A Prison Unsought

by Sherwood Smith

  “That’s why no Naval ship has ever visited it!” Rom-Sanchez exclaimed.

  “Then Gehenna will no longer be protected by secrecy,” said Ng. “You’re right. I won’t go into action without a fully informed crew. You never know who may be called upon to make a command decision.”

  She straightened up. “So I might as well start at the top. Genz, we will convene at . . . oh eight hundred tomorrow to plan our approach.”

  Navaz scowled at her hands as they filed into the corridor.

  Totokili said to her, “Problem?”

  “We couldn’t rescue the Panarch at Arthelion, but now we will,” she said slowly.

  “Because we’re under orders,” Rom-Sanchez put in.

  Navaz gave him a distracted glance. “AyKay, the Aerenarch ordered the rescue. It’s his duty. But . . . what if the Panarch decided it was his duty to not tell the Rifters about the Knot?”

  “They’ll be dead,” Totokili said, snapping his blunt fingers. “But we’ll see it.”

  That much of their mission would be standard procedure: on emergence, check the tacponders for traces. They could then observe the Rifter destroyer entering the system by standing out from the Gehenna system a distance equal to the time elapsed between its arrival and theirs.

  Krajno grunted softly. “As for the Panarch’s ‘duty’—how he might perceive it, and how he might react—why do you think she’s briefing the Aerenarch alone?”

  o0o

  Margot Ng was amused at the way her heartbeat accelerated when the middy on duty sent word of the Aerenarch’s arrival at the Plot room. It was the first time she had ever been alone with the young man around whom such a storm of controversy had thundered.

  Young? she thought as Brandon vlith-Arkad walked in, and she scrutinized him. A pair of intelligent blue eyes met hers in a brief, assessing glance that held no hint of the callow arrogance of youth. The bland contours of childhood had long since been planed from the refined face that presented such a formidably amiable front. Years of control rendered his countenance perfectly balanced. The toll the struggle on Ares must have taken on him showed only in the tightness of muscle across his brow and the hint of exhaustion marking the skin beneath his eyes. He can’t be much more than a decade younger than me.

  The novosti had done a perfect job of maintaining the illusion of his eternal youth—with all its damaging implication of callowness and irresponsibility.

  “Your Highness.” She made a formal courtesy. “Please, will you sit down?”

  They went on with the ritually prescribed exchange of niceties. She tried to make her part sound as sincere as she could. After all, he had willingly deferred all his prerogatives—he’d come to her, and at once, instead of requiring her to transfer all her data up to the cabin hastily fitted out as the royal suite and then making her wait upon his convenience. As his eldest brother would have done to an upstart Polloi.

  And then it was time for the real business. She glanced at the steward who had finished pouring out coffee, and he silently withdrew.

  As soon as the door closed, she leaned forward. “How much do you know about Gehenna, Your Highness?”

  “Nothing,” Brandon replied with cooperative readiness.

  “As much as any of us had, then,” she said, and then held out the parchment paper. “The sealed orders from Admiral Nyberg.”

  She sat back and watched his expression go from surprise to recognition, to enjoyment—and then to comprehension.

  He knows that the secret is lost, whether for good or ill. I don’t have to risk offense with speech. How could the Panarch have condoned what had happened to his youngest son? Was he too overworked, too distant from his sons after losing his wife—or did he wish, in some way, to preserve the past by regarding Brandon as a youth?

  She gave herself a quick mental shake. Fascinating as it was to speculate about the human beings behind the high titles, this was not the time or place. Brandon’s remarkably acute perceptions made such speculation dangerous.

  She spoke the one sentence she had planned: “Has Your Highness any idea what we might expect?”

  It was a very oblique approach to the delicate question of what he thought might be his father’s choice: death for the Rifters and Eusabian’s heir as well as for himself and his advisers, or life, and if so, to what end?

  The Aerenarch leaned forward. “If they can stay alive without cost of innocent lives, they will. Suicide might be a quicker death, but not more honorable when they are needed back among us.”

