Orion Shall Rise (34 page)

Plik stared around him, at the sleek cabin, gun posts, windows full of sky but equipped with steel shutters. His gaze went back to the abnormal form beside him, and thence to Terai. Both Maurai had donned white uniforms that stood forth against his own shirt and trousers (faded, patched, darned) like snow against fallen leaves. ‘This must be a large matter,’ he said slowly.

Wairoa’s tone became stern. ‘It is.’

Terai looked around again. ‘Y’know, Plik,’ he drawled, ‘it should be an adventure for you. See a bit of the world, hey?’

The singer coughed out a laugh of sorts. ‘Shrewd! … Well, we can talk, at least.’ He rubbed bloodshot eyes. ‘First, what about a drink, followed by breakfast?’

Wairoa nodded, unbuckled, and went aft to a cabinet. He brought back a flask of whiskey at which Plik snatched, before he returned to start heating food and making coffee on a hotplate. Terai leveled the jet off at ten kilometers and put it on autopilot.
It hissed along at close to the speed of sound.

He moved to seat himself across the aisle from Plik, lean over toward the passenger, and rumble, ‘We haven’t much time. We need your help fast, or it’s no good, none of it. Can we start talking at once?’

‘Aaah!’ Plik’s Adam’s apple, which had bobbed an impressive number of times, came to rest as he lowered the flask. ‘Yes, I feel better already. But you owe me an explanation, you realize. Suppose you begin.’

Terai brought forth pipe and tobacco pouch. He kept his look upon them while they occupied his hands and he said awkwardly: ‘We know you guided Talence Iern Ferlay aboard the Northwestern ship, and take for granted he’s being flown to what he thinks
is
refuge. Understand, we’re sure he’s quite innocent in this ugly business. We mean him no harm, and in fact we can offer him asylum ourselves – honest asylum. What made us
seize
you was the hope you can give us clues to exactly where he’s headed, so we can overhaul him and the rest before it’s too late.’

Too late for what?’

‘I wish I didn’t have to say this. That plane
is
delivering the stuff for a new War of Judgment.’

Plik almost dropped the bottle. Terai moved his head up and down, up and down. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘nuclear explosives.’

He described the evidence in harsh words. ‘Iern Ferlay must simply have happened along,’ he finished. ‘I daresay Mikli took him back because he might be a useful pawn. Besides, Mikli lives for troublemaking – stirring up the anthill, he called it once when we talked. Do you know, the rest of his gang may be sincere, but I believe Mikli Karst
is
mad. That he wants to put the torch to the world so he can see it burn.’

‘Nuclear explosives,’ Plik whispered. ‘My feeling was truer than I knew.’

‘What?’

‘Archetypes,’ said Plik wildly. ‘The demons are stirring against the gods. But who are the demons and who the gods?’

He took a hefty swig before he twisted around to peer at Wairoa. ‘Who
are you?’
he called.

Wairoa did not look up from his work. ‘I have given you my name,’ he said.

‘What are you, then? The same question, of course.’ Plik became
owlish. ‘I… do not… wish to give gratuitous insult. But you are a strange one, I have wondered about you before, and now I need to know somewhat.’ He looked at Terai. ‘I can’t agree to help you, whatever my help may be, until I understand what myth we are in – can I?’

Well, if he’s a lunatic too, I think he’s harmless, and best we humor him.
Terai explained the genetic mosaic.

Plik’s face stiffened. ‘Thanks,’ he said in no friendly voice. That gives me a better idea of why the Gaeans regard you Maurai as the ultimate enemy.’

‘Hunh?’ replied Terai, astonished. ‘Are you a Gaean?’

‘No, no. I am a Christian; a Nicene Christian – laughably archaic, no? Yet God has always allowed much strangeness to go about in the world, and reveals Himself in ways that are often terrible. I referred to your so coldly making free with life.’

Wairoa brought a tray whereon stood a plate of ham, eggs, and buttered toast, a glass of tomato juice, and a mug of coffee. ‘You have not asked me whether I object to existence,’ he clipped.

Plik looked long at him, while Wairoa arranged the tray in its rack and after he had sat down again. ‘I think you may be the loneliest human creature on Earth,’ the Angleyman murmured finally, ‘but you control yourself like a steel spring.’

Wairoa started the least bit, and almost spoke.

