Empery (11 page)

It was then that he began work on
Jiadur’s Wake
, naively hoping to free himself of the burden of his own fame. When it was rejected—he could not view the decision to censor it in any other light—he considered it a rejection of himself and turned his back on them.

In fact, the only lesson of enduring value that emerged from that time was one of rejection—that he was a foreigner, an oddity, an alien. There was no one else like him anywhere. Acceptance of that lesson had brought him at last to the Susquehanna.

There had been little enough pleasure in the four decades since he had retired, but most of what there had been, he had found here, in his woodland sanctuary. Now it had been violated, and Thackery knew he could not stay. But where he could go, he did not know. One thing was clear: There would be no sanctuary for him now anywhere on Earth.

His deepyacht,
Fireside
, had been downwell for a long time, but he had provided for its upkeep by means of a testamentary trust. He had had no conscious reason for doing so, beyond the natural inclination of a sailor to care for his ship. She had no great sentimental value to him, as he had made only one voyage in her. She had no practical value so long as he wished to maintain his pseudonymous hermitage.

Now the ship beckoned to him, offering escape. But where could it take him that Wells could not reach? To regain what he had lost, he would have to leave not only Earth but also the Affirmation. To attempt that in a deepyacht too closely resembled suicide.

It was several hours before he hit upon an alternative, but when he did, its rightness compelled him to embrace it. The first step required but a phone call. “Prepare
Fireside
for space,” he said. “I’m going out.” The word
again
was so strong in his mind that he wondered if he had said it.

Thackery had not quite admitted to himself until Wells had torn it from him that his time in the Susquehanna had been a vigil. If he was to fail to find a place in the human community, if he was to be denied reunion with Gabriel, he could at least choose not to surrender his remaining life to those hurts.

He had had enough of being lonely; now it was time to be alone.

Three hours after leaving Thackery, Wells rode an empty twelve-seat executive shuttle out of Newark back to orbit. The Brazilian orbital injector was closed twenty-four hours for maintenance, and he preferred enduring the extra gees and extra cost of the any-field shuttle to either waiting or going halfway around the world to the still operating African or Far East injectors. He briefly considered accepting the forced layover and flying west to see Chaisson, but in the end he decided he had left too many matters hanging to justify more time away.

Almost until he boarded the shuttle Wells had been unable to look past his disappointment at the outcome of his visit. But as the swollen-bodied vehicle lumbered upward, vibrating in sympathy with its roaring chemical engines, he at last put the disappointment behind him.

The whole business had been false to his basic beliefs. He was embarrassed remembering the threat he had made, the emotional barbs he had attempted to lodge in Thackery’s conscience. It had been so tempting to hope that Thackery could pave smooth one of the most difficult parts of what lay ahead.

But despite what Berberon thought, and even if the same could not be said of the Nines generally, coercion was not Wells’s way. It was usually better that something not be done at all than be done by unwilling hands. And it was always better to take responsibilities on oneself than to drop them into the laps of the unprepared.

Seduced by the prospect of a quick and easy solution to the problem of scouting the Mizari, he had allowed himself to be distracted at a time when more essential matters had required his full attention. Now Triad had been derailed, Berberon alienated, and Erickson alerted.

As the sky outside the shuttle’s windows faded quickly from blue to violet, and then to black, Wells took advantage of the privacy of the passenger cabin to make two calls, closing out his business on the surface.

The first was to Chaisson. The historian was off-line, so Wells left a brief message: “Richard—the business with Merritt will take some time to complete, and I don’t think it will withstand any extraneous contacts. Please put off indefinitely any plans to see him, and treat his existence as the strictest possible secret.” Tradition would give the request the force of an order.

The second call was to Arlett. “We’re going to have to keep watching Thackery, and you’re going to have to coordinate it,” Wells told him. “Anybody who doesn’t already know that he’s there isn’t to find out. Anybody who does know is under interdict.”

“I understand, Mr. Wells. Nobody comes to see him except you.”

“I won’t be coming back to see him,” Wells said. “But so long as he stays in that house, I want him left undisturbed. If he should leave, that’s another story. I’m to be alerted immediately, and he’s to be monitored as intensively and invasively as we’re capable of. Barring that, though, leave him be.”

“I understand. Sir—if I might ask about the possibility of promotion—”

“No. Never ask, Brian. And never make it part of your decision to lend service. Do for yourself and the things you believe in and not for the rewards that might come.”

“That would be easier if it were always clear how the things we are asked to do serve what we believe in.”

“It would be clearer if you did not always expect it to be easy,” Wells said sharply.

“Yes, sir,” Arlett said in a subdued voice.

In fairness, finding Thackery was service at least equal to that on which many promotions had been granted, and doubtless Arlett knew that. But he also doubtless knew that the jump from Fourth to Fifth brought with it so large a measure of additional authority—including the right to recruit new First Tiers and the first, albeit limited, authority to place referral requests—that it was not uncommon for the overtier involved to “load up” on the candidate.

