The Thrones of Kronos (10 page)

Omilov said quickly, “Kemal—”

“The Clouds are occupied by Dol’jhar, and the planet is
fine, though no one is permitted to land or leave. He won’t trust Rifters there
after our sabotage was blamed on them, but he won’t get anything out of us for
a long time.” She stood up and took Omilov’s arm. “If you’ve changed your mind
about the Gallery, then let’s stroll among the roses, and you tell me a little
about this Telos-damned Suneater.”

It was two hours later when he finally reached the
Cloisters. Though he was not a religious man, he liked the Cloisters for its
sense of peace and timeless otherness. A trace of fragrant incense wove itself
among the scents of rare blooms. In the distance he heard the rise and fall of
voices in a plaintive chant that evoked millennia of human experience.

When he stepped onto the terrace around which the residence
portion of the Cloisters was built, he found the High Phanist waiting. Although
Omilov had begun their association by distrusting her, he now looked forward to
their daily talks. On some days she was the only human being he communicated
with outside the requirements of his research.

She sat quietly, the Digrammaton on its chain glinting
against the plain black of her soutane.

“I went to the Jehan Gardens,” he said. “There I met someone
I’ve known all my life, and in the course of conversation she observed how
swiftly time passes. Yet her lifetime is less than a blink of an eye against
the unimagined millennia the Suneater has existed. The potential for learning,
were we able to establish an observation post there, is tremendous. Yet no one
here can see past immediate circumstances. They see the Suneater only as a
target in this war.” He rubbed his cheek absently; the remembered pain would
perhaps never go away. “I acknowledge the necessity for action, but I cannot
get them to see past its destruction.”

“Is not the Panarch’s goal contiguous with yours?”

Omilov looked from Eloatri to the bees bumbling among the
stirring blossoms. “Only as far as guaranteeing the safety of the Rifters is
concerned.” He shook his head. “My original impulse was to walk through the
Whispering Gallery. I have never been in it, but my understanding was that one
can hear converse on every subject if one stays long enough.”

Eloatri smiled. “I have been through it. The experience
reminds me of the function that cards of divination must have served for our
ancestors.”

“Well, there was to be nothing, divination or otherwise, for
me,” Omilov said. “At least at that hour, which is restricted to a theme. The
Archonei of Kemal dismissed as mere frivolousness Vannis’ introduction of love
as the current theme.”

Eloatri drew an audible breath.

Omilov glanced up. “You have an observation to make, Numen?”

“Not yet,” she murmured, rubbing one thumb over the scarred
palm of her other hand. “Not yet. Go on.”

“There’s little else to tell you except I thought of
Brandon, who, despite his new position as ruler of trillions, wants to follow
Vi’ya to the Suneater. Love may blind one to wise action, but it is not always
frivolous.”

“No.”

“If he does go, then perforce the Navy will have to preserve
the station,” Omilov said. “But ought I to hope he gambles his life this way?”

The High Phanist said nothing.

“That is my dilemma.” Omilov sat back, sighing. “Then, just
as I was leaving, another one of those accursed novosti tried to corner me. A
lot of impertinent questions about the Suneater, the attack, and the
Telvarna
Rifters, who are still
officially listed simply as ‘not here.’”

Eloatri nodded. “And one other question, I assume.”

Omilov looked up in an unguarded movement of protest. Then
he saw the pain in the High Phanist’s eyes. Pain that matched, he supposed,
that in his. They were both in disgrace with the Panarch, both guilty of
conniving the escape of the woman the Panarch loved.

“They pursue me as well. ‘Let those with eyes to see,’” she
quoted, letting her voice trail off.

“Well, eyes they may have,” Omilov said, “and I suppose our
positions are evident from the shifting of preference and deference, but I gave
their ears nothing. If the novosti find out where the Rifters went, and what
their captain means to him, then Brandon loses all freedom. As head of state
taking his forces to war he might go, but to chase a Rifter lover? We would
revert right back to chaos. A political reality.”

The High Phanist rubbed her palm.

“You disagree? Ought I to have told the truth?”