‘Your special senses and abilities –’ Plik went on. ‘Yes, it is something to be the great Watchman. And at the end of the world, you can let that coiled spring fly free.’

Terai lost patience. ‘What in Nan’s name are you blithering about?’ he exclaimed. ‘See here, you, the power to smash several cities
is
escaping westward. We need your cooperation to stop that, and by Tanaroa, we’ll have it. You are not going to slip into a drunken stupor till we’ve gotten your information out of you!’

At once he regretted his bullying note. The relief was enormous when Plik nodded vigorously and said, ‘Oh, you shall have it, whatever it is and whatever it may be worth. I’ve read my history books. Should I want Vineleaf screaming among ruins, the skin burned off her and her eyeballs melted? Only let me feed first.’ He gave hearty attention to his tray.

The dread that lay in the bones of every Maurai crawled out of Terai’s and into his flesh. ‘How can you say something like that,’ he mumbled, ‘and then sit and eat like that?’

Plik engulfed a forkful of ham. His answer was quasi-cheerful: ‘Why, I am a poet of sorts, and horror is the proper business of poets.’

After a conventional interrogation, the interplay between him and Wairoa became an event which Terai could only watch in awe and incomprehension, with chest aching from held breath and strained muscles, while the aircraft speared westward. Later Wairoa said it had been unique in his own experience. He had never before worked with anyone like Plik, nor did he imagine he ever would again.

The two of them felt their way forward through nuance after nuance. There was hypnosis, to bring out buried memories, but there also came to be a kind of mutual trance, wherein a silence might have as much meaning as a sentence, and the words gave little to listening Terai. Subliminal whispers and shifts of expression (and posture, odor, what else?) must likewise have passed back and forth, as Plik lay on a pad in the aisle and Wairoa hunkered above him.

–‘“Krasnaya,
”
he guessed?’

‘Mikli’sface, his body – That guess was right.’

–‘Mikli was amused?’

‘
Yes, to me he felt somehow, creepily amused by all this. –

In the end, after the better part of an hour, Plik rose, shuddered, got back in his scat and groped for his bottle. Wairoa settled down cross-legged in the aisle for a time before he too stood up, sought Terai, and said, expressionless:

They intend to refuel in Krasnaya. It
is
reasonably close to being on a direct route to the northern tier of the Union, where secret activities can be most readily carried out; and they have no reason to suppose we have reason to pursue them. Besides, Mikli was making snap decisions, including the decision to go along himself. It’s his way. I’ve gained a number of clues to his character which may prove useful. But they aren’t immediately relevant. As for his precise destination, I have considered the airfields in Krasnaya and narrowed down the possibilities to a fairly small territorial range. Give me a map.’

Terai did not pause to marvel at the encyclopedic mind which had so incidentally revealed itself. He just obeyed. Wairoa pointed to an area not far north of the greatest of the Great Lakes. ‘Air traffic
is slight over that region; it’s mostly wilderness. Make for it, use radar when you have approached, and the chances appear good that we can detect them and intercept them well ahead of whatever goal they have.’

‘Lesu Haristi –’ Terai breathed.

‘If you have no further need of me, I would like to rest awhile,’ Wairoa said. He withdrew to the rear of the passenger section, settled down, and did not sleep but… meditated?

3

While the Captain’s office was not large, it was, above every place else in Skyholm, tradition-hallowed. No photograph of those who formerly occupied it had ever been replaced on the bulkheads, though time had turned the oldest nearly faceless. Beneath that of Charles Talence and directly above the desk hung, framed, the original copy of the Declaration of Tours, signed by him and the entire Ancestral crew – a seed from which the Domain would grow.
(‘We pledge ourselves to more than a rebuilding of what the material world has lost. It is to the causes of peace, order, justice, and ultimate reunion that we dedicate our lives and this instrumentality whose warders we have become.…
’) The desk itself was a gift from High Midi when that realm joined; glass protected the ivory inlays on its top, but five centuries of use had left their scuffs and scars on oak panels. A modern console – radiophone, video screen, computer terminal, printer, et cetera, et cetera – was the wellspring and channel of information, but on a shelf beside it stood books that had risen with the Thirty. None but scholars could now read that French Bible, the novels by Jane Austen and Castelo Branco, comedies of Holberg, poems of Villon and Goethe, but they were the last such relics that had not crumbled away. The wool carpet covering the deck in subdued colors was no antique, but it did express the gratitude of Devon in Angleylann after Skyholm had blasted a pirate fleet a generation ago. Hundreds of years earlier, a Captain had caused to be engraved above the outer door the words
We Serve.

