End of the Circle

by Jack McKinney

“Exedore,” Aurora called from the front room.

  That she had said it just loud enough to be heard did not keep Exedore from jumping out of his skin. Miriya’s youngest had that effect.

  He entered the room a shaky step or so ahead of Max and Miriya, who had also come running. Aurora was seated in front of the monitor screen, one finger raised to it.

  “It’s the reconfiguration pattern,” Exedore said excitedly after a moment’s study of the displays. “We’ll be able to see—”

  Miriya gasped.

  Haydon IV’s northern and southern hemispheres were separating. The artifact world was about to open up like a hinged ball!

  In newspace, Lisa edged quietly through the doorway to the nursery. She told herself that in addition to being a naturally inquisitive mom, she was being considerate just now, mindful not to disturb the children’s play. At the same time she realized that her inner voice was not urging caution but demanding it; the feeling was similar to the fight-or-flight hormonal responses that were triggered every time she had to give the order to deploy the fortress’s defensive shields.

  The kids, human and Zentraedi, were still grouped around the enormous sphere they had constructed, completely absorbed in their work. The toe of Lisa’s heelless boot touched down on a squeaky toy, and a dozen pair of eyes were suddenly trained on her.

  “Hi, kids,” she said, pinning a smile on it.

  Roy glanced at his peers, rose out of his cross-legged pose on the deck, and walked over to meet her halfway. Lisa squatted down to his eye level and mussed his black hair. “Hey, that’s some globe you guys made,” she began. “What is it, some kind of space base?”

  Roy took a quick look over his shoulder at Drannin. “It’s secret, Mommie. You have to leave.”

  Lisa adopted a wide-eyed expression. “It’s so secret you can’t even let your mom have one quick peek?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, sweetie, please.”

  Roy shook his head, adamant. Behind him, the human children had formed a guarded line in front of the sphere. Lisa straightened up to her full height. “Just one peek, Roy, and I’ll leave you guys alone,” she said more firmly.

  Roy’s eyes and faltering tone of voice betrayed his ambivalence. “You can’t, Mom. We’re doing something secret.”

  Stern-faced, Lisa folded her arms across her chest. “Now listen to me, young man, I’m still the commander of this ship. Just show me what you’ve built and I’ll—”

  Abruptly, Roy turned on his heel and rejoined the group, leaving Lisa standing in the center of the room. She shook her head in disbelief at the mirrored side of the observation window and was about take a forward step when Drannin and the other Zentraedi children suddenly positioned themselves between her and the sphere. It was like facing a fifteen-foot-high wall of muscle and bone.

  Lisa tried to contain her unease. She had not had to face off with a Zentraedi in almost longer than she could recall, but some part of her remembered and pumped fear into her blood.

  “Drannin,” she said in a scolding voice, “I don’t approve of this behavior. And Kazianna won’t, either.” She could see Roy peering from behind Drannin’s knee. “Do you want me to go get her, or are you going to show me what you’ve built? I promise I’ll keep the secret,” she thought to add.

  “It’s almost finished,” Drannin answered in English. “We can show you after, not before.”

  Lisa softened her expression somewhat. “So it’s not really a secret, then.”

  Drannin spent a moment considering that, almost as though monitoring something just out of earshot. “No, it isn’t really a secret,” he said at last. “It’s more like a surprise.”

  Angelo Dante was the one who had discovered Rem slumped unconscious in the rec-deck corridor and had carried him over his shoulder, like a fireman, down to the med lab. The experience had been more troubling than the recent EVA and had cost the sergeant the few hours of after-mission rest he had coming to him.

  “The guy’s bad news,” he was telling Sean, Marie, and Jack. They were picking at meals in the ship’s commissary/mess, Karen’s harsh reprimands having worked a temporary truce among them. “I’ve been through this before, so help me. Once I caught him hanging around outside of Major Emerson’s office. Then I found him snooping around Fokker Base.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Jack cut in, gesturing with both hands. “You caught Rem where?”

  Dante showed him an impatient look. “Not Rem—Zor Prime.”

