Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1)

by Francis W. Porretto

  The clan has had it too easy for too long. I've counted too much on Armand. I've neglected to develop fresh leadership. The chickens have come home to roost.

  "I see," he said. "Well, in that case I suppose this isn't the post for you." He rose and stuck his hand practically into Yves's perplexed face. "Thank you for the gift of your time today. I'm sure it's been as instructive for me as it has for you."

  Yves took the hand and rose slowly. "But I'd thought --"

  "Perhaps you did. All the same, thank you for your time." Alain guided his visitor gently toward the exit and closed the door firmly behind him. When he could see his grandnephew's back receding across the eastern knoll toward where he'd moored his ultralight, he let his emotions have their portion of release.

  Small objects distributed around the room shook, stirred, and shot from their places to smash into the walls. An antique pewter paperweight buried itself deep in an oaken beam. A brass figurine of Spooner cut a neat hole in a plasterboard wall. A tray of notepaper smashed to flinders against the door, sending a spray of noteslips fluttering like the first snows of winter.

  Alain resumed his seat at his desk and tried not to think of anything at all. He was successful for several minutes.

  His stasis was broken when the office door opened. Elyse's head poked around the edge. She surveyed the damage without comment.

  "Grandpere?"

  "Hm?" He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus.

  "Is all as it should be?" She wore a reassure-me expression.

  She's had ample reason to fret. It's no secret how all this has affected me.

  He grinned. "No worse than yesterday, at any rate."

  "Will you be joining us for dinner?"

  "Yes," he said, "I think so." He rose and went to accompany her.

  Tomorrow I go to Gallatin.

  ***

  "I really don't know much," Marsha Gottlieb said. "She was a junior and I was a freshman. Besides, she was always with Armand. They were practically a fixture."

  Teodor Chistyakowski nodded. "But you did speak to her?"

  The girl sniffled. "Just once." She smiled. "She was nice. Complimented me on my bag." She hauled a heavily laden canvas tote bag, intricately embroidered with the silhouettes of flowers and trees, onto the concrete bench they shared. Teodor murmured a polite accolade of his own.

  That was Teresza's other gift, the one I had nothing to do with.

  "Miss Gottlieb --"

  "Call me Marsha, please." She smiled again.

  "Marsha, then." He indicated the woods beyond the campus with a flick of his eyes. "I'm beside myself over her. Please, tell me anything you feel free to discuss or repeat. I can't know what might help me to find her until I hear it."

  "How will you know?"

  He grinned crookedly. "I've already looked in a lot of places. If something you say suggests one I haven't thought of yet, that's where I'll look next."

  "Well..." The girl's face compressed into a squint of uncertainty, as if she were wondering whether it would be proper for her to say what had come into her mind.

  "Marsha, please." Teodor knew how forbidding he could look. He did his best to assume a harmless, paternally affectionate expression. "I've already talked to three of your classmates. They couldn't help at all. You're my last chance here at Gallatin. I promise you solemnly," he said, putting his hand over his heart, "all I want is to know that my daughter is safe, well, and happy."

  The doors of the Genet Center opened and a stream of students flowed out, chatting and chaffing. They laughed and japed as if nothing in the world could harm them. Marsha Gottlieb turned to watch them pass. Teodor marshaled his patience.

  I must not hurry or chivvy her.

  "They're all so beautiful," she said at last.

  "Hm?"

  "Like Armand and Teresza." She grinned wanly. "I envied them. I had a crush on Armand the size of the Relic, but I kind of figured he'd have someone like Teresza, even before I saw them together." She leaned toward him, serious again. "What was it like?"

  His brow furrowed. "What was what like?"

  She opened her mouth to speak, closed it again and looked off. The sun had dipped to touch the tops of the mason trees to their west, sending a coruscation of blue-green sparkles through their crystalline crowns.

  "It's okay, Marsha, you can ask. What was what like?"

  "Having a daughter like her. Beautiful, smart, popular with everyone, always the life of the party, always had the attention of all the nicest boys. Was she always that super?"

