Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1)

by Francis W. Porretto

***

  Idem stretched Its psi tendrils gingerly upward, ready to retract them instantly, for fear that at any moment It would meet the searing molten whips that had kept It imprisoned. Yet mile after mile It sensed nothing but Its own ravaged flesh.

  It found nothing but lifeless rock, devoid of even the least of Its minions, until it had almost reached the surface. Whatever the Other wanted with Its body, its affections had not extended to Its microorganisms or larger servants. Save for the cramped, sense-deprived core where It had taken refuge, the Other had exterminated all that lived within It, and had swept It clean of nutrients to prevent Its helpers' return.

  It was near enough the surface to sense the warmth of the sun seeping through the rock when It came upon the first traces of life.

  It was foul stuff, repulsively simple and limited. It used primitive ionic means and the trickling warmth from the surface to transform simple chemicals into chemicals only slightly more complex, with a great detritus of brutally toxic wastes. The process seemed to go on without limit, a mindless replication of molecules made entirely of the lightest atoms. There were no scavengers to salvage the wastes. The weakness of the dispersal mechanisms guaranteed that the cycles of self-perpetuation would inevitably falter and drown in the sea of chemical offal.

  Even if it didn't exhaust its ingredients, without active management the cycle would poison itself with its own effluents in fewer than a billion orbits of the sun. Unthinkable waste.

  Could the Other be this unwise? Or was it a tactic, a defense against Idem's return? In either case, the Other had doomed itself by its meddling just as effectively as it had confined Idem.

  Idem could not know. It could only press on.

  Its overriding need was plainly to make contact with the Other. If they could interact in some mode from which Idem need not flee, perhaps there could be an arrangement. Idem might show the Other the havoc its negligence -- or was it deliberate destruction? -- had wreaked upon It, and implore it to see the consequences. It would offer Its services to repair the damage while there was still time, in exchange for restored access to the surface...autonomy over Its flesh...the return of Its freedom.

  But all of that presupposed that the Other prized life as Idem did, and bore It no true malice...that the Other was sane. For that proposition, It had no evidence either way.

  If the Other were insane, readier to die than to permit Idem to live in freedom, Idem's audacity in probing the surface might bring a final explosion of wrath, enough to expunge It completely.

  Idem could not hope to defeat the Other...or Others. It didn't know what They were, or how many. Their powers were beyond Idem's ken. Their appearance on the surface, more than twelve hundred circuits of the sun ago, was unforeseen and unexplained. Quite possibly They had destroyed Their own flesh before battening onto It.

  Idem could not defend Itself. It could only appeal, offer knowledge and guidance, and plead for an accommodation.

  It pressed onward.

  Hope was stronger than fear.

  Chapter 14

  The chair at the center of the room in the Genet Center basement was plushly upholstered and covered in soft brown leather. Its backrest canted at an angle that suggested relaxation just short of sleep. One might have found it in the sitting room of any well-to-do home on Hope, except for the six thick bundles of cables taped to its arms and back.

  The visible ends of the cables bristled with spatulate conductors. The cables led to a bank of devices along the near wall. Victoria couldn't identify them, but their heavy gauge power cords made her a little afraid.

  Maybe Mom was right.

  She turned to Mandeville and asked, "Where's Armand?"

  The graduate student waved vaguely. "Just down the hall."

  "I thought we were all going to be working together."

  Mandeville frowned. "Did I give you that impression? My apologies. Perhaps later, when we've established your respective potentials for amplification and range extension, we'll conduct some coordinated tests. For the moment, we don't want any influences on either of you that might disturb the measurements."

  He waved her into the chair, squatted before the array of equipment and started flipping power switches. One by one, the devices' displays lit. He emitted a low, tuneless hum and twiddled their various dials, to no purpose she could see.

  "I thought you'd already gotten a clear idea what we were capable of."

  He looked back over his shoulder. "In terms of function, yes. Power and range are another story. Remember, we're looking for practical alternatives to radio." His eyes flicked to the chair once again. "Please, sit down."