  Jack scratched his head. “You mean the Masters’ clone, the one Southern Cross command stuck with the Fifteenth?” Dante nodded.

  “So what’s Zor Prime got to do with Rem?” Jack persisted.

  Dante growled. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Captain. They’re the same guy!”

  Jack looked to Sean, then to Marie for support.

  “What the sergeant’s saying is that both Rem and Zor Prime were cut from the same cloth,” Sean explained. “They’re both clones of the same donor. It’s like they’re identical.”

  “On the nose,” Dante said.

  Jack tried to dredge up what little he knew about theories of nature and nurture. “Biologically, maybe,” he argued. “But Rem was raised on Tirol, for cryin’ out loud. Zor Prime grew up on one of those space fortresses, didn’t he?”

  Dante waved a muscular hand. “Splitting hairs. You find Rem lurking around, you know something’s going on.”

  “Like what?” Jack started to say, when the sergeant suddenly shot to his feet and began beckoning someone over to the table. Jack turned and saw the keyboard man, Bowie Grant, headed their way, meal tray in hand.

  “Just the person I was looking for,” Dante said as Bowie was sliding into one of the molded chairs. “You heard what happened outside the music room, right?”

  Bowie nodded uncertainly. “Rem passed out or something.”

  Dante returned to his seat and fixed Bowie with a gimlet stare. “I want to know what was going on inside, Bowie.”

  Puzzled but wary, Bowie tucked in his chin. “We were running down some old songs.”

  “Who was?” the sergeant demanded.

  “Me, Musica, Allegra, Minmei. Why? What’s this have to do with anything, Angelo?”

  “Minmei?” Jack asked, surprised.

  “Some of those old Masters’ songs, I’ll bet,” Dante said. “Some of that clone music.”

  “Easy does it, Sergeant,” Marie cautioned.

  Bowie pushed his tray aside angrily. “Let’s not start this again, Angelo.”

  “Minmei singing with you, Rem outside listening … Doesn’t that mean anything to you, Bowie?”

  Bowie glanced around the table. “Zor Prime,” he said in sudden realization, then laughed. “Look, Angelo, Rem is not Zor Prime.”

  “We just had this discussion,” Marie offered in a weary voice.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not convinced,” Dante said, rising again. “And besides, even if he isn’t Zor Prime, he’s a clone of the original. And look what that guy dumped in our laps.”

  In the SDF-3’s briefing room, Rick checked his watch and muttered to himself. “Damn it, what’s keeping her?”

  Lang regarded him from the hull viewport. “Why don’t you just have a seat, Admiral. I’m sure she’ll be here any moment now.”

  Rick stiffened, then resigned himself to it, forcing out his breath as he joined Lang at the permaplas window.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” the scientist said.

  Rick had to agree. Any planet at all would have been a welcome sight just then, but the one they had found—or the one that had found them—was nothing less than extraordinary. Crystalline skies like those on Spheris, verdant forests like those on old Praxis, seas to rival Garuda’s own … And yet unlike any of those worlds.

  “It makes me think of Earth,” Rick said after a moment.

  “Earth before the first war,” Lang amended. “But yes, looking at it summons up the same feelings in me. After T
irol, Karbarra, Optera, how easy it is to forget how affecting the sight of rampant life can be.” He cleared his throat. “Now, Admiral, as to a scouting party.”

  A hatch hissed open behind them, and Lisa stepped into the room, an unreadable look in her eyes. Rick thought it was anger but could have believed it was fear.

  “Rick,” she began, “you better get down to the nursery and have a talk with your son. When I tell you what he did—”

  “We can save that for later,” Rick interrupted. He jerked a thumb at the viewport. “Maybe you haven’t noticed.”

  Lisa glanced at the planet. “Of course I’ve noticed. Raul’s kept me apprised of everything. But we can’t save this matter until later, Rick. Roy and Drannin—”

  “Lisa,” Rick snapped. “I said I didn’t want to hear it. We can discipline the kids later on. Right now we’ve got more pressing matters to address.”

  Lisa’s mouth tightened. “If you’d kindly let me finish,” she grated.

