Empery (4 page)

“Hello, Felithe,” said Chancellor Blythe Erickson as she crossed the greatroom toward him, her white silk caftan flowing gracefully with her strides. She locked fingers with him in the formal greeting that said “equal,” stepped close to brush her cheek against his in a gesture that amended it to “friend,“then turned away.

“Thank you for coming up tonight,” she said, recrossing the room and retrieving a glass half filled with ice and an amber liquid.

“Is there enough of that for two?”

She gestured at the bar. “You’re welcome to choice of the house, so long as you promise not to compromise your judgment. I need you at your best tonight.”

Berberon smiled. “Since alcohol works only on the higher brain functions, I am hardly in any danger.”

“You are immodest in your modesty.” Pausing, she stared through the bottom of her glass at the floor. “Felithe, I’m about to tell you some things you are not supposed to know, because I need to ask your opinion. Do you have any objection to my doing that?”

“No—except it may not be necessary. I find I know many things I am not supposed to know.”

“Does the catalog include something called Triad?”

“A rather large entry, I am embarrassed to admit.”

Erickson shook her head and smiled wryly. “I might have expected it. You always know things that no one else does.”

He bowed in mock ceremony. “One of the few and decidedly minor compensations for having been here thirty-five years.”

With her drink replenished and his drawn fresh, they settled in the viewpit. The Chancellor settled gracefully on the padded floor near the center window, knees together and bare feet tucked beneath her. Berberon sat uncomfortably cross-legged opposite her.

“How can I help you, Blythe?”

“I believe that Wells is planning to bring the Triad proposal before the Committee tomorrow.”

That rumor was not meant for your ears, Berberon thought. Someone has been indiscreet. “I would not be surprised if that were true,” he said, nodding.

“Do you know how the vote will go?”

“How can I say, Madame Chancellor? I am only an Observer, not a Director. I cannot even vote myself.”

“Now you dissemble too much. Surely you have a sense of their leanings—”

“No better or worse than your own.” He hesitated, then added, “I must tell you that when it happens, tomorrow or another day, I will myself speak in favor.”

“Felithe! Why?”

He shrugged at her expression of dismay. “You know that Wells has many friends, friends who are in a position to cause the Terran Council a great deal of grief.”

“It seemed to me that the Nines have been quiet lately. Are they still a problem?”

“The Nines will be a problem until they grow up or die off,” Berberon said with uncommon depth of feeling. “They are arrogant, self-important elitists who’ve decided they will only tolerate sharing Earth with their inferiors if they themselves are in charge.” Checking his outburst, he smiled sheepishly. “Forgive me. You did not ask me here to listen to me carry on about matters that are outside your concern.”

“Yet it seems that your problems with the Nines affect us here.”

“They affect my public posture only. I cast no vote in Committee. It’s your Directors who will decide whether Wells gets what he is asking for, and you after them.”

“I’d hoped to enlist you to speak against him. Or at least to offer him no support.”

Berberon lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness.“How can I? My charge is to befriend him, to assist him in obtaining what he wants. Thus the Council hopes to buy off the Nines and focus their attention elsewhere. And there are other considerations as well. Thirty percent of Earth’s industrial product is related to Defense expenditures. Wells’s buildup has helped us considerably.”

“So to keep the money flowing and the workers busy, you would give a man who feels as Wells does that kind of power—”

“Alone he is not a threat to our interests,” Berberon said softly. “Collectively the Nines are.”

Erickson pressed her body back into the cushions and stared out the window, as though seeking to withdraw from him. “I invited Felithe Berberon to my apartment, but it seems I got the Terran Observer to the Committee instead. Can you never speak for yourself?”

Sighing, Berberon drained his glass and set it aside. “My own thoughts are irrelevant. I’ve survived here this long because I obediently advocate what I am told to advocate.”

“Even when you disagree?”

Berberon cocked an eyebrow and shrugged. “If my wisdom were better thought of, I would be
on
the World Council, not representing it.”

“Felithe, please—am I wrong to mistrust Wells? To want this weapon never to come into existence?” There was honest anguish in her voice.

