Branegate (13 page)

“Anton,” she said, and held out her arms to him.

He felt a compulsion to embrace her, but held back and saw tears well up in her eyes. “My name is Trae,” he said.

She came up to him, sliding her arms around his neck and pressing her cheek to his. He felt pressure, but no warmth. “I know it is, but you’ll always be Anton to me. And now you’re becoming a man.”

She took a step back and grasped his arms. “I think you favor your father a bit, but that nose is mine.” She smiled. “I’ve missed you so much. I hope someday you’ll understand why we had to leave you. I feel so badly about it, but I have to be with your father, especially now, and you have to carry on for us in the place we really want to be.”

“Petyr—Father—he said something about a crisis in your home universe,” said Trae. “Right now I’m trying to digest and believe what I’ve heard. I might be making this all up in my own head.”

“You’ll accept it all in time, dear,” she said, then reached down and took his hand in hers. “Walk with me, now, and tell me all about your life on Gan.”

There was no real sense of time. They strolled together, shoulders touching, and Trae’s story was a steady stream without conscious voice, a detailed data dump of the experiences of sixteen years in the caverns. When he was finished, the woman he supposed was his true mother pursed her lips in a sad smile.

“No girlfriends? No romantic attachments yet?”

“My friends were few, and there were no girls. The Church doesn’t encourage it for people my age.”

“Ah, The Church,” she said, and sighed. “That was becoming a problem even before we left Gan.”

“It advocates belief in The Source, brought to us by The Immortals,” said Trae reverently.

She squeezed his hand. “We had nothing to do with the founding of The Church. Your father preached democracy and equal opportunity for everyone during his mission. He wanted all people to recognize and use the natural powers within themselves to make their lives better, and to stop depending on the grace of rulers who only stole from them. The concept of ‘The Source’ was invented by a few ambitious men who obtained power by making up a new religion, and sad to say they were successful.”

The sky suddenly darkened. Trae looked up and saw that a dense cloud had covered up the sun, but even as he watched, the cloud slid away and the sky was bright again.

“Sorry,” she said, “but the subject of The Church makes me angry. We objected to it from the start, but the instigators only tried to pacify us by making us out as some kind of superbeings. What nonsense. If there
is
a God, we’re certainly not it. It’s our technology that allows us to do what we do, and that’s a product of our own brains and hard work. Nothing has ever been given to us through worship or prayer to the so-called ‘Source.’”

Trae was struck mute, and looked down at the ground. They walked in silence a few steps, and then she squeezed his hand again.

“I know I’ve offended you, but it had to be said. There will be more to your education than technical matters. Try not to hate me for it.”

Still stunned, Trae said nothing. A few more steps and she stopped, grasped his arms and turned him around to face her.

“Trae, look at me.”

He did so, his eyes moving slowly upwards to meet hers.

“I’m your mother, and I love you with all my heart, but I have very little time before I leave my only child in another universe, at least for a while. Your father and I are going back to a bad situation, and the only reason I’m even with him is because of the political influence of my family. I have to be there. You have to be here. You have to take charge of our affairs here, and be ready to react to any negative consequences in our political maneuverings. Billions of lives could be at stake, and I don’t want your judgement being clouded by religious teachings you’ve learned as a child. Your father can stuff you full of technical and business information, but your use of it must be realistic and practical and free of religious dogma that doesn’t apply to the vast majority of people in all universes. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She shook him for emphasis, and tears welled in her eyes.

“I don’t see how my belief in ‘The Source’ can hurt anything I do in everyday life. How can faith, trust and love hurt anything?” said Trae.

The woman who called herself his mother released him. For a long moment they just stood there looking at each other. She wiped her eyes with a hand, finally, and said, “I guess you’ll have to learn as you go along, and that’s the hard way. I can only hope we all survive it. We’ll talk another time, because your father is aching to get back to you with all his technical data. But before I go, I need to know one thing: do you remember me at all, from when you were little—before your rebirth, I mean?”

“I remember your face—in—dreams.” He told her about the dreams, the big bed, the ornately carved door in his room. The fire.