  “You do not think he might balance their lives against that of Eusabian’s heir, then, Your Highness?”

  Brandon’s smile turned sardonic, briefly recalling Semion to mind. “Do you mean, is Anaris to be counted so little a threat? To that I can’t return a simple answer, except that to underestimate him would be a mistake. But you have to realize . . .” He hesitated, then said, “To my father, Anaris is not just an enemy.”

  Ng waited, hoping her puzzled expression would prompt him to explain.

  For a time it seemed that no explanation would be forthcoming, for the Aerenarch rose and walked the length of the room, his coffee cup forgotten in his fingers. He gazed beyond the holographic depiction of the movements of Eusabian’s fleet, then said over his shoulder, “I don’t know if I can make it any clearer, because I don’t entirely understand it myself.”

  “Anything that affords us insight can only aid our planning, Your Highness.” She uttered the platitude in her most encouraging voice.

  And won a brief grin in response. He said, “My own experience of Anaris was limited to hunt and run: he spent his time trying to bully me into submission. Once or twice he threatened to kill Galen and me. So we retaliated by making him a butt. This went on for, oh, three years or so, and there came a time when . . .”

  The Aerenarch glanced up at the holo, his gaze abstracted, the resemblance to Semion very strong.

  Anger, Ng thought. Semion was angry all the time. I’m seeing old anger in Aerenarch-Brandon.

  He said, “Forgive me, but the, er, timeliness of the memory has its ironies. There came an incident in which Anaris’s attempted goal, shall we say, came very close to success. So they moved Galen and me to Charvann, ostensibly so Galen could attend the university.”

  Ng did not know what surprised her more: that the Panarch would permit it go on so long, or that his son would be the one removed, and the hostage the one to stay in the place of the son. The thinking behind it is quintessential Douloi, she realized. The first, a matter of training, and the second, of honor.

  “. . . and when I returned from the academy, I saw my father seldom. Anaris saw more of him than I did. But that was not by preference. I had an interview with my father one day. It was after one of Anaris’s visits to his private study. Something had happened. I don’t know what; by then we were moving in separate spheres. But my father said that seeing me was a pleasure, and Anaris a duty. And while he could deny himself pleasures, he must never shirk duty.”

  I was right, thought Ng. Out loud, she said, “So the Panarch did his best to subvert the Dol’jharian hostage, then?”

  Brandon shook his head, his gaze still distant. “No. Eusabian would have had him gutted as soon as he stepped off the transfer ship if he’d suspected that. Always, always they were enemies, but in opening up our history and thought to Anaris, I think he hoped that—despite the exposure of our weakness, which could be used against us—Anaris would take with him memory of our strengths.” His smile hardened. “Semion was violently opposed. He maintained up until the very end that Dol’jhar was planning a war, and we must be ready. Everything he did was aimed at making the Panarchy ready. We would have become a military meritocracy, drawing on the best minds in the Tetrad Centrum, if he’d succeeded. And whatever you think of Semion’s goals, or methods, it turns out he was right in his prediction.”

  I hadn’t realized how intertwined with their lives the Eusabian heir was. Ng shivered with a frisson of presen
timent, and wondered exactly what had happened during that incident when Anaris had ‘nearly succeeded’ in his attack on Brandon. “Was he the only heir?”

  Brandon grinned, dropped into his chair, and swallowed off his coffee. “No, Eusabian had three sons and two daughters. Anaris was the youngest.” He set his cup down with a musical ring. “Is this beginning to sound familiar? They are all dead.”

  “I see,” she said.

  And my life is tied up with these people as well. . . . Memory wrenched at her, fending off the attack of Eusabian’s flagship, the Blood of Dol, at Acheront while the lances boarded it: the flight of the Panarch’s enemy just before the ship blew up. The inevitability of a confrontation between the two heirs seemed a certainty. It had to happen, it would happen, and—though she dreaded the prospect—she knew she had to be there.

