Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (143 page)

Presently, Eshaz felt fully restored, and grateful to his symbiotic companion. But he was left with a certainty that troubled him above all others.

Noah had been right. There really
was
a great and towering danger out there—more than any of the galactic races had ever encountered before—and to complicate the situation even more, no one could identify it.

Chapter Forty-Three

In this universe of wondrous possibilities, certain constants exist, and all of them are linked to the symbiosis of science and religion. These two divisions of the Ultimate Truth are—in the basic analysis—one and the same, and their respective subparts contribute to the whole. Are certain acts morally wrong and repugnant to civilization? In pre-Scienscroll times, many purported scientists claimed that there were no immoral acts, and that moral templates were no more than artificial constructs. When at long last humanity saw the light, such views were righteously tossed into the dustbins of history.

—
Scienscroll
, 1 Eth 77–78

With Princess Meghina right behind him, Noah negotiated a spiral, rock stairway that led down to the ancient dungeons of the palace. Bright lights illuminated the way, so that they could walk more safely on the uneven, stained surface—stairs that had been worn down in places by the passage of many feet. It was early morning.

“As you know, it was pretty dark down here before,” he said, “so we added more lighting.”

“My palace has a long history,” she said, “much of it unsavory. I’m afraid there were torture chambers down here centuries ago.”

“We found some evidence of that. No machines, but there were still shackles on the walls.”

Noah pushed open a heavy iron door, revealing a corridor lined with glowing orange, electronic containment cells. His officers had converted this to a military gaol, always necessary to confine fighters and a limited number of others that the forces encountered who needed to be taken into custody. And, though it was not large or crowded with prisoners today, it became, nonetheless, quite noisy as they approached a cell on the far end.

“Finally!” the Salducian diplomat shouted as he jumped up from a cot. His normally impeccable gray suit was wrinkled and soiled, and at the knees of some of his numerous legs the fabric was torn and bloody, with visible wounds. Glaring through the containment field at Noah, he then shifted his gaze to the Princess. At that point his demeanor changed, and in a pleasant tone he said to her, “Thank you for coming to get me out. I have spent a most uncomfortable night.”

“I’m not here for that,” she said.

“What?” Confusion moved across Kobi Akar’s oblong face. His crab-pincer hands flexed back and forth behind the containment field, as if looking for something to grab onto and rip apart. Looking at Noah, he asked, “Are you attempting to assert military jurisdiction over me?”

“No,” Noah said. “Your confinement is presently military, since that offers the best security. However, the jurisdiction is civilian. As soon as possible, you will be transferred to Canopan authorities.”

“In the midst of a war? What outrage is this? I want a lawyer!”

“You will have access to lawyers on Canopa,” Noah said.

“This is outrageous!”

“It is the law,” Noah said. “A serious charge has been placed against you.”

In an indignant tone, the Salducian said, “One of the guards mentioned something about sex with a minor girl. It’s a complete lie!”

“You will have your opportunity to prove that. Reportedly it occurred on the orbital gambling casino, over Canopa.”

“It’s all a monstrous fabrication, designed to extort payment out of me. However, just for the sake of argument, I ask you: How can there be any Canopan civilian jurisdiction over an orbiter that is in space? That falls under intergalactic law, not planetary law.”

“We don’t know the particulars,” Meghina said, “only that the Office of the Doge has ordered you to Canopa.”

“It’s all a waste of time, you know,” Akar said. He scuttled backward, and sagged wearily onto the cot. “Whatever the jurisdiction, I have diplomatic immunity.”

“And the courts will determine if you flaunted it,” Noah said.

“Flaunted? In this matter, that is not a legal term. Obviously, I know the law and you don’t.”

“I’m not here to debate you.”

“I asked Noah to bring me to check on your physical condition,” the Princess said. “Are you being fed well, Mr. Akar? Have you received treatment for your injuries?” She looked down at his bloodied legs that draped over the side of the cot.

“The food is unfit for roachrats,” he replied. “And as for my injuries, that is an additional matter. My lawyers will prefer charges for mistreatment of a prisoner.”

