by Bill Adams
I would have thought this just more standard rah-rah boilerplate, but for some reason the crowd stirred with new interest. What could they know that I didn’t—about Evan Larkspur?
The lecturer smiled and leaned forward on the lectern. Sometime during this next speech, so slowly as to be unnoticeable, the houselights went down, his spotlight came up, and the narrow stage behind him vanished into blackness.
“A hundred years ago,” he said, “the most prestigious of colleges was the university of the planet Nexus. The great families of the commercial empires competed to send their smarter children there; while the university’s Kanalist lodge, the oldest public temple and by then the most influential in Kanalism, provided scholarships for boys and girls from the farthest fringes of the human sphere.
“Oddly enough, Larkspur qualified on both counts: his grades were of the highest, and, while he was penniless, his family name had been the most prominent on Wayback, the tough frontier world of his birth. Historians have speculated that he originally joined the Order to further his own social advancement. A young man who wants to write verse plays had better have rich patrons. But it was Kanalism’s rich lore that seduced him; and the legendary Summerisle, who had been Master of the Nexus U. chapter for decades, was grooming him to take over that lodge when, a hundred and two years ago, Larkspur wrote his masterpiece.
“The Nexus U. chapter had already gone rotten from within. Under the Federal Alignment, the great families of colonial days had been in slow but inevitable decline, unable to maintain control of the new fortunes that keep sprouting from nowhere in a free market. What they wanted was a powerful new central government. Their model was what we now call the First Column—a small subfederation of planets within the Alignment. On the Column worlds, government-franchised cartels run by the ‘right’ people suppressed business competition, and kept the masses quiet with a deft mix of welfare programs and secret police. Sound familiar?
“Summerisle had recruited a number of young Columnards in hope of converting them, but they converted the rest of the Nexus chapter instead. They spoke of a Reform Kanalism that would get behind the Column movement, of an elite that would give the ‘little people’ the order and security of strong government.
“Larkspur, of course, believed in making people greater, not littler. And so, as his contribution to the struggle within his chapter, he restated and reaffirmed all the true Kanalist ideals in his verse play The Enchanted Isle. Many of you know that play by heart—but perhaps not the marginal notes on his original manuscript. This is what he wanted to make his Nexus classmates realize as they saw it performed:
“ ‘Once you know that you were born a king, that this world is your forest and its creatures your deer, all else falls into proportion. You will not want to be warlord or warden or hoarder now, nor ward heeler, nor whore. The only politics not utterly beneath you is noblesse oblige, the helping hand to those who have not yet remembered that they are your peers.
“ ‘I’ve done my part there. I have crept through a maze of errors to find that the golden Kanalist thread is still in place. We took the right steps all along, and said the right words, and nothing remains except to remember that they mean just what they say and are true: the secret of Everyman’s noble birth is that it lies outside history, and can be reexperienced at will, like memory itself, like a work of art.’ ”
This still seemed too boring a digression for a political rally—but it suited my own purposes perfectly. Simply a question of when to interrupt—when to take over.
The lecturer took a dramatic pause.
“But Larkspur, and those of his party, failed. The social elite Kanalism had cultivated for so many years betrayed us, and led a popular uprising against the perceived weakness of the Federal government. The Alignment was a loose affair, dependent upon the consent of the governed; it couldn’t crush a revolt. And as soon as the Columnards won, they were quick to establish Reform Kanalist temples and ban the real thing. As the old song went:
Alignment dead, without a mourner,
We all line up to watch the fight.
Right and Left in the same corner
Against what’s left of the Old Rite.
“Some perished bravely in the revolution—Summerisle, for instance. But before the outbreak of fighting, the Reformers had already made things hot for Larkspur on Nexus. Looking for a positive way out, he’d joined the Alignment’s navy, and signed on board a survey mission to obtain praeterspace access data for new stars. During the four to six years the survey would spend at near lightspeed, thirty or forty years would pass for those he left behind. And Larkspur was optimistic enough to believe that while he was gone, the Reform movement would fizzle out; his enemies in the great families would grow older and wiser, or perhaps get themselves killed; and he himself would be forgotten. It seems funny to us now, but he thought of the plays and poetry he left behind as juvenile apprentice work—he intended to start his literary career afresh when he returned.
“Of course, he never did return.”
The lecturer paused to pull at a glass of water. I couldn’t help looking around in the darkness, trying to weigh the mood of the crowd. What was Baldy up to? You don’t summon revolutionaries from a hundred planets to give them a lecture on Dead Poets of the Pre-Column Era. Where was the “Down with Column tyranny, Up with Liberty!” stuff the situation called for? And why was this dangerous-looking crew waiting for it so meekly?
“A hundred years have passed,” the lecturer said—finally getting down to cases? “I don’t know much more about the history of that century than you do—they don’t teach it in school. During the first few decades, the great families extended the constitution of the First Column over the whole human sphere, and they didn’t care how much blood they shed. The Shadow Tribunal rose to its current eminence among secret police forces. And it must have been about thirty years ago that the Consultant to Intelligence Affairs, an obscure naval officer, managed to obtain executive authority—or dictatorship, whatever you want to call it—over the Column. I suppose we have to consider this an improvement; in his struggle to maintain power over the great families and their Tribunal, the Consultant has had to curry popular favor by restoring minor liberties here and there. But the mass of us remain well-fed slaves.