  Rick was about to interrupt again when the intercom sounded. He punched the talk-stud and barked, “Admiral Hunter!”

  “This is security, Admiral,” a deep base voice answered. “Colonel Xien.”

  “Go ahead, Colonel.”

  “It concerns, Rem, sir. He’s been released from med lab and is now on his way back to rec deck.”

  “And Minmei?”

  “The same, sir. She’s with the two Tiresian women.”

  Rick rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “All right, Colonel. Maintain surveillance and notify me immediately if there are any new developments.”

  Lisa was staring at him when he signed off. “What’s this about Minmei and Rem? Did you order surveillance on them?”

  Rick snorted. “I thought you were being kept apprised of things, Lisa. Maybe if you hadn’t been spending your time in the nursery—”

  “Rick!” Lisa said. “What right do you have to question my actions?”

  “Every right, when you disappear from the bridge to attend to some … child-care problem!”

  “Child care? If that’s what you think—”

  “Please, please,” Lang said, stepping between them with hands raised. “We’re wasting valuable time.”

  Rick and Lisa glared at each other over Lang’s shoulder.

  “Carry on, Doctor,” Lisa said through clenched teeth.

  Lang bowed his head. “About the scouting party, Admiral. You were about to say—”

  “Pass the order to ready a party at once,” Rick replied before Lang could finish. “And inform them that I will be accompanying them.”

  He was holding Lisa’s gaze as he said it.

  Minmei recalled how she had sung for her parents as a child, recalled Yokohama and trips to Kyle’s house, where she would invariably be asked to perform, to entertain. It had been years later on Macross Island that singing had grown to mean something else to her. She still lived then for the chance to perform, lived for the response, the adulation, but singing had come to represent a kind of power game. More than the power to inch herself closer to wealth and popularity, though; singing was power over people: a means to move, stir, control.

  To conquer.

  The problem was, there were people who sought to make that power their own. To twist it this way and that to suit their own purposes. Gloval and the SDF-1 command had used her; Kyle had tried to remake her; T. R. Edwards had tried to possess her.

  And now Rem needed the voice—not Minmei but the voice.

  Only he was not out to conquer audience or enemy or to build an empire founded on his own lust and greed. He needed the voice to position himself on a road to self-discovery. A road to redemption for a father/self he was just beginning to understand.

  So she had been willing to help him, even willing to let him go on believing that by so doing he was helping her. To confront her fear, he had told her. To give full reign to her vocal prowess.

  How she had been tempted to confront him on that one! To embrace him, really, and confess that she would sing simply because he needed her to sing, nothing more. But that could wait until Rem’s inner quest was concluded. And then she would confess, and thank him, too. Oh, yes, thank him for allowing her to reexperience how wonderful it felt to liberate that voice within. For what had she been but self-contained the past five years, imprisoned, like matrixed Flowers of Life? Her voice: the Protoculture denied …

  Musica and Allegra had played no small part in that sense of rebirth. For with them she harmonized with equals. She had come closest to such transcendent purity with Janice Em, human-made, but at the time neither she nor Janice was possessed of the songs themselves.

  Ancient psalms that predated Tirol’s Grand Transition and the coming to power of the Robotech Masters.

  Minmei was in the company of the sister clones now, preparing her voice for the difficult parts Bowie’s keyboards had taught her. Musica and Allegra had seemed pleased with her contributions thus far, to say nothing of Bowie, who was beside himself. A dream come true, he kept telling her, a dream come true.

  She kept to herself that she was wearing a transmitting device, that Rem had wired her for sound, to use an old Earth phrase. In some sense it made her feel as though Rem were present in the music room, pressed close to her warm breast like the device itself.

  Her hand brushed it through the soft weave of her tunic, then went to her belly, where it lingered a moment longer.

  And she began to sing.