  She lowered herself uncertainly into the chair. A moment later, he rose and returned to her side with a fat tube of some glistening translucent gel.

  "I have to rub some of this onto your scalp for conduction. Would you lift your hair up, please?"

  She complied. He squeezed a generous amount of the gel onto his fingertips and massaged it gently into her scalp, taking care to get as little of it into her thick auburn hair as possible. His touch was soothing. She felt herself beginning to drop off to sleep.

  "Miss Peterson?" She opened her eyes and found him peering at her. "I'm going to attach the sense lines now. There are a lot of them. It will put a load on your neck, so please get as comfortable as you possibly can. Sit so the weight of your head is supported by the back of the chair as much as possible."

  She shifted slightly, strove to relax herself as completely as possible, and said, "Go ahead."

  It took some time to complete the connections. The cables were heavier than she expected; Mandeville had had good reason to warn her. Without the support of the chair's thickly padded backrest, she would have been unable to keep her head up.

  When he was finished, he squatted before her once again. "Are you okay?"

  She managed a smile. "Yes, thank you."

  He nodded. "Today we're going to try to measure your maximum telekinetic torque." He gestured at a tale that sat against the far wall, about twenty feet away. On it rested a six inch cube of some bluish-gray stone.

  "Do you think you can lift that basalt block telekinetically, Victoria?"

  She started to shrug, remembered the cables and quelled it. "I don't know. Would you like me to try?"

  "Please, lift it straight up, as far as you can. Keep it against the wall if you can, too." He turned back to the wall of devices. "Start any time."

  She focused on the rock and poured all her will into her telekinetic engine.

  The cube shot straight upward and smashed against the ceiling with a report like the impact of a wrecking ball. Stone shards whizzed through the air in all directions. One narrowly missed Victoria's cheek. Another pierced the sleeve of Mandeville's tunic and scored his bicep. He screamed and clapped a hand to the stinging mark.

  Victoria relaxed her telekinetic thrust. The remnant of the cube crashed back to the table. Half of the monitoring devices to which she was wired flashed crazily and went dark.

  Mandeville stared at the jagged lump of stone, dumbfounded.

  "Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer," he whispered. "Did you know you could do that?"

  She grinned innocently at him. "Got anything heavier?"

  ***

  Armand frowned down at the chair and its cables. "How is this supposed to work?"

  The slight, dark man who'd invited Armand to call him Dmitri, but had volunteered nothing else about himself, shrugged expressively. "Ethan told you how little we know about the psi powers, didn't he? I'm sure of it."

  "Well, yes."

  "One of our problems is the lack of a coherent theory," Dmitri said. "Every time we think we've come up with a good one, it contradicts some known fact about the brain, or implies things we know to be untrue. You've no idea how many hypotheses we've gone through. So for the past few years, we've concentrated on collecting as much data as we can and hoping a pattern will emerge from them." He smiled fleetingly. "Some researchers have lots of idea
s but no budget. We have a budget, but not many ideas. Please, sit down."

  Armand lowered himself into the chair. Dmitri swiftly gelled Armand's lower scalp and attached the electrical contacts. He looked directly into Armand's eyes, his expression solemn.

  "We are most impressed by your clairvoyant ability, and today we'd like to gauge its resolution. The ability to resolve extremely small images usually correlates to the ability to see larger ones at long ranges."

  "Like eyesight," Armand said.

  Dmitri bobbed his head. "Much like eyesight." He went to the table at the far end of the room, bent over it, and did something his interposed body kept Armand from seeing. When he stepped aside, Armand saw that he'd propped a small silvery-gray card against the far wall. The card appeared entirely unmarked.

  "Can you read what's on the far side of that card, Armand?"

  Armand looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, then closed his eyes.

  Almost as his eyelids met, his mental viewpoint disassociated from his sensorium and floated down the length of the room. When it passed behind the card, Armand bade it halt, drop a few inches lower, and turn around to "face" the concealed side.