“And what happened to Evan Larkspur?”
I groaned at the renewed digression, and someone shushed me. They’d get their Larkspur update soon enough, from me; I wanted them militant first—
“His survey ship, the F.A.S. Barbarossa, never returned to the human sphere, apparently lost to an accident. Meanwhile, Larkspur’s plays—mere college entertainments—soon found universal recognition. Are they actually so brilliant in themselves, or is it just that he picked the best classics of old Earth literature to retell? Or is the real appeal the legend of Larkspur himself—the tales of sex and violence and politics surrounding his Nexus University career, his Byronic life and mysterious death—the artist as rebel and prophet?
“Personally, I believe that it was the early Column attempts to suppress his works that made them so famous; nothing sells like a banned book. Eventually, of course, the Column changed its policy. They took the line that Larkspur was a Columnard at heart—that it was the Old Rite he fled from, not Reform. Now every political and religious faction claims Larkspur for its own. And everyone cherishes a forlorn little hope.
“Larkspur could still come back.”
The mask seemed to tighten against my face as the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Was this a trap after all? Or was it somehow…something worse?
“It’s not an idle fancy,” the lecturer said. “Survey ships were self-maintaining, fueled by ambient hydrogen. There’s no reason why the Barbarossa couldn’t have spent an extra year near lightspeed, which would translate into decades of our time. Evan Larkspur could still come back, a century after he left—only a half-dozen years older than when he departed at twenty-two. And why would this matter?
“First of all, he’d be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Any survey—especially one of that duration—would return with p-space access data for stars we cannot yet travel to: thousands of stars, meaning hundreds of new planets to colonize or mine, a vast fortune.
“Second, he’d be the idol of every liberty-loving man and woman, outside government and in—the perfect figurehead for a new revolution. Even our long-divided Kanalist underground would unite under the oldest and most knowledgeable of living Masters.
“And third, he’d have powers that I am revealing to you for the first time tonight. Because, just before Larkspur left for deep space, Master Summerisle entrusted him with the great secret of the Nexus University chapter—”
“No,” I heard myself say. He could not know this! This time I was not only shushed, but the hawkfaced man sitting next to me in the dimness half reached for something in the folds of his Satan costume; I shut up, but I could barely hear the lecturer’s next words over the roar in my head. No one could know!
“…now called the White Book. Handed down from the first Kanalists, and known to no other chapter, the White Book contains the one true history of our order. It also teaches an advanced alien technology, considered too dangerous for men to know. Summerisle had sworn an oath upon everything he held sacred never to use the Book as a weapon—but Larkspur had not.”
Excitement was rustling into the dark room like a night tide. Baldy grinned fiercely.
“You’ve heard the rumors, or you wouldn’t be here tonight. They are true. He is back, he is safe on the planet Venezia. He has the resources, the power, the secrets to bring down the Column and its Consultant. Evan Larkspur has returned.”
And he stepped back. He extended one arm to his side, hand outstretched. And slowly, someone walked into the light—a figure almost made of light.
“No,” I said again, standing.
Young, not yet thirty. Not exactly like Schaelus’s famous bust—or the mask I wore—but recognizable all the same. “Greetings,” he said—
—continuing to talk obliviously as I stiff-armed the hawk-faced man when he tried to interfere and vaulted onto the stage. “No!” I cried, and chopped my hand at the lying face—
—and the hand disappeared into it for an instant before the Larkspur image broke up and flickered away—a hologram!
I slapped a little pistol from Baldy’s hand before he could level it at me and dropped him to the stage with the old Alignment Navy knuckle to the solar plexus; six like him couldn’t have stopped me from going through with the plan that had barely kept me sane all those weeks. I faced the audience—someone turned up the houselights, and the crowd was on its feet now, scared and baffled—and tore away the Larkspur mask to reveal my Larkspur face.
“I’m here, now!” I roared. “The real Evan Larkspur! What you wanted to say to him, say to me!”
And they said it, the hawk-faced man and a half-dozen other agents strategically placed throughout the crowd and the two men in Shadow Tribunal uniforms standing over unconscious Kanalists at the houselight controls; almost in unison, they said, “You’re under arrest!”
Chapter Three
Darkness. They’d pasted something over my eyes. We hadn’t gone far—along a corridor, down some stairs. They must have set up a command room in the hotel’s basement. The other genuine Kanalists had been led somewhere else; I’d heard talk of “the vans.” The cream of the revolutionary movement, skimmed away. So the trap hadn’t been just for me. Perhaps not for me at all; perhaps I’d been a bonus. Either way, all my years of fear would now end in a few hours of pain.
A dubious tenor voice: “The real Larkspur? Would he just walk into it like that?”
Contentious baritone reply: “He’s not a total sucker. Look at this so-called Master’s robe he was wearing. Nothing ceremonial about it. The outside’s fractal silk—reflects less light than any other fabric. And it’s got vents in it, and heat exchangers beneath, to distort his infrared profile. If he’d had a chance to make the street, he would have vanished on us.”