  It was Teodor's turn to grope for words. He tried to frame the intensity of his pride in Teresza in words that wouldn't sound too proprietary or self-congratulatory, stopped, backed up, tried a different tack, stopped again, and realized all at once that tears were streaming down his face and Marsha Gottlieb had wrapped her arms around him to offer comfort.

  "It's okay," she murmured. "You'll see. You'll find her and she'll be okay."

  He nodded against her shoulder, still too overcome to speak.

  She rubbed and patted his back gently, as if he were an over-large child. He clutched her to him and let the river of sorrow flow unchecked until it lapsed of its own.

  Presently he sat back and wiped his eyes.

  "Thank you, Marsha. You've been very kind. I didn't mean to do that."

  "It's okay, Mr. Chistyakowski."

  "Teodor, please."

  Her face lit. "Okay. But I just thought of something."

  "What?"

  She nodded. "It was only twice that I heard her and Armand talking about anything in particular. One of those times was about spring break, but the other was a subject from class that had Armand fascinated."

  "Oh? What subject was that?"

  She shrugged as if it couldn't possibly amount to anything.

  "The Hopeless."

  ***

  Teresza pressed the sandy soil around the last of her tomato seedlings, hauled herself up off her knees and clapped her hands against her thighs. The horizon had begun to cut into the sun's disk. She thought about proceeding to the beets and potatoes, contemplated the risks of being outside in the open after dark, and decided her root vegetables could wait until the morning.

  It wasn't much of a garden, less than two thousand square feet, but it would provide some produce. If carefully conserved, it might yield enough to see her and Armand all the way through the summer. Armand had other ideas, though. He wanted to start burbanking and cross-pollinating as early as possible, to give them something else to trade with their Hopeless neighbors.

  More likely something else to give away.

  Armand had decided to exploit their gift for growing things as he had his gift for machinery: as a wedge with which to penetrate their neighbors' affections. The worthier ones had responded to Armand's generosity in kind, if not degree. The less worthy didn't get a second extension of his beneficence. She'd predicted that few would likely reciprocate his gifts, but he'd insisted that everyone in Defiance should get at least one chance to show his colors in practice. He'd been more right than she.

  She still wasn't altogether happy about it. Their straitened circumstances had made her regard every mouthful of anything wholesome as a prize to be hoarded. Even after a year north of the land bridge, they hardly had enough of anything. Armand's willingness to spend their assets and his labors cultivating good will, mostly among persons who had little of their own to offer in return, baffled her as nothing else he'd done since they'd arrived in Defiance. When she said so, he smiled and counseled her to patience. It was a long-term investment, he'd said. It would need time to mature.

  She rubbed at the thick pads of callus that had formed on her fingers and thought wryly about who was providing the funds for Armand's investing. She trusted his judgment -- she surely didn't begrudge him -- but it could be hard, very hard, to watch him give food away when her breasts could no longer fill out her blouses and there was slack at the waists and seats of all the trousers she'd brough
t.

  The practice had both galvanized and polarized the village. Armand's reputation had risen so high that no one would dare to accuse him of so much as an unkind word -- and he kept no secrets about who had disappointed him. That disappointment was reflected in the fees he charged for his services. The other villagers tended to scorn anyone toward whom "Allan Morrison" showed conspicuous disfavor.

  As she made to return to their hovel, she noticed Burt Marchesand, the bully who'd tried to roust them on the day of their arrival, striding swiftly toward her from the north.

  Before they'd come, Marchesand had been the local strongman. He and his henchmen had lived on tribute extorted from the rest of the village. After word of his humiliation at Armand's hands spread through the populace, his influence had diminished to nothing. Few would have anything to do with him. He'd been reduced to scavenging what he could from others' leavings. Given the infinitesimal surplus the community generated, it was hard to imagine how he survived.

  He was the only man in the village who'd received none of Armand's largesse. They'd traded a bit, but not often, and for nothing of great account. He appeared to have no skills worth mentioning, if one discounted intimidation.

  Marchesand was alone, and his hands were empty. He wore a broad smile, something she hadn't seen on him in a year.

  "Good evening, Burt," she said. "Allan's over at the Simpsons, working on their fractionator. He'll probably be back in an hour or so, if you'd like to wait."