“I cannot direct you on that,” Eloatri said. “But I admit I
was thinking along a different track.”

“Which is?”

“Those cards of divination, I mentioned,” she said, smiling
sadly. “And Vannis Scefi-Cartano’s new fashion.” She rose to her feet, turned,
then turned back. “Love is not frivolous,” she said. “Danger, inspiration,
catalyst, wise, blind, but never frivolous. Never frivolous,” she repeated.

o0o

The new High Admiral of the Panarchy of the Thousand Suns
could not sleep.

Her cheek muscles ached from so much smiling, and her head
throbbed, even though she had managed to make her last glass of celebratory
champagne last for hours. She had lost count of the times she had nodded,
smiled, lifted it in return to someone’s toast, and pressed it to her lips
without letting any liquid actually pass them.

At last the after-party was over, and she was able to retire
to rest.

But exhausted as she was, she still could not sleep.

Finally Margo Ng tabbed on a light and rose, padding across toe-soft
carpet down the few stairs to one of the anterooms, and through that to the
study that was now hers.

The change in quarters had been accomplished neatly by
unknown stewards earlier in the day. Not that they’d had much work. What little
Ng owned she had ordered left on
Grozniy
,
now her flagship. Here she kept only uniforms.

She traced her fingers over the inlaid keys of the console,
then tabbed it to life. Most of the hours between the brief reception after the
ceremony and the much-longer after-party had been spent in meetings—both
official and unofficial. One of the first official meetings had been with the
Panarch and Nyberg and Willsones, who had witnessed the transfer of databanks
coded to the high admiral. She had not yet had the time to peruse these.

She went to the monneplat and punched up some coffee, and
during the wait, looked about the room. Now, in the quiet of the night watch,
she could contemplate the reality of her new position. It still did not seem
real.

Why do I move so
softly?
There was no one to disturb; the ensign and steward assigned to her
had been dismissed for the night. She employed no servants, and she had no
dependents.

Pain gripped her heart. No dependents—that was a choice she
made when she began officer training on Minerva. How lightly made was that
decision, how easy for an ambitious youth with her eyes on command of a
battlecruiser. The monneplat delivered her coffee and Ng moved back to the
console.

She smiled mirthlessly as the retinal scan identified her,
then displayed a menu.

No dependents—just one mate. She sipped coffee as
grief-heightened memories of Metellus Hayashi gripped her. Lost in the
desperate action over Arthelion before the hyperwave was secured, she had to
assume he was dead. Better that than kept as a prisoner for the torture-happy
Dol’jharians to sport with.

Like the crew of the
Crone
of Aravis
.

She shook her head, dispelling the ugly memory of that
hyperwave broadcast. She called up a review of the Suneater data, specifically
the oppressive number of ships the enemy was posting for defense of the Urian
station. Communications from ships transferred there could no longer be
analyzed—they used ciphers backed by the computational power of the arrays the
Dol’jharians had to be building.

Ng cleared the data from the console, then noticed the glyph
for personal, eyes-only data blinking in a corner of the screen.

Curious, she opened one of the more recent files, authored
by her predecessor Padraic ban-Carr. Its frank language declared it to be from
his personal journal; her skin prickled in an atavistic perception of the
presence of the dead.

Ng swiftly inspected the rest of the coded data. Indeed, not
only had Carr left his memoirs for his successor, but so had each of his
predecessors, a chain of plainly-expressed insight and history reaching back
hundreds of years. That was a tradition no one else in the Navy had
suspected—no doubt it was part of the balance of power between the Mandala and
the Navy.

She opened the last file. Admiral Carr had obviously been in
the middle of composing this journal entry when he was called away to that
ill-fated Privy Council meeting on Lao Tse.

. . . the pattern is
clear. It is also, according to both Energetics and Ontological Physics,
impossible—requiring superluminal communications. Thus, they argue, it must be
the operation of unknown human factors, but the Synchronists just shrug and
shake their heads. Foolishness.

Ng paused, unsure just what the admiral’s last word had
referred to, then continued reading.

But now to Lao Tse.
Perhaps there will be answers there. Not, I expect, that I shall like them, but
anything is better than this uncertainty. I’ve had enough of that. All of us
have.

