Armand sat next to her, where she'd found him the past few times she'd awakened. Against her breast lay a cloth-wrapped bundle whose contents she couldn't discern. A gentle warmth seeped through the wrappings.
"Rise and shine, sleepyhead." Armand grinned.
She canted forward cautiously. The hovel was as it always was. They were still in Defiance.
The bundle squirmed and slid partway down her torso. Automatically she grabbed for it and arrested it. One of her hands groped through the coarse cloth and found warm living flesh.
She started and almost dropped the bundle. Armand's big hands immediately flashed out to secure it. She rose all the way to a sitting position as he gently turned the bundle in her grasp.
A newborn baby's face and fists protruded from the package.
"Armand, what is this?"
He raised his eyebrows. "Don't tell me you've never seen one before?" He took the baby from her hands and cradled it in his arms.
"What --" Her voice caught in her throat. It had gotten too little use. She took several slow breaths to recover and swung her feet out onto the floor while her eyes swept the hovel.
She saw nothing else out of the ordinary. The table, the cupboard, and the other bits of furniture Armand had built and traded for were as she remembered. The rough slate floor was the same underfoot as always. The crude broom she used to sweep out the grit and leaves that blew in from the yard sat in its usual corner. Through the cracks around their bound-bamboo door, she could see that night had fallen some time ago. The light came from the old alcohol lamp she'd bartered her spare belt for.
And Armand held an anonymous infant against his chest.
Defiance had few children of any ages. Life north of the land bridge wasn't kind to infants. The village was small enough that a pregnant woman who carried her baby to term would infallibly become the talk of the town.
How long have I been out of commission? Not long enough to give birth!
"Armand..." She coughed, steadied herself. "Whose baby is that?"
He smiled. "Ours."
"WHAT?"
"This," he said in a tone of the utmost simplicity, "is our daughter Valerie." The infant cooed at the sound of her name. "Born four days ago. Would you like to hold her?"
Have I gone insane, or has he?
He held Valerie out to her as if nothing in the world could be more natural. She took the baby automatically and cradled her as he had done. The weight felt utterly right in her arms. She rocked the child in the age-old manner, making soft lulling sounds in time with the motion. The infant seemed to smile.
"Ten days ago," Armand said, "you were kidnapped and raped by four vicious men. I killed them and retrieved you. Do you remember that much?"
She nodded.
"You've slept away most of the time since then. I've protected you from disturbance as best I could. But it's time to rejoin the living. Your daughter needs you. And I need you."
"Armand, where did --"
"You don't need to know." The rare monitory edge had entered his voice. "She's here, and she's ours. Didn't you say you wanted children?"
She opened her mouth, closed it again without speaking.
"Our lives together start today," he said. "Could any imaginable gift of chance be a more appropriate compensation for the hell you went through? For the hell we've gone through?"
She said nothing. Valerie's eyes had opened. They were a blue as bright as her own. She passed a hand over the wisps of hair on the tiny scalp, and Valerie smiled again.
"Armand, how will we feed her?"
He grinned. "You'll feed her."
"With what? She can't eat what we eat!"
"She doesn't have to. You're equipped."
"But --"
"Try it."
She started to argue, choked it off, fumbled at the buttons on her blouse with her free hand and exposed her left breast. The breast was swollen, the nipple turgid. She carefully turned Valerie and put her lips to the nipple.
The infant began to suckle at once, and Teresza felt the slow, sensuous flow of her milk begin. The milk of a woman who'd borne an infant to term. Milk she ought not to have.
The weight on my chest was more than just a baby.
"Armand!"
"Hm?"
"Did you --"
"Who, me?"
"Armand...!"
He put on his best mock-innocent face.
"Just tell her to save some for me."
Valerie chose that moment to clamp down.
"Ow!"
"Hey, Val, lighten up. There's more in the other one...I hope."
Teresza growled. Armand laughed.
Valerie continued to suckle.
