by Mack Maloney
But how could that be? He’d gone through three screens — just as the race procedures called for. But what if the second screen actually incorporated into its madness a scenario where he thought he punched out, and then punched back in again and then, maybe…
Stop! he heard a voice cry from somewhere deep inside his head. You’re making yourself crazy.
He opened his eyes and looked at his hands, and at that moment he knew that all this was happening.
This was real.
Wasn’t it?
The Empress was coming toward him again. Her eyes were locked onto his. She began dancing even closer. Time seemed to jump ahead several minutes. The other partygoers were suddenly becoming extremely intimate with each other. Many of the women were now topless. Hunter began to sweat. He drained his drink, making the situation worse — or better. His goblet was instantly filled again.
The Empress was dancing so close to him now, she was rubbing against his chest. Hunter closed his eyes. The music began pulsating very slowly.
What was the penalty for cavorting with the Emperor’s wife? he wondered.
The music got louder. He felt her body start to grind into his. He’d been stuck on Fools 6 a very long time — but not long enough to forget the necessities of life.
Her hands on him now.
“Well, is this better than the desert?” she asked him.
Oh, yeah, I remember this, he thought.
He reached out for her.
Flash!
* * *
“I said: ‘Is this better than the desert?’ ”
When Hunter opened his eyes again, he was sitting on a flat, moss-covered rock, high atop a soaring cliff, looking out over the ocean. The sun was right in front of him. And it was setting — over the water.
This could mean only one thing: He was still on Venus, but most likely on the opposite side of Zros.
The pop-in had been so sudden, his hand was still moist from holding his wine goblet. Someone was sitting beside him — a female, but not the Empress. This person was dressed in a nonprovocative white gown. Her hair was brunette and styled long but conservatively. She was wearing no makeup, she had no glow. There was no aura around her, at least not one that he could see.
Yet despite this, she was much more beautiful than the Empress. Or any of the women he’d just seen at La-Shangri. And she was a lot younger, too.
Hunter recognized her right away.
It was Princess Xara.
She smiled. “You didn’t really want to stay there, did you?”
Hunter began fumbling for a suitable reply. “Well, I thought that maybe your mo—”
Xara just shook her head. “My mother was trying to entrap you. And La-Shangri? Please. Half the people are dead in that place.”
She spread her arms to indicate the beautiful landscape around them. The flower-covered cliffs, the green seas crashing below. The sun, still bright, going down. The sweet breeze. It was stunning. And natural.
“Isn’t this place a lot better?”
Hunter had to agree with her. “It is.”
She smiled. He saw lots of teeth.
“But why did you bring me here?” he asked her directly.
“Do I have to have a reason?” she replied. Her gown went up a bit, showing her well-shaped legs.
“Yes, you do, because I don’t think anyone in your family does anything without a reason.”
She placed her hand in his. One thing about the Specials, Hunter mused, they weren’t afraid to get touchy-feely.
“Okay, you’re right,” she said. “And I confess. Ever since I saw you at the race today, I wanted to talk to you — and I wanted to do it someplace where we could be alone. Really alone.”
Hunter looked around. He could see nothing but forests and beaches and sand and water for many miles.
No châteaus. No palaces. No enormous bodyguards.
“I think you picked the right place,” he told her.
“Of course, I’m not sure you want to discuss what I have in mind,” she said.
“And that means?”
She slid a bit closer to him.
“I’ll be up front with you: I know the circumstances by which you were found. I know what happened during the attack on the BonoVox. I know that you can’t remember who you are. Or where you came from. Is that correct?”
Hunter nodded uncertainly. “Well, no one has really asked me about any of those things since I’ve been here on Earth,” he replied. “So I’ve kept my mouth shut about them.”
“Another art that we lost as a race sometime ago,” she said. “The art of holding one’s tongue.”
Hunter looked deep into her eyes. There really was something very different in there.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you that I’m probably the smartest one in my immediate family,” she said, her lips hovering somewhere between a smile and a grimace. “I don’t know why — it’s my burden to bear, I suppose. But I care deeply about things. Things I consider important, and not just ‘interesting,’ or ‘sacred,’ or reveling in self-gratification—”
She caught herself, and put her hand to her mouth.
“Oh, my,” she said with a gasp. “I must sound like the biggest snoot!”
Hunter squeezed her hand. If possible, she was getting more beautiful by the moment. Her eyes, her mouth, her cheeks — they all seemed just a bit bigger than what would be considered “perfect.”
And when she smiled…
Suddenly there was no other place in the Galaxy he wanted to be.
“I don’t think you’re a ‘snoot’ at all,” he told her. “In fact, you’re the most interesting person I’ve ran into since landing here. Well, the most interesting female, anyway…”
She tilted her head slightly. “Is there a compliment in there somewhere?”
They laughed. “Well, maybe,” he said. “But tell me, what are these things you care so much about?”
She looked very pleased to answer that question.