  She expected him to stop, mutter a demurrer, turn around and walk away. He didn't.

  "Oh, I don't think that will be necessary," he said.

  Before she could make sense of his words, he closed the gap between them and threw an uppercut straight into the point of her chin. The blow took her completely by surprise. It sent her sprawling into the dirt of her garden, instantly unconscious.

  Chapter 28

  A knock sounded at the cipher-locked door to the monitoring room. Dmitri Ianushkevich rose from his station, keyed in the combination, and swung open the door to confront the last person on Hope he'd have expected to see.

  Alain Morelon pushed past him and arrowed straight for the bank of monitors.

  "How's he doing?" The clan patriarch bent low over the display focused on Terra's dimly lit bedchamber.

  Ianushkevich stood silent and let the monitors tell the story.

  Morelon's eyes slowly grew wide as he stared at the two naked figures writhing on Terra's bed.

  "That's not Armand, is it?"

  "No."

  "Then..."

  "The new Goddess of Hope was once named Victoria Peterson," Ianushkevich said. "The young man is her lover, and the newest member of the

  Inner Circle. We haven't seen Armand in more than a year. He's been gone from Gallatin at least that long. Frankly, Alain, I hoped he'd gone home to you." Morelon stared at him. "And kept so low a profile that you'd heard nothing about it?"

  Ianushkevich shook his head. "It was my hope, not my expectation."

  I ought to have contacted him before this. I let my hopes do my thinking for me. Or perhaps it was my fears.

  Morelon dropped into the monitor's chair, dumbstruck.

  "You wanted him kept from the Godhood, Alain. You got that much, at least. The rest of it is not for me to intrude on. If you insist on knowing my opinion, I'd say your grandson probably used his powers to probe the Cabal itself. He was potent enough for that right from the start. Perhaps he deduced what our enterprise is about, and fled in fear for his life. But if he's not at home in Jacksonville, then I have no notions about where he might be."

  The silence was deep and leaden.

  Ianushkevich pulled up a wireframe chair and settled onto it. Morelon took no notice.

  If it were my grandson and heir, I'd have gone insane a year ago. He's the strongest man on Hope. But what now?

  The Morelon clan patriarch's eyes were unfocused. He stared not at the dim figures on the video monitors, nor at the glittering cut-rock walls of the chamber, but beyond them all, into a new rendition of history. A version where, instead of dutifully and self-sacrificially saving a whole world from its lethal geodynamics, Armand had fled the prospect with such speed and efficiency that no one had grasped an inkling of what he was about.

  "Alain..."

  Morelon made no response.

  "Alain, be glad he's not here. Terra had plans for him. She wanted us to take him captive and use him as an experimental animal, to, to work out a therapy against the terminal dissolution. If he were still here, that's how he'd be occupied. That's what we'd be doing to him. It would have to be worse than whatever refuge he's contrived for himself."

  "And Teresza," Morelon murmured.

  "What?"

  "For himself and Teresza Chistyakowski. My friend's daughter and only family. Armand's betrothed." Morelon rose from his chair. Ianushkevich rose in response. "This didn't just cost me and mine, Dmitri. It robbed Teodor Chistyakowski of his only daughter. He's the man who cured Armand of trisomy twenty-one before he was born. The man who made it possible for me to send Armand to you in the first place. The best genetic engineer on Hope. The Cabal's adventures in ecoformy have spent the heart and soul of a better, brighter man than you or I could ever hope to be."

  "How --"

  "Because they fled together," Morelon said. "Armand would never have left without Teresza, and Teresza is incapable of living without Armand. Physiologically incapable, Dmitri. If they were apart for more than a few days, her brain chemistry would go to a terminal state. She'd seek her own death."

  "Alain --"

  "Except that she doesn't know that, Dmitri. Teodor never told her about that aspect of her gene map. Isn't it just too rich? Armand doesn't know that you have your new God safe under lock and key already, Teresza doesn't know what sort of hazard she's accepted by embracing my grandson, and none of us knows where in the world they are. Armand's smart enough to have forsaken his name and as much of his appearance as possible. Teresza will follow his lead regardless of where it takes her, and we'll probably never hear another whisper about either of them, as long as we live."