Again, ambiguity. She puzzled at the scope of the pronoun,
then shrugged. Whatever her predecessor had meant, uncertainty was the reality
of life in the military: awareness that their careers, brilliant or otherwise,
might end in sudden death.
I am Margot O’Reilly
Ng, almost fifty years old, and I am High Admiral.

How strange it seemed! Pride and uncertainty were her
foremost emotions as she looked about the room. It had no personality—no
atmosphere, as if anyone who had stayed here had been in transit.
As I am
, she thought grimly. After the
attack, she would not be returning.
Either
I’ll be dead or else on my way back to Arthelion to begin the real work,
cleaning up the mess the Dol’jharians have made.

Who among the Panarchy’s high admirals had stayed in these
quarters, under what circumstances, and what had been their thoughts? Let’s
take a look. She began tabbing backward through earlier memoirs.

. . . inconclusive at
best, although it will be hailed as a brilliant victory. We still have not
discovered the Shiidra home-world or worlds . . .

. . . do not know what
to expect from these strange triplicate creatures, who profess only friendship
but may possess secrets as surprising as their conscious control of the
chemistry of their ribbon-pelts. Can we understand them well enough to trust
them?

An even older journal note snagged her eye.

. . . whoever you are,
if you do not already know it, Her Majesty’s fits of apparent irrationality and
vagueness are an especially dangerous sham, generally staged to distract from
the real issue. In reality, there is no more coldly appraising and relentlessly
rational creature in the Thousand Suns.

Ng checked the date on that one, then smiled. The Kyriarch
Banicalaan had entered legend as a sim-crazy eccentric; even the works of
generations of revisionist historians revealing the strengths of the political
structures she had built had failed to dispel that image.
Which was no doubt her plan. People won’t fight someone they don’t take
seriously.

And apparently Brandon hai-Arkad had inherited a full
measure of that subtlety. Certainly, he had effectively applied her methods
against his brother Semion and his minions; Ng grimaced in embarrassment,
remembering her early judgments about him. Then she almost laughed. Was she
embarrassed at being easier to deceive than a man who’d evidently been a
paranoid monster in his single-minded conviction of moral superiority?

The reality of her position quickly sobered her: as High Admiral
Ng, she had been received into the Panarch’s Privy Council. Despite her
vigorous avoidance of the maelstrom of civilian governmental politics, with her
acceptance of the high admiral’s blason she knew she had been sucked squarely
into the center.

Anticipation of that had haunted her since she realized she
was on an inside orbit for the position of high admiral, along with Jeph
Koestler. At times she’d almost felt that she’d rather he had it instead.

Sustaining an inward chill, Ng remembered some of the
casualties of the refined strife the Douloi engaged in: Hesthar, her blood
boiled away in the vacuum of space; Tau Srivashti, smashed to an unrecognizable
jelly by a four-and-a-half-kilometer fall from the spin axis; and Stulafi
Y’Talob, the Archon of Torigan, ripped apart by a crazed mob. She’d rather face
a ruptor in battle. At least you knew where it was coming from, and there was
never any doubt of the enemy’s intent.
Or
who the enemy is.

But identifying the enemy was one of the functions of
Siglnt. Her innate good humor began to reassert itself, and she indulged in a
brief image of Lieutenant Warrigal attempting to invent Tenno discriminators to
make sense of that maze of sound and gesture, feint and counterstroke of words
and symbols to be found in the Whispering Gallery.

That’s what you have
Security for.
She’d send Anton Faseult; that was his world. And that would
allow her to concentrate on the proposed Rifter alliance, the negotiations for
which had reached their final phase with the covert arrival of the Rifter
triumvir Jep Houmanopoulis on Ares. Nyberg had done most of the initial work
there, but now that she was officially in charge of the Navy, she must take it
over.

A jaw-cracking yawn interrupted her thoughts. Now that she
had mapped the problem of Douloi politics into a more familiar space, sleep
might be a possibility. The Rifters could wait. Her unconscious mind could
simmer their proposals now, without also dishing up nightmares about politics.