“They locked us in, and the house burned down around us,” she said. “I don’t remember the end of it; they told me they found us together on your bed, all charred. I’d covered you with my own body, trying to protect you. At least I was spared a direct memory of it. It doesn’t haunt me so much that way.”

Now tears were streaming down her face. She hugged him and buried her face in his shoulder. Trae stood there stiffly, not knowing what to do.

“We’re reborn and hardly know each other, but you’re still my Anton and I love you,” she sobbed.

“I know,” said Trae, and immediately felt stupid. There was more he should say, more he should feel, but couldn’t. The woman was a vague memory from a dream. He didn’t know her.

A voice came out of the clear sky, saving him. “Tatjana darling—give him time. This is all a huge revelation. The poor lad is paralyzed by all of it, so let him rest a bit. Besides, there are other things he has to assimilate before he wakes.”

She kissed his cheek, stepped back and sniffed once, then wiped her eyes again with her hand. She looked a bit angry as her eyes moved away from Trae’s. “Very well, but next time I’ll not give up so easily. Next time I’ll have him know his own mother, even if it means you have less time with him.”

The woman nodded curtly to Trae, and her image faded to nothingness, as if she’d been a projection on a screen of air.

“She’s going to be very angry with me,” said a voice behind Trae, “but it won’t be the first time.”

Trae jerked around in surprise. Petyr was standing there, now dressed in a dark business suit, strange looking and out of place in a field of flowers. “A mother’s love for her only son extends across an eternity, Trae. Be good to her, as good as you can, until you get to know her again. The two of you are all the family I really have in this universe. Now, however, it’s time to get down to business. I’m going to let you go into rem sleep for half an hour or so, then bring you up a bit and begin feeding you data. At the same time I’ll do a bit of downloading to update my records of your memories and experiences. Make sure your guardian, whose image I’m using without permission, does the same as soon as you wake up. Updates will be necessary every night from now on until I tell you otherwise. This is important, Trae. Don’t miss a single update. I can already hear your question about memory updates. Ask your guardian. His instructions are being supplemented as we speak. No more talk; time for you to sleep. I’ll return soon.”

Trae opened his mouth to speak—and went away somewhere.

If there were more dreams, and likely there were, he didn’t remember them. He awoke on his bed, staring up at a white ceiling. There was a faint buzzing sound. He turned his head, realized the buzzing was coming from an open briefcase on a table in one corner of the room. The table lamp was lit. On the bed next to his lay Petyr, on his back, breathing deeply, and the man’s eyes were moving beneath his eyelids. Trae watched him for several minutes, then lay back and tried to recall everything that had happened in his dream. It was all there, in detail, total clarity. Not like a dream at all.

A sudden, rattling intake of breath, and Petyr woke up. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, looked over at Trae. “Get up. I have to test you again,” he commanded, and swung his legs off the bed. “Now.”

Petyr went to the recording instruments in the briefcase and fiddled with them while Trae got up. “You said you were monitoring the effects of little machines in my body, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? You didn’t tell me the truth, Petyr.”

“It was truth as far as it went. Sit down here. We need to do this quickly. No drugs this time.”

Trae sat down in a chair by the table, and Petyr hooked him up in the usual way. “You’re scanning my memories up to this moment, even private things,” he said. The thought made him feel a bit angry, even violated.

“Welcome to the world of The Immortals,” said Petyr. His fingers moved over a small keyboard. The buzzing became a sing-songy pattern of sound, but otherwise Trae was not aware of anything unusual happening. The sound stopped. “Done. I’ll make copies of this one. Four, I think.”

The man was talking to himself. “How did you know that had to be done as soon as I woke up?”

“I had my instructions,” said Petyr. “Anyway, I was sure we’d have to do it after you took that huge dose of whatever it is they gave you. I’ve just had some revelations myself, Trae.”

“Baloney. You knew exactly what had to be done before I even said anything.”

“Instinct. I have a lot of experience with this.” Petyr bent over the briefcase, took out four data-cubes and put them into storage boxes on the table.