  After a brief inspection, he found a patch of engraving of an old style, cursive script that had not been darkened by any ink. The script was very small. With another effort of will, Armand made his mental eye zoom in on the engraving, which mushroomed at once to legibility.

  "Nevertheless," he read, "in the inexplicable universal votings and debatings of these ages, an idea or rather a dumb presumption to the contrary has gone idly abroad, and at this day, over extensive tracts of the world, poor human beings are to be found, whose practical belief it is that if we vote this or that, so this or that will thenceforth be. Practically men have come to imagine that the laws of this universe, like the laws of constitutional countries, are decided by voting. It is an idle fancy. The laws of this universe, of which if the laws of England are not an exact transcript, they should passionately study to become, are fixed by the everlasting congruity of things, and are not fixable or changeable by voting!" He paused. "What's England?"

  Dmitri didn't answer. He was staring at Armand as if he'd sprouted a second head.

  "Dmitri?"

  "One of the States of Old Earth," Dmitri whispered. A few seconds later he went to the table and returned with the card, which he handed to Armand.

  Armand turned it over. It wasn't paper or cardboard, but a thin sheet of aluminite. It appeared to be blank on both sides. He frowned. "What was I reading from?"

  Dmitri wordlessly handed him a loupe. Armand fitted it to his eye and squinted at the card again.

  The passage he'd read off was there, but it was barely legible even with the loupe. He pulled the lens out of his eye and looked at it. The rim was marked 50X.

  He handed the card and loupe back to Dmitri. "And what's voting?"

  ***

  Teresza waited with rapidly diminishing patience. The concrete benches outside the Social Science Center were more for decoration than relaxation, and the day's breeze was unexpectedly chill. When an hour had passed and Armand had not yet emerged, she became irked. As two hours approached, she became acutely worried.

  They can't be doing anything that would hurt him, or they wouldn't be paying him all that money.

  Somehow it didn't satisfy. She got up and paced for a while. When other students poured out of the building at the end of the class period, she returned to her uncomfortable seat.

  I have a right. He's mine now. If anyone has a right to worry about him, it has to be me.

  Is he really mine? He doesn't know that I can't conceive by him. What will he think when three or four years have gone by and I haven't gotten pregnant?

  It was a hard thing to think about. Her thoughts veered to other subjects and convenient distractions despite her best efforts.

  Her gift had proved to be a mixed blessing. She loved Armand with an intensity that few others could ever feel. But that love partook greatly of need: the need her father had graven into her genes to possess the finest specimen of character she could find, and to be possessed by him.

  On their first night together in Morelon House, when he, all gentleness and tender consideration, finally entered her, probing gently for her hymen, she clutched him to her and slammed herself onto him with a single headlong thrust. The pain was momentarily blinding, yet almost at once it was banished by a transcendent sense of joining, as if she had fused herself to him in some dimension she could not see.

  His eyes went wide and he gasped convulsively. He did not withdraw, thrust and withdraw as she expected. He stayed buried to the hilt within her, arms tight around her, both of them shuddering violently. Moments later, still locked tightly together, they climaxed as one.

  He had felt it too.

  She would give up everything else on Hope, even her father's love, to keep that bond, and Armand by her side. She couldn't imagine living without him.

  I've heard other girls say things like that about their boyfriends. They couldn't have meant it this way. They could never imagine what this is like.

  Will I envy them someday?

  Armand and Victoria emerged from the Social Sciences Center. As the doors closed behind them, Victoria said something inaudible to Armand. He chuckled, waved goodbye, and headed straight for Teresza. She rose and beckoned him into her arms. He couldn't see the cloud that passed over Victoria's face, but Teresza could.

  "What's the matter, Terry?"

  She smiled. "Nothing. You were just in there twice as long as you said. Were there problems?"

  He shook his head. "They didn't believe the first test runs and wanted to do them over, that's all." He passed a hand over her hair. "You sure everything's all right?"