“I care about history, for one,” she declared. “I think it’s important to know what went on before — well, before all this…”
She waved her hand across the sky. The sun had not set, yet many stars were already twinkling above them.
“I mean, my father is the leader of the Fourth Empire,” she went on very earnestly. “There have been three empires before us. And yet what we know about them wouldn’t fill a single nanodisk. There are some things left over from the Second Empire, and apparently traces from the Third. But we know just about nothing about the First Empire — or anything that happened before it.”
She looked over at him.
“Am I boring you yet?” she asked.
Smile. Teeth.
“Impossible,” he replied.
She laughed sweetly and went on. “What bothers me most is that my family, the Specials and the Very Fortunates, they’re all so quick to take credit for all of this. But the truth is, they stumbled upon it. They didn’t invent any of it — it invented them. Yet they feel it’s their duty to exploit it, to take advantage of any chance they get.”
“Your father must care about the Empire, though,” Hunter told her, wondering which one of the Emperor’s three incarnations would actually be considered her father.
“Frankly, I’m not sure anyone can tell,” she replied slowly. “Don’t get me wrong — my family, the military, the Very Fortunates — they all care about the Empire. They care about keeping it going. How to make it bigger, better, no matter what the cost. Now, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I just think we should learn as much as we can about the past so—”
“So we can avoid the same mistakes in the future,” Hunter finished for her.
She looked up at him. Her face was a mixture of surprise and delight. “So you actually understand what I’m talking about?”
Hunter had to think a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I believe I do.”
She gave him a very spontaneous hug, th
en let go and fiddled with her hair a moment. A warm wind blew by them. More stars had come out above.
“I actually envy you in a way,” she told him. “You know, you’re in a very unique position here. Not being like us…”
“How so?”
She looked out at the sea. The sun dipped lower into the water.
“Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we are a Galaxy full of obsessive behavior,” she said. “Everyone needs whatever they can get, as fast as they can get it. Sure, there is wealth beyond comprehension. But whether you’re my first-first cousin, or some space pirate robbing old bag planets out on the Fringe, everyone wants a piece. And they want it now. And if they can’t get it, they’ll drive themselves nuts trying to get it. It’s not the best way to be… at least I don’t think so.”
She fiddled with her hair again. Hunter could have sat here and talked to her for days.
“And our biggest obsession, of course, is this thing where everyone is an expert on their family ancestry,” she went on. “They know their bloodlines, their origins. Who married who, on what planet, and when.
Everyone must keep track of who they are, or they just go batty.”
“Is knowing where you came from such a bad thing?” he asked her. “I wish I knew…”
“Yes, but that’s my point: You want to know who you are — they want to know what they are—”
Hunter shook his head. “And that means?”
She sighed. “No one has told you about the Holy Blood, I suppose?”
“Nope.”
She slid even closer to him.
“My family, the Specials, are the descendants of the people who ruled the Galaxy in the Third Empire,” she began. “That dynasty collapsed about eight hundred years ago. We know very little about those people. Only that they were called the Specials, too — and that at one time they had control over every planet in the Galaxy. Billions? Trillions? Whatever the number is, every last one of them was under their control.
“For whatever reason, no one is sure why, these people had blood pumping in their veins that allowed them to live for very long periods of time. I’m talking about five, six, even seven hundred years or more.
As a direct descendant, that blood is my blood, too. As well as that of thousands and thousands of my relatives. My father is nearly four hundred and fifty years old; my mother admits to two hundred and seventy-five.”
Hunter couldn’t help screwing up his face at that last fact. Two hundred and seventy-five…
“Now, most people who are not of Holy Blood live to be about a third of that age,” she went on. “But some will live longer because they have varying strains of the Holy Blood in them, too.”
“How did that happen?” he asked.
Xara frowned. “Because in the past, it was not beneath some of my more enterprising relatives to sell a drop or two — for incredibly huge amounts of coin. They say it still goes on today, which makes this even more disgusting.”
She played with her hair for a moment and then went on.
“So you see, the more connected you are, the closer you can get to escaping your own mortality. That’s what makes a person a Very Fortunate. They have a little more of the Holy Blood in them than a Fortunate, who has a little more in them than a first-class citizen and so on and so on.
“Now, it’s up to you to stay out of the way of a moving air car, or a stray Z-gun blast. But if you live in a safe part of the Galaxy, as many people do, then you probably have a long, long life ahead of you. And that’s the problem. Everyone wants it — but no one really appreciates it, because they’re so obsessed with how much longer they can live, even by a year, a month, a week, based on how much or how little Holy Blood they have in them. It’s crazy. It leads to all kinds of prearranged marriages, the pairing up of total strangers, industries to figure how much Holy Blood you have and how many years it’s going to buy you. It all leads to a total lack of diversity and misplaced energies. And it’s created a class system that is not healthy for us as a race and that I personally find appalling.”
She looked over at Hunter. He was staring very intently into her eyes.
“And how old are you, my dear?” he asked her.
