A Dark and Hungry God Arises (37 page)

He didn't look away, but his quiet answer ached with defeat. 'That kaze nearly killed you. He nearly killed Captain Vertigus. Knowing you, I assume you feel responsible for the woman who died in the explosion. I owed you an explanation. '

She ground her fingers into the tops of her thighs in a fierce effort to contain her distress. She wanted to shout, What kind of explanation have you given me? Do you call supplying me with reasons to distrust you an explanation? Do you call saying you want me to survive an explanation? Nevertheless she crushed down her protest. If she gave him another reason to look beaten, she didn't think she could bear it.

'Then I guess, ' she rasped, You'll be glad to hear Captain Vertigus has decided to sponsor your bill. He should have it ready by the time the Council convenes tomorrow morning. '

The director shrugged. Too bad. You haven't heard the latest news. Abrim Len has already announced that the Council won't re-convene until Security has had a chance to investigate that kaze. Until the members can be sure they're safe. Another day or two at least. '

The keening in Min's ears seemed to grow louder. She began to think it would never go away.

DIOS TO CADETS OF THE UNITED

Men and women, cadets of the United Mining Companies Police Academy, it's time.

Your training is over, to the extent that the Academy can provide it - to the extent that any of us can ever say our training is over. You've spent many hundreds of hours in classrooms, absorbing advice, memorizing data, squinting at screens and hardcopy, being hectored by pedants, purists and philosophers — in short, studying until you thought your skulls were going to crack, [laughter] You've spent months of real-time in simulators and simulations, learning to use our equipment, the best as well as the worst of it, learning the basic skills to survive and function when your life depends on your machinery and your companions - learning everything it's humanly possible to learn from a mock-up. You've been marched, stressed, exercised, taught, and beaten up until even the smallest of you could face entire guttergangs and take less damage than you give. You've been under hard g -

you've been through the gap. And some of you - I say, some of you - have even contrived to squeeze in a little sleep, [laughter]

Now it's over, [applause, cheers] Over at last. You've learned what the Academy can teach you. Every one of you is stronger and smarter than you were when you arrived, better equipped to take care of yourselves and the people who trust you, better prepared to meet any future you choose.

It's time you went to work, [groans, laughter]

I want to talk to you about that work, [applause]

We're the UMCP. In crude terms, we stand against the Amnion: we control their impulse to encroach on our space, our interests, and our survival. And we chase pirates, [laughter] In other words, we do what the police have done since humankind started keeping historical records. The only difference between us and the uncountable legions of our predecessors is that our jurisdiction, our 'turf', begins where theirs left off - at the limits of this planet's gravity well.

Men and women, cadets, we are responsible for all human space.

That makes us unique in history. It makes us unique in our own time. In every other way, we're just cops. Like every cop before us who ever put his heart into his job or her life on the line, we're here to serve and protect the people who gave us birth, the people who nurtured and educated us, the people who taught us inspiration and imagination, the people who invented our technologies and our arts, the people who made us who we are. In that way, we're no different than our predecessors. We're simply another link in the long chain of men and women who took the same oath we do - the men and women who swore to defend what they called civilization against whatever they understood as external and internal threats.

But in this way, in the matter of 'turf', we are without precedent, in our time or any other. Never before have the police been responsible for the continued existence of their entire species in the whole created universe.

External and internal threats we've had aplenty since the beginning of time. That's inevitable. We're human beings. Most of us can't get out of bed in the morning without causing trouble for somebody, [laughter] But the internal and external threats have always been human ones. What one clan or tribe or nation calls civilization, another calls barbarism - or a violation of natural sovereignty. Racial distrust fosters violence. Economic imbal-ance breeds greed and jealousy. And the planet is a closed eco-system. Therefore conflicts occur within and between civilizations over the allocation of resources — an under-standable struggle which has typically been disguised by masks of religion and politics.

Make no mistake about it. The cops have always had their hands full.

But only on our turf is the continuance of humankind itself at issue. All the struggles of our long, bloody and unscrupulous past have produced survivors and corpses

- but the survivors, like the corpses, have always been human.

That isn't true on our turf.

Of course, the word 'turf' is something of an over-simplification in this context. I'm not referring only to questions of jurisdiction. The Amnion exist. They have no discernible desire for war. On the other hand, they're profoundly imperialistic -I say profoundly because their imperialism reaches to the core of our genetic existence, the core of what makes us human beings. All human space is our 'turf' because that is our jurisdiction - and because the Amnion will take it away from us if they can.

They will take who we are away from us if they can.

For that reason - and no other - we are utterly and essentially unique.

And because we are unique, we have — we must have -

a unique relationship with the people we serve and protect.

Precisely because we are uniquely responsible for the future existence of our kind, we must also be uniquely responsible to our kind. The sheer scale of the challenge we've undertaken requires of us a special integrity, a com-mensurate valor, a whole new kind of dedication. You know that. But it requires something more as well. It requires a special responsiveness to the will and spirit of humankind. In the purest terms, we must act for the people we serve. If we do not - if the barrier we erect between humanity and extinction in any way violates the trust or the desire or the freedom of the people we serve - then we falsify ourselves as cops. We make ourselves, not the defenders of the future, but its arbiters. Rather than simply and cleanly enabling the future, we choose it for men, women and children who didn't ask us to do that job.

Cadets of the United Mining Companies Police Academy, it is the nature of power to resist restrictions, to seek an unfettered expansion and expression of itself. And it is the function of ethics to impose restrictions on power, to weld and wield the potentialities of power so that they serve but do not control the people in whose name they exist. And we have power, never doubt it.