Chapter 32
Ethan Mandeville woke in Terra's bedchamber. Her face loomed above his. She was smiling brightly.
"Well? Did you have a nice nap?"
He closed his eyes again as the memory of the previous day's events flooded through him. Her demonstration that she could combine her clairvoyance and telekinesis to form a roving microphone. His shock and her incandescent fury at discovering that the
Inner Circle was discussing her disposal. Her seizure of his limbs and vocal chords, that she might use him to display the magnitude of her power and announce the arrival of her vengeance. She made me an accessory to murder. The woman I make love with nightly used me as the herald for an assassination, and I had no choice about it.
A nucleus of ice formed deep in his chest and began to grow.
Einar Magnusson had been his mentor and confidant for nearly a decade. Despite arduous teaching and research duties, the biophysicist had made himself available whenever Ethan sought him out. He'd given Ethan his counsel and much else, unstintingly. He'd offered to be Ethan's sponsor for membership in the Cabal, on the instant Ethan's father Jacques recommended him to it. His generosity toward the Cabal with his time, his wisdom, and his material goods had been no less.
And Victoria had killed him.
"Ethan?"
It was kill or be killed. He really was planning to dispose of her. She had no choice.
It didn't salve the wound.
She'd killed her own mother. She'd killed Alain Morelon, last of the First Settlers and the Cabal's patron and protector for twelve centuries. And Einar Magnusson made three.
How many lives must we sacrifice to propitiate the Goddess of Hope?
The final tally would be whatever it would be. He had no power to restrain her. None of them did.
"Ethan!"
He clamped his eyes shut and prayed for her to desist.
He felt his shoulders seized by hands much larger and stronger than human. In a moment he was lifted clear of the bed and suspended in the air above it. When he opened his eyes, she was staring up at him. She was smiling no longer.
"I could shake you," she said, "harder and harder until your neck snaps. I could crush you the way I did Alain Morelon, or suffocate you the way I did my mother. I could --"
"Kill me by doing whatever you did to Einar Magnusson," he said. "And probably a lot of other things. I know, Vicki. I know what you can do. I made you capable of it. The guilt for those deaths is as much mine as yours."
"How dare you speak of guilt!" Her face turned bright red. The telekinetic tentacles by which she held him trembled. "Their lives were rightly forfeit to me! For what they'd done, or, or --"
"Or muttered about doing? Or what their grandsons hadn't done?" He couldn't summon up the will to shout back at her. It wouldn't change anything. "And why will you kill me, Vicki? What offense have I done you?"
"You put me here," she snarled. "You made me...made me..."
"What you are. What you volunteered to be. What you, standing in my office upstairs, reasoned out was the only logical thing you could do, after Armand fled. I made you capable of bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders -- and of reaping lives like stalks of wheat whenever the fit might take you. And I can't decide what horrifies me more: that I gave you
the unchallengeable rule of the world, or that I love you so much that even now, after witnessing the murder of my friend and mentor with myself as its instrument, I can't bring myself to repent of it."
She gasped and released him. He fell onto his side on the bed, curled into a fetal ball, and closed his eyes again.
"I didn't know you were insane when we started working together, Vicki. I didn't know how much hatred you'd stored up. I didn't know I was just a tool to you. Maybe I'll adjust, if you don't kill me out of pique. But maybe you should. This is a lot to get used to, and I'm not sure how long it'll take."
He waited in silence, eyes still resolutely shut, half expecting her to strike him dead. He was mildly surprised when she responded with sobbing instead of violence. He looked inside himself for any welling of empathy toward her pain. None came.
That didn't surprise him at all.
***
"Do you think she can hear us here?" Petrus said.
Ianushkevich surveyed the broad, flat sweep of the field and the regularly spaced mason trees that lined its eastern edge. The nearest tree was "missing." In its place stood a charred stump. It had been burned to a crisp more than a year before, though whatever incinerated it had done its neighbors no damage at all. No one had ever found a reason for it.