  ABOARD THE SAMEDI

  The latest changes downloaded from the hyperwave rippled through the strategic display, and Anaris sat back, drumming his fingers on the console. They had woefully underestimated the cunning of their enemy. Of this the evidence was clear, in slashing lines of red and green and the fuzzy blue of relativistic indeterminacy. Despite their handicap, the Panarchists were slowly chivvying his father’s forces into a revealing redeployment that pointed straight at the Suneater.

  The only questions now were: how long would it take the enemy, despite their slower communications, to see the success of their strategy, and how long then to find the Suneater?

  At least it is in one of the worst parts of the Rift, he thought. Their search will be slow.

  He tapped rapidly at the keys, composing a query to his sources in Juvaszt’s chain of command, then stopped and wiped the message header. He grimaced.

  These conversations with Gelasaar are eroding my sense of propriety. Of course he could not communicate with the Fist of Dol’jhar, now approaching the Suneater. His first message must be the ritual notification of the completion of his father’s paliach.

  Anaris shrugged and completed the query, then keyed it to his secretary. Morrighon would handle it. Observing the letter if not the spirit. Then he laughed. A very Panarchist approach.

  He glanced at the chrono. Gelasaar would be arriving momentarily. His mind ranged swiftly over all he had learned in their conversations, focused by the Panarch’s strangely intense request, at their last meeting, that he study the Unalterables. He toyed with his dirazh’u, the silken cord mirroring the complexity of his thoughts.

  The annunciator chimed.

  “Enter,” Anaris said. As the door to his quarters hissed open he stood up and tapped the gravitors to standard gee, and then hesitated. This would be their last meeting alone. On a whim, he left the strategic display of the Thousand Suns running. Then, feeling the gaze of Gelasaar hai-Arkad on his back, he turned around.

  That strange intensity had not lapsed—if anything, he sensed it stronger than before. The second was the Panarch’s age. The thought startled Anaris. This was the first time he had consciously noted Gelasaar’s age. Why?

  He let nothing of this show as he motioned the Panarch to a chair, then stepped aside as, instead, Gelasaar walked toward the console. They studied the display in silence for a time, standing side by side.

  “You see that communications and control are not, after all, always sufficient,” the Panarch said finally.

  “That is merely a lack of strategic judgment and insufficient understanding of a new weapon,” said Anaris.

  “Perhaps,” the Panarch replied, turning away and seating himself in his usual place. “Have you reflected on the Unalterables, as I requested?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Something about Gelasaar’s demeanor mildly unsettled Anaris. He sensed currents here he could not understand.

  “The first thing I discovered is that there are two kinds of Unalterables: the prohibitions and the prescriptions. The former have held up better than the latter.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  This was almost an interrogation. Anaris hesitated, then decided that he would find out why sooner if he went along with it. “A dance has no contrary. As you suggested,” he said, “it has to do with the second Polarity: ‘Seek not control, nor multiply laws; the cracks in the system are blessings, not flaws.’” He stopped.

  Gelasaar waited patiently.

  “At least some of the Unalterables seem to express this Polarity perfectly. For instance, the right of sophonts to untraceable monetary exchanges, which mitigates against attempts to control economic relationships.”

  “Very good,” said the Panarch, his voice neutral.

  A reflex of pleasure triggered annoyance. I am not under judgment here. “But the purpose of the prescriptions is not as clear,” Anaris said.

  Gelasaar nodded. “They are the same.” He spread his hands on his knees. “Consider the oneills, fixed by an Unalterable at a maximum population of fifty thousand. That is a fundamental determinant of the structure of civilization in the Thousand Suns and a powerful limitation on the power of government.”

  “How?”

  “First, fifty thousand is the largest polity that can be governed democratically, as are the Highdwellings under their temenarchs. Second, in so small a polity, in any sort of liberal culture, democracy is almost inevitable; the ease of personal associations guarantees it. And that democratic structure forcibly resists any attempts of my government to micromanage human affairs.”

  “But planets are far larger,” Anaris countered.