That may seem slightly implausible to men and women who've suffered for years through what we blandly call

'training', but of course I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about us. We, the cops, hold the future of humankind in our care. We must not misuse it. We must be as vigilant in how we exercise our power as we are diligent when we use it.

I want to be absolutely clear about this. Your oath puts on you a responsibility which extends far beyond the limits of any ordinary employment, any planet-bound or stationer occupation, any less stringent concept of duty.

Let me suggest an analogy. Consider the problem of piracy. We don't 'chase pirates' just because they're illegal.

We don't shoot at them just because they shot at us first -

or because they damaged any of the people we protect. We fight piracy for the same organic reason that an antibody fights a virus, because if we don't- and if we don't succeed

- the whole vast human organism sickens and dies.

But when an antibody begins to change the shape of the larger organism, when the antibody introduces mutations which the larger organism didn't choose and can't control, we call it 'cancer'. Like the virus, it kills the larger organism. Unlike the virus, however, the cancer is wrong.

The virus resembles the Amnion. It exists. It seeks to perform the functions of which it is capable for its own honest, genetically coded reasons — because it must. But the cancer is a violation of its own code. It is deadly because its protein chains have become twisted and false.

Those of you who are good with analogies will hardly have failed to notice that piracy also is a form of cancer.

Well, if you're going to die anyway, what difference does it make whether a virus or a cancer kills you? No difference at all - that's obvious. But while you're still alive, while you still have a future, the difference is profound.

When you contract a virus, you can always hope that your antibodies will be equal to the task of preserving you. But when your antibodies turn to cancer, you can only survive if you accept some kind of fundamental violence against your own organism - surgery which cuts you open, chemotherapy which wreaks havoc with your polymerase, radiation which threatens the very nucleotides of your existence, genetically engineered predator microbes which attack the cancer, but which can never be trusted to attack only the cancer. Whether or not you survive, the cancer has done you more harm than the virus.

If we are not antibodies, an expression of the humanity of the organism to which we belong, then we are cancer, and humankind would be better off without us.

That is the thrust of your oath, the unique and necessary task you swear to undertake. I must tell you frankly that in the end I don't care whether you succeed at it or not. For the simple and valid reason that we don't try to choose or control the future, we can't guarantee it. Space is immense, and the Amnion, mysterious. None of us can know what the outcome of our efforts will be. Our responsibility for and to humankind doesn't require us to know. Ultimately none of us are measured by the degree of our success. We are measured by the quality of our service.

Men and women, cadets of the United Mining Companies Police Academy, it's time.

It's time we all went to work, [prolonged applause]

Liete Corregio, command third, Captain's Fancy, sat at her station on the bridge with the ship's best people around her and a long black wind blowing in her ears.

By ordinary standards, she and the watch she'd selected had nothing to do on the bridge. Captain's Fancy was docked, immobilized, both drives and all her energies dead. Even the power to process water and circulate air came from Billingate; from the fusion generator buried beyond reach in the core of the rock. Clamps and grapples held the ship in place, as rigid as the dock itself.

Only communications might conceivably demand some attention; but the board could be set to route incoming messages to her in her cabin - or anywhere else she happened to be.

Nevertheless she had her orders. No one aboard could countermand them. And she had no intention of challenging them herself, despite the long black wind and its burden of dread.

She did her best to ignore the wind. It was metaphoric in any case, a habit of mind or a perceptual trick. Ever since she could remember, she'd experienced her life in images of wind: the arctic pressure of necessity which had blown her from place to place and skill to skill until she gusted aboard Captain's Fancy; the soaring gale-ride of the gap between the stars, the hollow howl of the vacuum; the sweet zephyr of sleep; the solar flare of Nick's virility; the hungry mistral of flight and battle and command. Even the sensations of food and comradeship were like breezes ruffling her short hair, warming her dark cheeks. And when Nick Succorso had finally taken her to bed, after years of longing as poignant and unanswerable as a sigh in a dark cavern, his touch had felt like wind: a scorched blast from an old, baked and needy desert, raw with sand and so dry it denatured her heart. By the time he left her again, some part of her had shriveled away, desiccated to powder - the only part still capable of questioning him.

Once she realized that now at last she had no remaining needs or desires that didn't belong to him, she began to hear the black wind blowing.

It was the wind of her doom.

It may have been the doom of the whole ship.

Yet it was only a metaphor, an image; a way of thinking: it didn't confuse her. Instead it helped her understand her circumstances. When Nick had burned his way onto the auxiliary bridge and aimed his cutting laser at Morn, the familiar, respected urgency Liete called the mistral had lifted her and flung her at him, carrying him to the floor; saving both him and his ship. She'd ridden breezes and blasts to gain the trust which had made her his command third.

For that reason, she had no difficulty carrying out her orders, despite the sound of the black wind - a prolonged empty echo as twisted as a groan.

She stayed on the bridge, at her station. From around the ship she culled the people she wanted, people she herself trusted: Carmel for scan; Lind on communications; Malda Verone at targ. Helm she gave to Pastille because she valued his abilities more than she disliked his lack of discipline. Engineering sat vacant, of course. And no one was assigned to data and damage control: Morn was lost; Sib Mackern, gone; and Alba Parmute, hopeless. Liete routed those functions to the command console and handled them herself.

Once her people took their g-seats, she told them, 'I'm not here to answer questions, so don't ask. ' Her voice always sounded quiet. Nevertheless it carried: the mistral carried it - or the black wind. She knew that she would be obeyed. 'I'm here for the same reason you are — to do what Nick tells us. He gave me orders. I'm giving them to you.