  She crinkled her nose and looked down at the pavement. "Yeah. I just don't like not having you around." She groped for his hand. "Got anything else on the agenda?"

  Another shake of the head. "Any ideas?" He squinted at the cloudless turquoise expanse of the sky. "It's a nice day for a stroll."

  With that, she turned and pulled him along behind her. "Nix! I've been out here in the wind long enough. It's time to get warmed up."

  "Hm? Coffee?"

  She leered up at him. "I've got a better idea."

  "Oh!" He smiled naughtily. "Well, if you insist."

  "Which I do."

  They began to trot.

  Chapter 15

  Magnusson started as Tellus jerked awake. The God of Hope screamed, flung away his bedclothes with a sweep of his arm and flew across the room as if hurled by a gigantic but invisible assailant. He tumbled and crashed against a tapestry-covered wall, and slid down it to lie limp at its base.

  The biophysicist leaped from his seat before the monitors and ran for the cipher-locked entry to Tellus's suite. He toggled in the combination, rammed the slowly opening vault door aside, and ran to crouch next to the stricken God.

  Tellus lay perfectly still. His eyes were glazed. His pulse was thready and rapid. His skin was cold, yet slick with an unusually oily sweat. He appeared to be unaware of his surroundings.

  Magnusson's hand went to the special pager at his belt, whose call button would summon Petrus and Ianushkevich. His fingers found the button, hesitated over it, then drew back.

  Why call them? This is nothing they haven't seen before, and it's nothing they're equipped to handle. It's my job.

  As always seemed to happen toward the end of a God's reign, Tellus's powers had recoiled against him. His telepathic sensitivity had filled his head with an unendurable clamor. His clairvoyance was bombarding his mind's eye with a senseless collage of images, too bright and too kinetic to ignore. Now his telekinesis had gotten away from him. It would subject him to an accelerating series of bizarre pratfalls and other abuses until his brain weakened too far to produce any telekinetic effect at all.

  When Tellus's deterioration reached that point, his inculcated power to purge Hope's crust of the heavy meta
ls that surged on the magma currents below would vanish. The antimony and copper would return to the soil. Unless Tellus's successor was readied well ahead of all previous experience, the poisonous metal particles would doom Man and all his living companions, both animal and vegetable, to an agonizing deterioration and death.

  The biophysicist slipped his arms under Tellus's inert form and hoisted him. The God had lost more weight. Magnusson could hardly believe he made it to a hundred twenty pounds. His flesh was the same cold, slick texture all over. Along his back and sides were pockets of loose skin, as if the muscle mass immediately below had been surgically removed.

  Magnusson rose carefully with his burden, and carried it to the plush bed from which its own undirected power had ejected it. He lay Tellus down gently, drew the covers over him, and stepped back.

  Jean D'Avenire had been barely nineteen years old on the day of his apotheosis, fifty years before. His enormous powers had been mated to a fiery idealism all but unknown to the supremely practical men of the

  Inner Circle. The combination had shaken them so greatly that they'd decided to break a cardinal rule: they'd told him of the fate that had claimed his twenty-three predecessors, and that would surely claim him. He'd listened with full attention, had smiled and said that if the life of Man on Hope was his burden to carry, then carry it he would. And anyway, who could know what the future might bring? Giants who could give him the ability to regulate the crustal chemistry of an entire world might yet discover how to stabilize him against whatever unknown agents had claimed the lives of his predecessors. If they did, he might well be the last God of Hope. Magnusson had loved that young man, as he'd allowed himself to love no one else over the seven centuries before him.

  He passed his hand lightly over Tellus's forehead, remembering, remembering. The God's eyes roamed about wildly for a few seconds, then settled on Magnusson's face for just a moment with an all but certain hint of recognition, before closing with a sense of finality.

  Magnusson turned away and left the bedchamber, carefully closing the heavy vault door behind him, and returned to his seat at the monitors, where he buried his face in his arms and wept. After an unknown interval, he pressed the button that would summon Charles Petrus and Dmitri Ianushkevich to his side.