  Ianushkevich felt the onset of the psi storm as an accumulation of dread, a mounting sense of disaster converging on him from all sides. Before he could utter a calming word, Morelon loosed the rage and sorrow within him, in that worst of all places.

  The screens of the monitors exploded simultaneously, spraying glass and plastic shards throughout the chamber. One caught Ianushkevich high on the cheek, gashing it to the bone. The chair on which he'd perched flew backward into the granite wall with such force that the impact crushed it down to a pancake. Morelon's seat softened and puddled where it stood, leaving only a dull skim of aluminum on the chamber floor.

  In the midst of it, unmoved and unmoving, stood Alain Morelon, the third strongest psi talent in the history of Man on Hope.

  A keening sang through the paranormal tumult. It seemed to vibrate through the very rock from which the chamber was carved, as if the planet itself were protesting the psi assault. It rose steadily in pitch and intensity. Ianushkevich clapped his hands over his ears, to no effect.

  "What --"

  Ianushkevich whirled. Ethan Mandeville, clad only in boxer shorts, had come out of Terra's chambers to investigate.

  Morelon took note, and the psi storm abated.

  "Who are you?" Ethan said.

  Morelon merely stared.

  "Dmitri, who is this man and what's he doing here? He's not Cabal, and he's surely not

  Inner Circle." "I," Morelon said before Ianushkevich could speak, "am the grandfather of one of your experimental subjects. The one that didn't stay for the full course. I am the patron of this enterprise, to the tune of nearly fifty million dekas over the past twelve hundred years. I am the last of the First Settlers, and the only man outside the Cabal who knows its secrets down to the last detail. My name is --"

  "Alain Morelon."

  Three heads spun to confront the robed
form and furious face of the Goddess.

  "No need to introduce us, Dmitri. We've met. Looking for something, Alain? Or perhaps for someone?"

  "Victoria --" Morelon said.

  Terra slashed the air. "Not any more. Not to you. Our relationship has changed. Haven't you heard about my promotion, Alain? Goddess of Hope. Quite a career move, actually. Big title, short hours, easy work, excellent perquisites. I even get a young, handsome live-in lover who caters to my every whim. There's just this one little catch: I can never quit. I can never leave this chamber. And in fifty years or so I'm going to die horribly. I'm going to go out of my mind while my own psi powers turn on me and my brain disintegrates in my skull. You knew that already, didn't you? But do you know why I'm going to die while aristocrats like you live for centuries?"

  Morelon stood silent. Ianushkevich started toward the Goddess, hands raised imploringly. From her other side, Mandeville sought to put his arms around her.

  A wave of power swept the parapsychologist off his feet and smashed him against the chamber wall. The impact stunned him, left him straining to refill his lungs and veiled his vision with blue gauze. He did not try to rise. At the other end of the chamber, Ethan Mandeville lay prone and utterly still.

  "Don't interrupt your Goddess, gentlemen. Where was I? Oh, yes: why I'm going to die of brain rot while Alain here goes striding down the millennia. No guesses, Alain? It's because somehow, your precious heir found out what the job entails. When he did, he ran like a gazelle and took his little blonde strumpet with him. He left the most important post on Hope to be filled by the daughter of an impoverished widow. Wasn't that noble of him?"

  A new miasma of power, many times the size of the earlier one, was building in the room. It strummed every nerve in Ianushkevich's body. He cringed against the fury of it. His body and Mandeville's began to rise clear of the chamber floor, while Morelon's arms levitated up from his sides, clearly against his will.

  "My grandson," Alain Morelon said, "is the most precious thing on this entire planet. And not just to me, Victoria. You coveted him for yourself, I know. And he escaped your clutches, and you've never since thought of him or the woman who took him from you with anything but hatred." He smiled. "Dmitri told me what you had planned for Armand. I'd rather have seen him decently dead -- I'd rather have seen this whole world depopulated than allow that to happen. If one of you has to suffer the tortures of a God's death, I'd infinitely prefer it to be you. Regardless of your supposed generosity in taking this duty on yourself." He raised his chin and folded his arms across his chest. "Now do your worst, if you haven't done it already."