It was Berberon’s turn to stare out the window as he carefully composed an answer. “I am convinced that Wells is sincerely interested in the security of the Unified Worlds. If I may revive .an archaic word, he is a patriot. That is both his strength and his weakness. As for Triad—perhaps it is my age that makes me so fearless. I hope the Mizari are gone, extinct thousands of years ago. But if they are not, I would like to know that we will fare better against them the second time.”

“Then your own beliefs are not so far from official policy as you might have wanted me to think.“Berberon’s smile was rueful. “In this instance, perhaps not, after all.”

Eyes downcast, Blythe drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “I suppose I’ve known this has been coming since he joined the Committee.” She raised her head and met Berberon’s gaze. “Thank you for coming by, Ambassador. You can see yourself out?”

She seemed lonely; perhaps that was inevitable for one in her position. If he were a younger man, or a different kind of man, he might have stayed and tried to fill that need. But it was not the kind of thing Felithe Berberon did, not the kind of relationship he formed. He had learned that lesson decades ago: that as expediency demanded, he could find himself tomorrow lining up against a friend made today. Knowing that, he had kept his distance and been rewarded for his discipline. Through the years Chancellors and Directors alike came and went, while Berberon carried on just the same, his tenure unprecedented and unequalled.

But as he left the executive complex, a part of him wondered against his will whether he knew how to stop playing the role in which he had submerged himself for so long, and whether he would have had what Erickson needed within him to give.

“Archive,” Erickson said softly, curled up alone in the viewpit of her darkened apartment.

“Ready,” answered the netlink.

“Terran history. Nines. Statement of purpose. Exclude references previously accessed. Primary sources if available.”

“No contemporary primary sources available. I have twenty-four speeches by founder Eric Lange from his campaign for supervisor of Sudamerica District 5.”

“Oldest entry. Context.”

“Year 610 A.R. A public rally in Montevideo, Sudamerica. Estimated attendance, six thousand. Source of reference, Earthnet polinews archive.”

“Show me,” Erickson said, settling back firmly against the cushions.

The greatroom lights dimmed further, and a flatscreen video element in the viewpit’s broad window came to life.“There were warnings,” the image of Eric Lange said to the overflow crowd in the seedy public hall. “William Clifford, a man who would be here tonight had he not lived nearly a thousand years ago, a man who was in every way one of us, saw what was coining.

“ ‘A race which is fixed, persistent in form, unable to change,’ he said, ‘is surely in peril of extinction. It is quite possible for conventional rules and habits to get such power that progress is impossible, and the race is fit only for death. In the face of such a danger, it is not right to be proper!’

“Clifford was right—but no one listened. We went on taxing the winners so that losers could be made equal. We went on legitimizing the claims of the have-nots and would-nots and could-nots. We went on elevating mediocrity. And we taught our children that that was what it meant to be civilized.”

There was a light in Lange’s eyes that seemed to burn through Erickson’s objective remove, and his voice had the compelling power of honest conviction. A powerful speaker, yes, but no demagogue, she thought. Every word spoken from the heart, every idea the product of introspection—

“They will ask us what we stand for,” Lange said. “We will tell them. We believe in survival.” He was cheered. “They will ask us what we want. We will tell them. We want the freedom to grow.” The cheers resounded.

“They will ask us what we offer. We will tell them. We offer change—change for the better if we can, but if not, then change for its own sake. We have a right to live in interesting times. We have a right to struggle, and if we are worthy, to greatness.”

The. audience told him, with six thousand massed voices, that they agreed. Lange smiled an uncomfortable, embarrassed smile and waited for them to quiet.

“They will ask us our name,” he began again softly. “And we will tell them. We are the not-average. We are the non-followers.” As he continued, his voice rose, and the sound of voices crying “Yes” rose with it to reach a roar. “We are the un-mediocre. We are the movers. We are the dreamers. We are the builders and planners. We mastered fire. We invented writing. And we colonized the stars. We are the Nines. We are the Nines. And we will not be denied our birthright.”