Seated in a chair that threatened to buckle under his weight, Mattas Olvera was like a boot kicked through a museum case. He grunted, snorted, belched, scratched his armpits and bulging belly. Fleas hopped in his whiskers and greasy robe. His cigar filled the
room with stench. Behind the desk, Jovain must keep insisting to himself that this new arrival was his ucheny, come to advise him on matters of doctrine, and that perhaps the Captaincy had indeed shriveled to a museum exhibit and the time was overpast to give it fresh life.

‘I’m no politician,’ Mattas gobbled. ‘The fine details of wheedling and diddling aren’t for me, except where it comes to getting at a juicy young wench, haw-aw-aw! But I do understand you can’t press forward too fast, oh, yes.’ He wagged a finger. The nail was blackrimmed. ‘However, boy, there’s such a thing as moving too slowly, also. Right now most people will go along with you, because they don’t know any clear reason not to. They’ve families to worry about, positions, possessions, their own sweet necks; they hope if they obey, they’ll be let continue living as usual. That includes the opposition. Don’t
give
it a chance to harden.’

‘I know.’Jovain suppressed his irritation.

‘What are you doing, then?’

‘The hunt is out for Iern Ferlay, and Faylis
is
helping break down his reputation among the populace, reveal him for the puffball he is.’
Her condition was that I guarantee his safety and freedom. Well, yes, but I can’t control events like a puppeteer, can I?
‘I’m in daily conference with Seniors and other leaders who incline toward me for their different reasons – Gaeanity pacifism, social progress’ – Jovain sketched a smile – ‘or, for that matter, restoration of social virtue.’

‘Nor incompatible, those. I never claimed to be a good example.’ Mattas spread his arms wide. ‘Gaea is in every aspect of what we are. Go ahead, denounce the latter-day decadence, call for the purity of old. If it turns ’em toward Gaea, it’s right.’

‘You know about my Terran Guard,’ Jovain continued. ‘It’s just a nucleus, of course. But as it grows, it will give us every reason to proceed with the disarming of the Aerogens and the various states. More efficient, more controllable, therefore less provocative to foreign countries.’
And obedient not to any homeland lord, but directly to the Captain.
‘The Espaynians are ready to cooperate.’

The day before, Yago Dyas Garsaya had sat in that very chair opposite the desk and discussed that very subject.

‘Yes, Your Dignity, my government is prepared for a certain amount of humiliation,’ he said. ‘Was that not the plan? You
justify your actions by a threat from my country. We apologize for not having had better curbs on our extremists. We can swallow that much pride for the sake of the larger purpose.’ His palms made a gesture that looked negligent but, Jovain knew, was studied. ‘After all, every informed person is aware that our regime is not yet totally settled into every part of its territory; and as for the Domain public, the admission makes us more human, less sinister. Both governments pledge to work together for a lasting peace. Reduction of armaments is an early step.’

‘Can the Zheneral actually afford that?’ asked Jovain. He had been over this ground before, but there was so much to keep in mind, and everything so damnably fluid –

‘Oh, yes, if it is genuinely mutual,’ said the Zheneral’s envoy. ‘What real menace do you and we face except each other?’

‘Well, eastern Uropa is in ferment,’ Jovain must say.

‘Allied, we can keep those tribes polite, with minimal force. The Maurai have shown us how.’ The Espaynian paused to choose words.
‘They
are a long way off, Your Dignity, like the Northwest Union, to name our two most important rivals. We need not worry seriously about either in the near future.’

‘I am not so sure,’ Jovain answered, remembering a fragmentary report he had gotten this morning. Two aircraft headed west, one of them launched in sly defiance of the sovereignty now inherent in him, and one blatantly – He should summon Mikli Karst, by the code that the outland agent had given him, and require a statement. But a thousand pieces of business were clamoring at him, and he didn’t even have a proper staff organized.

‘Maybe,’ the delegate conceded. ‘Doesn’t that make solidarity of our two countries the more urgent?’ He smiled. ‘A paradox, that in order to strengthen ourselves against the misguided, we begin by cutting back our armed forces, no? But so the situation is.’