“I viewed the surveillance file on you,” Noah said. “You injured yourself when you fell on the stairs.”

“I was pushed!”

“That isn’t what the evidence shows.”

“I shall send you better food and a doctor,” Meghina said, stiffly. Then, without another word, she turned and left, with Noah behind her.

“What are they going to do?” Akar shouted after them, “Give me a life sentence?” He cackled, delighted at his own dark humor.

“That is not up to us,” Noah said, over his shoulder. “We are only holding you for other authorities.”

“I have a long list of grievances!” Akar shouted after them. “You’ll both hear from my lawyers!”

“On that, at least, I believe you,” Noah yelled back, as he and Meghina went through the heavy iron door.

“What’s that supposed to mean?’

In response, Noah slammed the door shut.

“A charming man, but I never entirely trusted him,” Meghina said. “That doesn’t mean he’s guilty, though.”

Noah couldn’t help but agree, though soon—after completing the transfer to Canopa—the matter would be out of his hands.

* * * * *

Sometimes, Noah dreaded going to sleep. In his military duties, he spent long hours attending to important tasks, so by the end of each day he invariably felt tired enough to drift off. But so many problems kept churning through his mind that he found it difficult to leave them unresolved. So much seemed beyond his ability to fix or even to understand. At times, he wished he knew less than he did, or at least that he had been exposed to less.

The mysteries of Timeweb were at the very top of his list.

It awed him to think of the incredible galactic web that connected everything in a manner that most galactic races could not detect, a structure that had existed for millions and millions of years. During all of that time, it had been strong enough to hold everything together, but now, after so much abuse and neglect, it was falling apart. Reports from the Tulyan caretaker teams indicated some progress in completing repairs, and a number of the most heavily damaged areas had been improved. But there were also ongoing reports of new timeholes needing attention and entire galactic sectors in peril, so the Tulyan Elders needed to constantly adjust their priorities and plans.

As First Elder Kre’n had said, it was like the triage method of assessing the injuries of soldiers on a vast galactic battlefield, except in this case Timeweb was a single entity, with many widespread wounds.

Humankind is a single organism
, Noah thought, as he made his way to his private quarters in the keep.
In fact, all races are a single organism. All races are linked to Timeweb.

He felt his thoughts stretching beyond prior levels of understanding or connection.

Suddenly, in the corridor he dropped to his knees, and a green darkness pervaded his consciousness. In the background, he heard guards asking if he was all right.

Noah was conscious of remaining on his knees, and of people all around him. Some of them touched him, and he heard their distant voices asking if they should help him to lie down. Someone summoned a doctor, and Noah wondered if it would be the same doctor that would attend to the Salducian. An odd, throwaway thought that intruded on others of much more importance.

Priorities
, he thought. Life was about assigning priorities, and acting upon them. He wasn’t sure if he had heard that somewhere, or if he had figured it out himself. Another throwaway thought.

Then, with all of the commotion around him, Noah became an island unto himself, and voices drifted away around him. He recalled the horrible death of his sister, the way she aged too rapidly and died looking like a haggard old woman, and probably in terrible pain. Certainly, she suffered from a horrendous anguish of the soul. Noah thought back to the last time he saw her, when she stabbed him with a dermex needle, claiming it contained her own tainted blood. Even though doctors subsequently assured him that she had not infected him—and Noah seemed to have his own brand of immortality—he still worried about it occasionally.

So much information to discard. So many details that only clogged his mind and made it work inefficiently, details that intruded like guerrilla fighters and then retreated, only to irritate him over and over again. Concerning Francella, he didn’t want to think about her bad side, though that was almost all he’d ever seen of her. Instead, he tried to remember the few comparatively pleasant times they had shared (mostly as children), occasions when they almost seemed like normal siblings.

My life has been anything but normal
, he thought.
And hers, in its own horrific way, was far from normal as well
.

The Human condition seemed to cover a broad range of purported normalcy. But he realized that at its very core each Human relationship contained an inevitable element of dysfunction, and that people—the optimistic types—tried to put a positive cast on problems, making them seem less significant than they actually were.