The tenor, unconvinced: “He didn’t, though. He just walked into it. I think…V. is in for a disappointment.” It could have been “Vee,” a name, but somehow it sounded like an initial instead, a way of mentioning someone whose name was not to be spoken.
The baritone said only, “We’ll know in thirty minutes, one way or another.”
And so they would. It was almost a relief. Ten years now since I returned from deep space, from whatever the hell had happened on the Barbarossa. Ten years of living in fear, ten years on the run, all too aware of what would happen if anyone even suspected who I was. The Column would want to eliminate me as a political threat, a living legend of rebellion. And anyone, anyone at all might want to take my brain apart to find the location of the Barbarossa and its priceless data record of as-yet-unexploited planets. Kill the dangerous legend and steal his treasure, too.
The joke was that I had the data record on me—but it would be worthless even if found.
Because, like my own personal memories of the Barbarossa’s mysterious disaster, the data record and the ship’s log appended to it were warped, distorted, meaningless. I’d had the data retranscribed onto a ceramic nodule and fitted into a false bone to replace the last joint of my left ring finger. The smugglers who’d performed the operation had sworn that the cache would be scannerproof, but I’d never believed that the Shadow Tribunal, the most elite and powerful of secret police, would fail to find it. They had, though. Not that they didn’t have a better way to confirm my identity.
After the strip search and body scan, they’d taken a tissue sample. A tiny blade, a vampire tongue, had scraped the inside of my cheek. And now the field-issue gene-tester, tongue retracted, would be humming to itself as it tasted my cells, teased out the DNA molecules, and began to trace the long, long sequences of nucleic acids. Give it twenty minutes, and without touching me again, it would bleed my life away. Bad enough to be any conspirator against the Column—but even on a prison planet, there might be hope of escape. For Evan Larkspur there would only be torture, drugs, and when they failed, the brain probe’s voltage needles, lighting up memories like perfect little sensory holograms, one after another, until colors, sounds, textures, everything would fade but the stink of burning meat…
It’s possible to scare yourself out of anything, even resignation. I began to plan. You never know. Evan Larkspur had been believed dead for a century; who was to say that the Column’s new navy had kept his old Alignment Navy records all that time? Maybe the guards were just checking for genetic markers consistent with, say, Larkspur’s homeworld of Wayback—or looking to see if I could be disqualified, with a known identity. But they couldn’t have a record of every human born in the last century, on thousands of worlds.
So maybe, just maybe, they were about to draw a blank. It didn’t matter how small the chance was, I’d deserve whatever happened to me if I weren’t prepared to seize it when it came.
I’d simply been thrown off by the shock of confronting a fake Larkspur. It had been like something out of the trauma nightmares, one of the possibilities I could never quite dismiss. Suppose I am not the real Larkspur after all—suppose that is why I cannot remember exactly what happened to the Barbarossa?
In the fringe-world hospital ward where I first awoke in this century, they had often asked me who I was. And when I told them Larkspur, they had laughed and pointed at the bust of the famous Evan Larkspur in the corner of the room, sure that it was the source of my amnesiac delusion. After all, they said, the asylums are full of people who think they’re Larkspur, or the Consultant, or God.
But I’m the real one, that’s a given. So who had created the fake? The Pan-Kanalist leadership, for political purposes? Or the Shadow Tribunal, in order to bring all these Old Rite Kanalists together for exposure and capture?
Feep-feep. The sound of a communicator. The voice of one of my guards answering it. Muffled sounds from a r
eceiver, interrupted by the guard’s broken questions. The click of broken contact. Violent swearing.
“What gives?” asked the baritone guard.
“They’ve lost the others!”
“The subversives? You saying somebody hit the vans and rescued them?”
“No, you’re not going to believe this. Dannamore dropped them off at the local police station for holding. The locals signed them in at the front door and let them out the back!”
“What are you—”
“The fix was in. We forgot to have the Column warrant rubber-stamped by the Troudeserre judiciary—”
“Since when do we have to—”
“Since two weeks ago. One of the Consultant’s new ‘reforms.’ So our warrant was no good, and the desk officer—who’s gone missing, the whole thing was planned in advance—let the whole crew of suspects go before they’d been ID’d in any way. All the bastards have to do is throw away their costumes, and who the hell remembers what they look like? We’ll be lucky to pick up a single one of them now.”
Now the baritone swore, too. “So unless our party-crasher here turns out to be Larkspur, we’ve got nothing to show V.”
“That’s no good either. V. wanted the leader, fake or real, the one on Venezia who’s running the Kanalist show. He was too smart to show up, just sent a hologram. This clown is somebody else, I heard him yelling, he called their leader a fake—”
“Maybe their leader is a fake, maybe this is—”
The feep-feep of a new call interrupted him.
“Yes, Your Eminence…No, Eminence. Immediately, Eminence.” The tenor voice was quietly terrified. I didn’t have to ask the first initial of the person on the other end of the line. And wasn’t the Director of the Shadow Tribunal rumored to be known by a single initial?