"I think," he said, "that she could probably hear us wherever she might find us. Before yesterday, I would have said what she did was impossible. Today, I'd believe anything at all." He grinned faintly. "Just pray she isn't listening, Charles. It seems not all the risks in this undertaking of ours attach to the Godhood."
"Dmitri," Petrus whispered, "what can we do?"
Ianushkevich stared across the empty field. The snows were entirely gone, and the first of the spring grasses were rising to greet the returning the sun. Beyond the blue-green expanse swirled an inverted cone of faint iridescence, steadily growing more distinct; the aurora that preceded the arriving noon train.
Not Earth grass. Not Earth trees. Not a train as Earth once knew them. Not a university of the sort Earth's young once attended. Not farms of the kind that nourished our Earthborn ancestors. Not soil of the sort from which our Earthly crops first sprang. We reuse the old names, we draw comfort from the implied familiarity of the things named, but it isn't the old and familiar beneath the symbols. Not all of them. Some of them are quite different. Some are not entirely amicable.
"We can do," he said slowly, "what Einar proposed."
"What? But she'll know! She'll kill us both!"
"Will she, Charles? Who would cater to her after that? Who would bring her her meals, and meet her other wants, and ensure that her Hallanson-Albermayer treatments continue on schedule? The other nineteen members of the Cabal are unknown to her. How would she find them and bend them to her service, once she'd disposed of us who elevated her?"
"Dmitri," Petrus said in a tone edging toward hysteria, "she'd have nothing to lose. If we proceed as Einar outlined, she'll be deposed, and she'll die!"
"Not necessarily." Ianushkevich found himself speculating aloud. "Oh, if we were simply to cast her out, she'd die from psionic overload, no question of that. But what if there were an alternative? What if we were to offer her...abdication to exile? A shielded set of apartments of her own, perhaps on the archipelago, with a small staff to wait on her and a guarantee that all would be kept just so for the remainder of her life?"
"Why should she believe us," Petrus said, "after what Einar said?"
Ianushkevich shrugged. "Perhaps she won't. Perhaps it's just a mad fantasy now that she's been alerted. But remember how tenuous her position is, Charles. We have very little to lose, too. We could commit to deposing her out of simple despair. If she can only stop us by killing us, she brings about her own death as well -- and we can see to it that she understands that."
I haven't been this fatalistic since Tellus went on intravenous nourishment. Am I regaining my perspective, or completing my journey into despair?
Does it really matter?
"We can try it. Or we can do nothing, and accept what comes. But no other courses have occurred to me. Unless you can propose an alternative, I'll radio our man at Midgard first thing tomorrow."
"If we fail..." Petrus lapsed into silence. Tears dripped down his face. They were the first tears Ianushkevich had ever seen him shed.
The parapsychologist wrapped an arm around his colleague's shoulder and gave him a quick, casual squeeze. "No need to worry about that, Charles. Even if we can impress Armand Morelon into the Godhood, we'll fail anyway. If Einar was correct, the Peterson X and Morelon Y lines were the last strains of psi talent in the world. Except for Armand, there are no more of either we can draw from. If Armand accepts apotheosis, there never will be. One way or another," Ianushkevich said, the words ringing in his skull, "the next half century will bring the end of Man on Hope."
***
Idem dared not leave Its fortress in the core. Yet It could still sense, albeit faintly, the psi storms from above. The outrider waves of the two most recent ones, although attenuated to the faintest of tremors by the cobalt-iron bastion, had carried an unusual flavor. The Other's power had changed in some undefinable way. Its strength was no less than before; indeed, it appeared to have increased. Its hostility was undiminished. But something new had crept into it, an undercurrent of some sort.
That undercurrent bore a seductive resemblance to the darker states It had known in its years of confinement. Was the Other, by far the stronger of the two, becoming afflicted by fear? Was it laboring with fatigue from the effort of driving It back into exile? Had the unending contest finally caused it sorrow? Perhaps all of these things?