Noah had always tried to be an optimist himself, even when the obstacles against that state of mind seemed insurmountable. Now, more than ever in his lifetime, and he was quite certain—more than ever in the history of the galaxy—the obstacles were greater than ever.

Like a great flood waiting to break through holes in a dike, Chaos threatened to inundate everything in the known galaxy, ruining eons of cosmic evolution, changing everything for the worse. The Tulyans were like little Dutch boys running around putting their fingers in the holes. But there seemed to be many more timeholes than there were caretakers to fix them.

He felt the dark seepage of pessimism into his awareness, and fought to push it back.

At the moment, he sensed someone carrying him, but that part didn’t matter. He cried out, and felt the flood of an abrupt vision that took over his consciousness. Suddenly, he found himself thinking with Francella’s mind and seeing through her eyes. Startling! But fascinating. He didn’t fight the sensations. It didn’t seem like one of the doors to Timeweb; it seemed like something else.…

It was a gloomy, rainy day on Canopa, and Francella was at CorpOne headquarters with their father, Prince Saito Watanabe.

“You know,” the old man said as they stood by the rain-swept window, “I might have been wrong all my life about industrial pollution and waste, so maybe I should change after all, as Noah has been preaching to me—even if it means dismantling every business operation my company has. Maybe I should turn operation of the company over to your brother and let him clean things up from the inside.”

“He can only destroy CorpOne!” she shouted back, her voice cracking. “Noah has never cared about this company or this family! How can you say such a thing?”

“You will accept whatever I decide,” the old merchant prince said. “If I have been wrong in the past, I must make amends.” He looked at her with rheumy old eyes. “And you must makes amends, too. For a long time, I have noticed how you never reach out to Noah, never seem capable of seeing anything good about him. Why is that? I never wanted the two of you to grow so far apart.”

He extended a hand to touch her shoulder affectionately, but she pushed it away.

They argued for awhile, father and daughter, with far more than the normal associated emotions. Finally Francella went away by herself, to her own island of twisted consciousness. She felt extremely upset at what the old tycoon had said to her. In her office her thoughts went wild, and she smashed things around her.

It was a turning point in her life. Always before, she had imagined doing terrible things, even worse than the financial indiscretions she had long committed against her company and her family. Now, for the first time, she actively plotted to kill her father and blame it on Noah.

As the images faded and Noah found himself in his own apartment with a doctor tending to him, he was left wondering if he had experienced an accurate vision of her thoughts, something transmitted by her blood—which she had injected so violently into his bloodstream. They had been born fraternal twins, and perhaps the injection had intensified a paranormal connection they’d already had.

“He’s breathing hard,” the doctor said.

Through bleary eyes, Noah saw an elderly man with white hair. Noah tried to calm his own pulse, but became conscious of it roaring in his ears as blood pumped wildly through his veins.

Could their father’s death really have occurred the way he had just envisioned it? Noah was stunned, but somehow it all seemed to fit.

He felt medications taking effect, and heard the voices drift away again, but this time he blacked out.

Chapter Forty-Four

Each breath we attempt to take is an adventure into the unknown.

—Ancient saying

So much had happened, and of such grave and far-reaching significance, that Princess Meghina had not had time to grieve for her lost dagg, Orga, or for the many citizens of Siriki who had died in the HibAdu onslaught. Many had been her friends and associates. Sadly, she had to face the fact that portions of her past were gone, and irretrievable. Even her once-magnificent Golden Palace was looking worn and tired, from its conversion into a military headquarters for the Liberator forces.

She didn’t object to the use of her opulent home for that noble purpose, so her sadness was tempered by the stark realities that faced everyone now. There were two grave threats—the HibAdus, and the declining infrastructure of the galaxy. She’d even heard rumors that the Tulyans and Noah thought there might be yet another great peril “out there” somewhere, but whenever she had asked any of them about it, she had received only vague responses. Even Noah, who had a reputation for being concise and direct, had evaded her question. She came away with the feeling that the people around her were bordering on paranoia, and perhaps a quiet hysteria, constantly feeling that terrible things were about to happen.