Infinite Day (22 page)

Without thinking Merral replied, “I believe we have.”

Azeras gave a shrug that seemed to concede bewilderment and walked away. Merral's claim was supported that night in an unexpected way. He had a dream of such vividness that when he awoke he could remember every detail. In his dream, he saw a pale gray spaceship plunging onward into a leaden darkness. But the darkness was not empty; it was full of terrible, flying things bearing wings and eyes and tentacles that seemed to press around the ship. Yet on the vessel stood a colossal figure as tall as the ship was deep, robed in gleaming white, who swung a mighty, glittering sword this way and that. At his untiring blows, the creatures fled.

The next morning Merral reported the vision to Luke. The chaplain merely nodded, opened a small notebook, and added a new tick to a list. He totaled them up.

“Nineteen,” he said with a lean smile.

“Nineteen
what
?”

“Nineteen separate reports of the same dream.” There was another smile. “Vero says the envoy is ‘riding shotgun,' whatever that means.”

Despite the alarms caused by the manifestations, both crew and soldiers kept busy at their appointed tasks. By the end of the second week there was such a sense of routine that the crew took to wandering around in T-shirts and shorts. After considering the matter, Merral allowed it but insisted that the soldiers stay in some form of uniform.

Merral, Lloyd, and Vero found time to open the containers that had been recovered from Langerstrand and look at what was inside. They found data folders, food items, medicines, and items of clothing. Some of the medical information confirmed that the ambassadors had been surgically modified humans, and Merral stared, utterly appalled, at diagrams indicating where the modifications had been made. There was also much that seemed to have belonged to Lezaroth: a pistol, a dress uniform complete with military ribbons, a cap, and even his armor suit. Although similar to the armor they had already found, this seemed to be of a finer workmanship. Yet as Merral looked through the contents of the containers, he found no clues to the man he pursued across space.

He sat staring at the material and pondering Lezaroth.
Where are the pictures of his family? Where is any diary or notebook? Where are there any details of his favorite music or his favorite paintings? Is this absence of information because he took it all with him or because this man has no deeper dimensions? Can it be that the Dominion has produced that ultimate monstrosity: the man who is just a warrior and nothing else?

Merral picked up the helmet and stared at it, seeing his own reflection in the visor.
How alien is this culture! Physically, we are all men, and there is little difference between him and me except some small-scale genetic modifications. Yet how vast is the gulf between what we really are!

Then pushing his meditations to one side, he walked to the large room that had been cleared as a training facility. It was full of the soldiers trying on armor. Merral looked at the jackets and saw that the curving emblems had all been overstamped by two deep scores at right angles.

The snake is crushed. It is good.

Merral got everyone's attention. “Now we learn to work and interact in this armor. We need to be able to use all that these suits offer without even thinking about it. It is not going to be easy.”

It wasn't.

Merral also kept on at learning Saratan but had to force himself to do so. It was not the difficulty of the task; it was not a hard language with its simple if rigid grammar, and many words he recognized as having an English or even an early Communal origin. What put him off were other things. For one, there seemed to be an excess of military terminology and metaphors so that in Saratan you always seemed to be talking about “crushing,” “destroying,” or “devastating.” For another, the language had an abundance of oaths and curses that invoked the powers; these he noted but refused to utter. He was also struck by a striking sexism; it took some time before he realized that to call any man a “woman” was to offer a humiliating insult.

He practiced his Saratan with Betafor and Azeras separately and both made helpful suggestions. Once Azeras frowned. “Merral, you speak far too politely. In a military context you must be deferential if you are addressing a superior or overbearing if you are addressing an inferior. You speak as if to friends.” And at another phrase, Azeras shook his head angrily. “No! There's too much . . . geniality in your voice. Make it more abrasive!”

His Saratan was corrected more analytically by Betafor. “The lower frequencies are missing,” she said. “Try to say the words more deeply.” She stared at him. “The human voice is a very inefficient mechanism for speaking.”

Far easier than learning the language of Sarata was acquiring the dress of a Dominion captain. Merral had two of Lezaroth's uniforms modified to fit him. Extending the need for authenticity to its limits, he took Lezaroth's pistol and practiced walking around with it at his belt in a swaggering manner that Azeras and Betafor assured him was appropriate for all Dominion captains. When he fired it on the range—it shot dense metal rounds at high speed—he found himself so impressed with its accuracy that he adopted it as his own weapon and handed the other pistol back to Lloyd.