“You were told what to do. You know what just happened to me. I think you were there. I think you were still there when I woke up. Maybe you even know what just got stuffed into my head. I’ve never felt so alert in my life.”

Petyr closed the briefcase after depositing two of the cubes into it. The other two he put into his pocket. “What you just experienced changes a lot of things, and yes, I was there. It’s my privilege as a soldier of The Church.”

“If you were there then you know what my father thinks of The Church. You’re there for another reason, and I want to know what it is. Why are you so important to my father, other than just protecting his son? And why does my father use your image every time we meet in dreamland? You never give me an answer to this, and I’m tired of being lied to, Petyr. Don’t you care?”

Trae stood up, glaring at his guardian of sixteen years. Petyr gave a big sigh as Trae turned and stepped back to his bed.

“Of course I care,” said Petyr, and then there was a long pause.

“I’m your father, Trae.”

Trae sat down hard on the bed.

CHAPTER 11

T
his is too sudden,” said Khalid Osman, ruler of all Gan. “I’ve heard no rumors regarding overtures from Galena, and I’ve certainly not had their support on The Council.”

“I agree, sire,” said Fedor Quraiwan. “My inquires suggest the initiative has been sparked by several prominent businessmen on Gan who wish to have open access to Galena ports.”

Breakfast had been served in the Emperor’s private quarters: a meal of fruit, fish, eggs and a doughy flatbread laced with honey. Now they sipped a new tea with a flowery scent to begin their day.

“Ah, the name Azar Khalil comes to mind,” said Khalid.

“He seems to be pushing the hardest, sire, but there are others.”

“All of them in munitions industries, of course.” The Emperor smiled. “This could be a subtle way to suggest I reduce port taxes. I might even consider it.”

“It’s more than that, sire. Our ports haven’t been renovated for over a decade. They can’t handle the new freighters being used for interplanetary transport. It’s not just size; they’re much too close to population centers. The renovation costs are prohibitive, sire. It would be to our advantage to entertain any commercial overtures from Galena, and could also reduce the tensions between us.”

“I doubt that. We’ll never agree on how to rule an ignorant people. If Azar and his colleagues want better relations with Galena I won’t interfere with their efforts.”

“Underway, sire. Meetings are being arranged at the Galenan embassy for microwave conversations with their Economic Minister. I’ve been promised an invitation, but that’s weeks away.”

“You were going to tell me about this, of course,” said Khalil.

“I just have, sire. I’ve only had reason to consider matters seriously in recent days. They were only rumors, but then Azar himself called to brief me, and my people reported increased traffic at the embassy. Several new people have arrived.”

“More spies, perhaps. That seems to be the major function of the foreign embassies on our world these days.” Khalil took another sip of tea and wiped his mouth daintily with a napkin.

“Azar says they are staff members from the economic ministry.”

“I’ll expect you to verify that soon, my friend. So much seems to be happening without my knowledge. Azar and I used to communicate rather freely when I was more involved in everyday affairs, but that was before I turned things over to people like you.”

“You know what I know, sire, but I try not to give you information that’s false or misleading. Even this tea we’re drinking has been thoroughly checked. Mountain tea from Galena, a gift from Azar Khalil; he wants to begin importing it. I’ve tasted nothing more flavorful, sire. Do you agree?”

“A heady aroma,” said Khalid. “Three cups I’ve had before hearing the origin of the product. And just how was it tested for safety?”

“There was only a single box of it, and I’ve taken the liberty of drinking small samples over the past two days. You trust your tasters more than I do, sire.”

Khalid smiled. “You have a suspicious nature, Fedor.”

Fedor gave him a nodding bow. “I’m well rewarded for my suspicions. Tea is the least of them. The Lyraen cells have been unusually quiet lately, and then yesterday my people found the body of a priest floating in a canal. His lower legs were gone, and the front of his head had been blown away by a high caliber weapon. He’d likely been weighted down to submerge him, but it looks like scavenger fish chewed away the legs and set him free.”