Smile. Teeth.
“Just nineteen!” she replied happily. “I’m still a kid. Thank God my parents waited a long time before they started working on their heirs. I’m surprised they even stopped long enough to consider it at all.”
She let her voice trail off. The sun was just about gone by now. But she looked even more beautiful in the waning light.
“But you, Mr. Hunter — well, you’re like a breath of fresh air. Because for once, finally, we find someone who really doesn’t know where he came from. And look at him: He looks normal. He looks like the rest of us. But that’s what makes you unique, in a place where no one is truly unique. At least, no one we know about.”
Hunter wasn’t sure what to say, so he didn’t say anything. She turned toward him again.
“So then? Can I see it?” she asked him.
“Sure,” he answered right away, adding after a beat: “See what?”
“The clue. I heard that you carry something in your pocket — something that might give a hint as to where you came from.”
Hunter’s hand unconsciously went to his left breast pocket. The piece of cloth. The faded photograph.
He never went anywhere without them.
“There are two things, actually,” he confessed. “And I haven’t shown them to very many people.”
The smile returned. So did her hand on his knee.
“I’d be honored to see them,” she said sincerely.
Hunter retrieved the cloth and picture and carefully unfolded them. Xara looked at the picture first.
“She’s beautiful,” she said in a whisper so low it was lost on the wind. “Do you know who she is?”
Hunter shook his head no. There were some days he couldn’t bear to look at the faded picture. The emotion that welled up inside him could be that intense.
“I don’t have the slightest idea who she is,” he told her.
She studied the cloth. Red stripes, white stripes. A big blue block. Designs like stars. It was uneven, yet still symmetric. In a world where just about everything was built as a triangle, the horizontal lines looked alien. And fascinating.
And familiar.
“I was afraid of this,” she said.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Hunter replied.
She squeezed his hand again. “It might not seem so apparent now,” she said. “But not knowing where you’re from. It’s a gift. And it’s something that you might not want to give up so quickly.”
Hunter just stared back at her.
“What are you talking about?”
She turned very serious.
“While the rest of my clan is out doping it up,” she said, “I’ve taken it upon myself to learn as much as I can about what went on long before my father’s Empire went into ascension. I’ve been able to learn little bits and pieces of ancient history — things that happened even before the First Empire. Even before the people they call the Ancient Engineers inhabited the Earth. I’m talking about four to five thousand years ago.”
She looked deeply into his eyes. “If you had a chance to really find out where you came from, would you take it? Would you being willing to do anything, go anywhere, to find out?”
Hunter sat straight up on the rock. “Of course… that’s all I care about. It has to be… Why?”
She squeezed his hand a little more and penetrated his soul with her enormous emerald eyes.
“Because I think I know how you can find out…”
Hunter stared back at her. “Really? How?”
Flash!
18
The planet was indeed red and the dirt was indeed made up of tiny diamonds. And yes, there were canals here, too.
Lots of them.
This was Mars. First planet to be puffed by the Ancient Engineers. Ap
parently in the older texts, what few there were left of them, the Ancients believed that Mars ran best when it was crisscrossed with canals — just like Earth. So they built them, hundreds of them. So many, the planet could look like a red gemstone wrapped in a huge spiderweb if the sun’s rays were hitting it just right.
Mars was also considered a sacred place as well, on the same par as the bridges that spanned the triads on Earth. Travel here was restricted to only the Specials and an elite contingent of the Solar Guards. And while it supported its own atmosphere and was enveloped in vast plains and forests running along the canali, there was a definitely mysterious air to the red planet. Next to Earth’s Moon, where travel was banned for all, even the Specials, Mars was the least-visited body in the solar system.
But Hunter was here now.
He and Xara had popped in near a place called Bogus Charmas. It was near the southern pole, a region where stunted trees and dull red grass coexisted with bitterly cold winds and frozen-over canals. There were no diamonds on the ground here. It was the most desolate place on an intentionally desolate world — and about as far away from the tropical beauty of Venus as one could get.
There was a small scientific station set up here — just a permahut built next to a big hole in the ground. A string of dim lights faded away into the blackness of this cavity, underlying how deep and dark it really was.
“We’re going down there?” Hunter asked Xara once he’d shaken off the effects of the sudden transplanetary pop-in.
She nodded eagerly. Somehow during their transport, Xara had managed a complete wardrobe change.
Gone was the long, flowing white gown. She was now dressed for action: tight-fitting black jumpsuit, boots, gloves, and helmet. Hunter was still dressed in his ancient flight suit. Lucky for him he was not a slave to fashion.
“Many answers to your questions might be found down there,” she told him now as a brisk icy gale blew across the rugged plain.
Hunter fought off a chill.
“At this point I’ll do anything, to get out of this wind,” he said.
They walked about two hundred feet nearly straight down, to a rickety hoverlift. This brought them down even deeper into the hole; the temperature drop was so drastic, Hunter could soon see his breath.