  “Which is why the Covenant of Anarchy makes the distinction it does.” The Panarch’s gaze shifted to a distance far beyond the walls of the cabin. “And even so, the Covenant was showing signs of strain. Highdwellers and Downsiders growing apart, the loss of planets to Quarantine, political questions arising from . . .” The Panarch blinked. “Do you see it, Anaris?”

  His eyes were shadowed with an unfathomable concern; once again Anaris sensed judgment suspended.

  It should have made him angry, but curiously enough his overriding emotion was conflict—dichotomy. His Dol’jharian heritage rejected fiercely what the Panarch was saying—subjects obey or die, it insisted. But the part of him created in his youth on Arthelion was able to comprehend the, ah, call it the elegance of the action that is no action, the careful layering of responsibility and anarchy that was Panarchic governance.

  He nodded slowly. “Loopholes. Always leave loopholes. If you arrange them carefully, the flow of government will proceed as planned, unresisted by those who choose escape rather than acquiescence. This leaves you free to constructively apply the power you have, rather than fighting those who would oppose that power.”

  Gelasaar’s smile lit like sunrise. “You have transcended your heritage, Anaris achreash’Arkad.”

  Of the spirit of Arkad. The shock was almost overwhelming; the more so for its truth, and he almost missed what the Panarch said next.

  “And so I give you your life.”

  “What?”

  Instead of answering him, Gelasaar asked: “How far to Gehenna?”

  Anaris stared. “About thirty hours.”

  The Panarch let out his breath and spread his hands on his knees. “Good. You were astonished, you said, at how little there was in the Palace computers about Gehenna. That is because the key to the Gehenna system has never been committed to the DataNet—it exists only in hard copy and the memories of a very few of us.” He motioned to the dirazh’u lying limply in Anaris’s hands. “It is ironic, the Dol’jharian belief in a destiny determined by knots, for it is the Knot that guards Gehenna.”

  Anaris heard the capitalization of the noun.

  “A fracture in fivespace, some thirty light-minutes in extent, left over from the first few seconds of Creation and somehow anchored by Gehenna’s sun. I do not understand the physics of it. I only know the Gehenna system must be approached along the plane of the ecliptic, and even then, it is extremely dangerous to use the fiveskip. Ships attempting any
other approach are never seen again.”

  The Panarch smiled, and Anaris knew he’d let his astonishment show.

  “There are no guard ships, no weapons—the orbital monitor is unarmed. The guardian of Gehenna is Totality itself.”

  Instinctively Anaris turned back to the strategic display, still running the projection of ship movements throughout the Thousand Suns. Three thoughts rang like tocsins in his mind.

  I was under judgment, and Once again, we underestimated the Panarchists. It could be a trick, but he knew it wasn’t. Morrighon had told him how frantically, and futilely, Fasthand had been seeking data on Gehenna. It all fit together. How dangerously simple, to preserve a secret merely by leaving it on paper!

  And the third . . . He turned back to Gelasaar. “You knew all along that Brandon was going to run.”

  “I had my hopes,” Gelasaar said tranquilly. “That Brandon, denied a place in the system from within, might find a way to preserve it from without, after I was gone. I saw to it that he had the means to learn if he so willed. And an avenue of escape. He used both.”

  Anaris swiped the console dark with a strike of his hand, then faced the older man. And even though he knew the answer, he asked the question, anyway: “Why are you telling me this?” He tabbed the console to summon Morrighon; he would have to notify Fasthand immediately.

  “I told you at the beginning that I thought it likely you would be a better ruler than your father.” The Panarch stood up. “Now I am sure of it.” He waved at the console. “If, of course, you overcome the Navy, which does not seem as handicapped by your advantage as I warrant you expected.”

  Then his face became pensive. “I regret only one thing—that this last lesson will make it less likely that you will ever underestimate us again.”

  As the door slid open, Anaris shook his head, meeting the Panarch’s eyes in the last personal contact they would ever have, away from the eyes of others.