The images played in Erickson’s mind long after she closed the archive file and shut off the netlink. It was still “tonight” for Lange, still the pinnacle of his triumph. There was no hint there of what would come just three months later.

How would it be different if you hadn’t been killed, if those who reacted to your message with fear instead of cheers hadn’t dragged you from your house and silenced you?
she wondered.
At the very least the Nines wouldn’t have felt the need to go underground, and we would have known who we were fighting
.

Would you have approved of them as they are now? Would you have embraced the same goals? I hear the origins of their agenda in your words—it’s all there. But is what they want what you wanted? I believe you truly meant to lift us up, but what they do promises to drag us down—

Tipping back his head, Wells drained the tall glass of ice water, then refilled it and drank half. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he noted the clock and was surprised to see that it read 20:40.

Returning to his seat, Wells viewed one last time the seven-and-a-half-minute unnarrated clip of the Ba’ar Tell FFI exercise. The first edit had been too slick, too theatrical—too patently intended to end all debate over the Defender’s effectiveness. This one, the third, was better: the overview of the Defender system and strategy he had ordered added at the beginning made everything that followed more effective.

“Save,” Wells said. “File to Wells, Defense Archives, Committee Chamber. Level One voice-lock.”

“Done,” replied the terminal.

Now—what else needs my attention before I leave?
He ran through a mental list as precise and complete as if it had been written down and came up with only one item: Farlad’s new Thackery document.
I’ll give it ten minutes
, Wells thought.
That probably will be enough
.

But first he touched the com key. “Ronina.”

The terminal needed no more guidance than that. On its own it quickly sought out her com address from his directory and placed the call. When she came on, her voice contained a gratifying note of surprise and pleasure. “Mack—how nice. I’ve been hoping you hadn’t crossed me off your list.”

That was one of Ronina’s few unattractive features—her propensity for prompting him for reassurance, for setting him up to offer some verbal endorsement of her status. As he usually did, he ignored the cue. “I’ll be done here in a little while—”

“I’ll take that as an invitation,” she purred. “Do you want to come here or should I go up to your apartment?”

“Mine, I think.”

“I’ll be waiting for you—and thinking wicked thoughts.”

Then, clearing the screen of his notes for the next day’s presentation, Wells called up his private files, an act that required voice-password and retinal identification. There was a brief pause as the decryptor failed to keep pace with the system’s file retrieval speed, and then the menu popped up on the screen.

The file was named, unambiguously, MERRITT THACKERY. Shortly after becoming Director of Defense, Wells had begun a search of Service records for any and all anecdotal accounts by Thackery of his encounter with the D’shanna he called Gabriel and of what Thackery saw while on the spindle.

There turned out to be hundreds of such documents. It was impossible to believe that anyone anywhere had ever been more intensively interviewed and debriefed than had Thackery after his return from the spindle. There were literally thou sands of hours of interviews: normal, under time-expansion hypnosis, and using endorphin memory-enhancement therapy.

Had Service physicians known how to dissect Thackery’s brain and suck out the memories directly, Wells did not think they would have hesitated to do so.

The documents told Wells what every schoolchild knew, and little more. Then in the drive core of the shattered Survey ship
Dove
, Gabriel had reached out from the spindle and taken Thackery back with him across the barrier. That from the vantage of the energy matrix of the spindle, Gabriel showed Thackery the echoes of the ice-age Earth-based civilization that had founded the heretofore inexplicable human colonies.

Traveling downtime on the spindle, Thackery witnessed the Mizari’s savage attack on the Weichsel civilization. He learned the danger that awaited in the Ursa Major cluster, and he brought that warning back to the matter-matrix, once thought the only reality. And in doing so he had become the best-known personage in human history. Thackery’s miraculous translocation persuaded the skeptics, as it had the Survey brass, that the story he told was not fantasy, however fantastic.

But the things that Wells wanted most to find, even needed to find, simply were not there. There were no details about the Mizari, no glimpse of their world or even themselves, no hint of what moved them or, even more importantly, what their vulnerabilities might be. Not trusting the task to anyone else, Wells had plowed his way through more than two thirds of the documents in a search for even a handful of clues about the Mizari.