  Not far away, Rem would be listening.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Certain parallels are suggested by the fact that both the Masters’ clone (Zor Prime) and the Invid Regess’s simulagent (Ariel, aka “Marlene”) were corrupted by their contact with Terran humankind. Those commentators who advance the view usually offer the Zentraedi as further proof to bolster their claim. Corruption, then, is equated with emotion, for it was human passion above all else that turned the tide time and time again during the Robotech Wars. Terran humankind has been singled out and in some sense denigrated. But were the pre-Robotech Tiresians any more in control of their passions? One need only look to Zor and the corruption his actions worked on the Invid Queen-Mother. Was this not in fact the original corruption?

  Gitta Hopkins, Queen Bee: A Biography of the Invid Regess

  Outside the Ark Angel’s viewport spun a dark maelstrom of stolen matter, a grave whirlpool of cosmic stuff, black as evil in its singular heart.

  “My God,” Vince said in utter astonishment.

  “Let us hope not,” Cabell offered, turning his back to the view and helping himself to food recently delivered to the situation room.

  “Stellar Transylvania,” one of Louie Nichols’s data junkies said without bothering to explain. “Give me two pints of protons,” he added, affecting some sort of middle-European accent.

  In the foreground between starship and black hole floated what Vince had first taken for a dumbbell-like structure captured by the system’s nearly lightless sun, the host upon which the hole had fed for countless eons. It was only after the ship’s onboard AI had served up a graphic breakdown of the object that he had begun to comprehend it. One end of the dumbbell was in fact a small rouge moon, yanked from orbit by what constituted the dumbbell’s twin-cupped opposite end: a radically reconfigured Haydon IV.

  The cylindrically shaped bridge that joined moon and artifact world were made up of two massive conduits, which had apparently telescoped out of each of Haydon IV’s now separated northern and southern hemispheres.

  Vince ran a hand down his face and left it covering his mouth, as though fearful of what sounds might emerge. Just in view far off the Ark Angel’s port side were the ships of the Karbarran battle group, a school of predatory fish awaiting the scent of blood.

  “Evaluation,” Vince said, turning to find Louie Nichols headlocked to the room’s comp console. Data-expedient or not, the sight of the wizard’s cranial ports still left him distressed.

  With an audible pop, Louis jac
ked the umbilicus out of the skull. “No doubt about it, they’re mining the moon for metals. Haydon IV’s turned itself into a working factory.”

  Vince gestured to the viewport. “You mean those, those tubes are mine shafts?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Louie told him. “See, instead of parking yourself in orbit and shuttling payloads of raw materials up the gravity well, you construct transfer corridors ship-to-surface and suck up what you need. A variation on the old space elevator or orbital tower concept.”

  “But what the hell are they manufacturing?”

  Dr. Penn and Cabell approached the console to hear Louie’s response.

  “Ships would be my guess,” Nichols said, only to receive skeptical looks from the three of them.

  “Assume for a moment our theories about Haydon are on the money, then put yourself in his boots.” Louie stood up to make his point. “Here are Haydon and his crew wandering the spaceways for tens of thousands of years, jumping system to system, world to world. And frankly, the whole thing’s becoming a yawn. They’ve conquered war, hunger, pestilence, disease, death … I mean, what’s left to do?

  “So all at once they begin asking themselves some serious questions. Like maybe if there isn’t more to life than gallivanting around the galaxy playing deity to groups of awed primitives. They start focusing on ontological and teleological questions about purpose and god and what’s supposed to come after you punch exit and wave good-bye to your biological parts. Of course they’ve been asking themselves these questions since they crawled up out of the gene pool, but all of a sudden there’s an urgency attached to it. It’s a kind of—what’d they used to call it?—a midlife crisis thing.”

  Louie took a breath and adjusted his opaque goggles. “Thing is, for all their investigations into existential metaphysics and such, for all their experiments with religion, sensory dep, mind-altering substances, and cyber-interface, they just can’t seem to break through to any of the ethereal dimensions they figure must be out there or in there or somewhere. After all, the math works, so where’s the experiential side to the equation?

  “So Haydon gets the notion that maybe his or her or their race just isn’t meant for transcendence—I mean, they’re just not built for it. They’re psychically deficient or constitutionally deprived or something. But that doesn’t necessarily rule out the existence of these other realms or the possibility that some other race is capable of getting there.” Louie looked at Vince. “You following me so far, General?”