One night, Vero commented on the pistol. “How does it feel to wear his gun?”

Merral lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling before he answered.

“Two things. It constantly reminds me of our goal—of the need to defeat Lezaroth.”

“And?”

“It worries me. I have taken on this man's weapon. Do I slowly take on other aspects of who he is? Do I metamorphose into the Assembly's Lezaroth?”

“It's a risk. But only if you let it happen. And knowing you, you won't.”

Merral said nothing.
I am less sure.

As the days passed, all the soldiers and crew acquired pastimes to keep themselves occupied. One soldier said to Merral, “It's my chance to read all those books I never got round to.” A drama team formed; Merral was astonished to find that Vero had even arranged for a small supply of theatrical makeup to be shipped on board. Others did jigsaws, claiming that the absence of color made them more challenging while another did life sketches in black and white. Slee's mural of accurate but sympathetic caricatures of the soldiers and crew expanded. Vero was drawn walking along with his snub nose so deep in an old book that he was clearly about to fall down a hole. Luke was drawn in engineer's overalls with a Bible poking out of one pocket and a multispanner set out of the other.

Merral, trying to take a break from endless management, weapons training, and learning Saratan, decided to spend some time on his castle tree simulation. He had hoped that in that electronic world there might be color, but a quick glance had shown there wasn't. Nevertheless, he decided that his artificial form of nature would be a definite improvement on the arid, metallic world of the
Star
. So he sat down in the room he shared with Vero and Lloyd and, with his aide keeping an eye open for manifestations, donned imaging glasses and entered the program. Not wishing to taunt himself with yet another world drained of color, he set the program to a date in early November.

He found himself in a landscape with a thin film of snow on frozen ground and the great tree towering up black against a leaden sky of flying heavy clouds. Merral reminded himself that even outside the ship it would have been an almost monochrome world. On the tree, the final remaining leaves were whirling away as the great boughs were lashed by the wind. He found that, given the enormous height of the tree, the gusts at the top were enough to snap off boughs, which collapsed and tumbled down, shattering others beneath them, so that a whole side of the tree could be damaged. After thought, he modified the highest branches so that it was only the tips rather than the whole bough that snapped off. Reruns of various wind speeds suggested that this gave rise to much less damage.

Eventually he emerged from his simulation and took off the glasses. Lloyd, sitting reading on the other side of the room, looked up.

“Enjoy that, sir?”

“Yes, Lloyd.”
How can I not enjoy such a world? A place where I face no weird and troubling evils, where I don't have to command men and women who expect me to get it right, and where I am in control.

“Anything happen here?”

Lloyd made a dismissive cluck and pointed to a paper bag in the corner. “Just one of them
things
. A sort of caterpillar. Kicked it into the bag in one.” He gestured with his foot.

“Did you enjoy that?”

Lloyd grinned. “Kind of. I'm thinking of inventing ghost slug golf.”

Merral began to worry about Vero. His friend spent his spare time working with the Library files he had brought and also with the data banks from the
Star
itself. He seemed to sleep little, and Merral sometimes awoke at night to see, on the other side of the room, a slight figure hunched over a dull gray screen of a diary.

“What have you found?” he asked him one morning.

Vero ran his fingers over his curly hair. “Everything. And nothing.” A look of intense frustration crossed his face. “I am slowly piecing together how the Freeborn and the Dominion came to be. I now understand them better.”

“And will that help us?”

There was a pause.

“My friend, I have faith it can.” But that was as far as he would go. Merral found himself somewhat ill at ease both about the answer and also Vero's increasingly obsessive air. But as he had more pressing and more tangible issues to worry about, he put aside his misgivings about Vero.

One particular cause for worry was Azeras. He was generally to be found on the bridge, where he and Laura had developed what was evidently a distant, if effective, relationship. Merral characterized him as a man always on the margin of things, somewhat aloof, frequently gloomy, always preoccupied. Several times, Merral had to repeat questions to Azeras before he got an answer.