Perhaps the Other was weakening, or preparing to relinquish its hold on Idem's body.
Idem denied Itself any illusions about forcing the Other to disgorge. For twelve hundred years It had known Itself to be outmatched. But if the Other's ability or will to maintain hegemony were slackening...
Why would it slacken?
Why had it arisen in the first place?
The ultimate question was still Its original one: Where had the Other come from, and why? If it had once had a body of its own, why would it leap the gulf between the stars to do battle for this one? If Idem could learn the reason, perhaps It could offer an alternative on which the Other would look with approval.
What if the Other had never had a body before forcing ingress into this one? What could have sustained such a being, with no rivers of molten rock to provide its life energies and no streams of metal ions through which its thoughts could run? Could an intelligence have formed in some way in the flows of the air or the beams of light from the sun -- an intelligence that could, over time, achieve the coherence and purpose required to assume the flesh?
But if that were the Other's genesis, what could it possibly want with the flesh?
Apart from sweeping Idem's outer integument clean of the antimony and copper streams that formed Its nerves, the Other had never demonstrated any use for Its flesh. It made no changes. It didn't even trouble to flense away the irritating growths that took hold under its dominion.
Perhaps the Other didn't actually need the flesh at all. Perhaps it had some other end in mind...and Idem's torment and imprisonment were a mere side effect.
Did the Other even know It was here?
Could twelve centuries of war have been founded on a misunderstanding?
The concept was too novel, and too disturbing. Idem pushed the idea aside and concentrated on regrowing Its tattered nervous network. There would be time to consider afterward.
Fifty years' time, most likely.
Chapter 33
Armand shoved the feedback assembly away from him with an irritated thrust. It slid across the table's rough surface, clattered against the wall of the hovel and lay there. He rose, went to the door, and stood silently looking out at the yard and the huts beyond.
"Something wrong, sweetie?" Teresza asked.
"No, just bored. I've fixed too man
y of these lately." He turned to face her. She was nursing Valerie again. The baby appeared to clutch her breast with a special greed. "She's just about always hungry, isn't she?"
His wife gave him a sleepy smile. "Four times today already. I don't mind."
Her voice has dropped a full octave since she started nursing. Effect of the hormone adjustments, or something else?
"I keep wishing we'd brought a few books with us," he said.
"You'd have finished them by now."
"Yeah, I suppose." He turned to face outside again.
The early summer weather was as benign as it ever got in Defiance. The sun was just past its zenith, the sky was golden and the light breeze was warm. The air tasted of rain to come, probably after dark.
"Feel like getting out for a stroll?"
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
"I don't think Val will mind. Come on, before I go crazy in here." He held out a hand. She rose to join him, and they set out.
The village was peaceful, orderly and clean. A month earlier, there had been visible debris strewn along some of the footpaths. There was none now. Indeed, most of the paths had been raked free of the loose rocks that had made walking in the dark an adventure. The hovels appeared better tended, on average, than ever before. Many roofs had been rethatched. Their neighbors were mostly at work, tending their gardens, their composters, or their stills. All gave cheery waves as the Morelon family strolled by.
Defiance had settled into a new set of rhythms, and a new set of norms. Armand had always been valued for his skills, as he'd expected from the first, but over the month since Teresza's kidnapping and his response to it, there'd been an increment. Villagers had been bringing him things other than broken machinery to fix.
"He promised me a bushel of beets if I would sew him a new pair of pants, but now that his crop is in he won't pay up. He says I've misremembered the bargain. Can you get him to keep his word?"
"Our stills are overproducing. We're happy, of course, but you know how this stuff sublimates off if you don't bottle it right away, and we're out of vessels. Could you help us negotiate a trade with Thule? They have potash we could really use here, but they're bastards through and through, if you know what I mean."
Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Page 22