Wells was content to let Arlett think that was the reason and grumble to himself if so inclined. To grant a promotion now, Wells would have to make known to the community of the Nines the service that had won it, and that he was not prepared to do. He would sustain a small, short-lived injustice in expiation of a larger one, so that he might quell his conscience and quiet his backward-looking curiosity, and so focus his efforts on shaping the still malleable future.

That business dealt with, he made one final call, to Kioni.

He felt within him a growing restless energy, an impatience with the endless jockeying of move and countermove, pawn traded for pawn—an eagerness to press on to the endgame. There was no cure at hand for the root cause, but he was pot above treating the symptoms.

Kioni was much preferable to Ronina for such matings. She was much less his physical ideal than Ronina, small-breasted where Ronina was well gifted, thick-thighed where Ronina was long-limbed. But Kioni allowed him to come to her without promises and to touch her without touching, in whatever way he chose and whenever he pleased. They came together as animals, in mutual selfishness, and parted as strangers, in mutual satiation. Or so he had come to expect of her from their half dozen previous encounters.

She was waiting in his bed when he arrived, and she did not disappoint him.

Felithe Berberon had fully expected to hear from the World Council concerning his report on the challenge to Chancellor Erickson. But he had not expected to be ordered to Capital three hours after transmitting it.

Nor was the order a welcome one. For a variety of reasons, it had been more than seven years since Berberon had been on Earth. One reason had to do with personal biology. Berberon was allergic to more than two hundred varieties of atmospheric flotsam and did not care either to flood his body with mind-dulling drugs or to go without and spend his time down-well feeling as though his chest were in a vise.

An even larger factor was that the trip down and back quite thoroughly terrorized him. Having no comforting faith with which to sanguinely accept his own mortality, Berberon chose to avoid placing his life at even minimal risk. That was not possible where spaceflight was concerned—particularly the orbit-to-ground and ground-to-orbit regimens.

True, shuttle crashes were rare, and failures of the orbital injectors even rarer, but when accidents did occur, there were never any survivors. As he habitually reminded those amused by his phobia, “Bags of protoplasm make notoriously bad meteors.”

A final consideration was that, thanks to three decades in reduced gravity and an aversion to exercise for its own sake, he was now thoroughly maladapted to a full gee field. Climbing a ramp or stairway on Earth left him panting, his heart beating angry protest against the exertion. Too, the altered environment clashed against his learned reflexes, turning his gliding steps into graceless stumbles. And what were pleasingly rounded body contours in orbit became loose, sagging folds of flesh on Earth; the first day down, the man in Berberon’s mirror was a stranger.

In light of such considerations, and not being notably sentimental about verdant hills and pristine brooks, Berberon had gladly forgone many opportunities to return to his home world. The last event he had thought important enough to come downwell for had been the election of Jean-Paul Tanvier as World Council President. Being present at the inauguration and endearingly visible during the social functions that surrounded it had doubtless been a factor in Tanvier retaining Berberon as Observer, especially considering that one of the President’s aides had been angling for the post for himself.

This time he had been given no choice.

Mercifully the worst part of the trip was already behind him. He had come in through Algiers Port of Entry, the shuttle popping its double sonic boom over the Strait of Gibraltar and making its. final heart-pounding energy management turn over the western Mediterranean. Only when the spaceplane stopped rolling did he unclench his teeth and relax his viselike grip on the padded body harness.

A Council airskiff had been waiting for him there. As quickly as his overnighter could be retrieved from the cargo claim, he was aloft again. Flying fifteen hundred metres above the water, the skiff made a dogleg around Sardegna and then skimmed across the Tyrrhenian Sea in a beeline toward the Italian peninsula and the Adriatic beyond. Now, with the rounded ridges of the Apennines ahead on the horizon and the coastline passing below, the skiff began to climb. Capital lay just twenty minutes away.

Still troubling Berberon was the question of why he had been recalled. Other than purely social functions, which this surely was not, there was no interaction that could not be handled technologically, no information that could not be passed by means of the secure channels of the net.

The only reasons Berberon could think of for bringing him down to Earth were symbolic ones. Recall without explanation was in itself a naked reminder of the Council’s authority. And Tanvier’s insistence on breathing the same air as he did could be an attempt to reinforce through the ancient language of biological programming just who was in charge. Body-language dominance displays were transmitted poorly by the net, and pheromones and fear-sweat not at all.

But there had been nothing in Berberon’s message that should have prompted a rebuke. He had not mentioned his admittedly indiscreet blow up with Wells, offering instead a prediction that Wells would attempt to have Erickson removed, along with his own appraisal of why that was undesirable.

Which meant that almost certainly a version of that regrettable conversation had reached Tanvier by another route. If so, then there was one more possible reason for the recall—that Tanvier was going to remove him from the Observer’s office.

Before Berberon could evaluate the question to his satisfaction, the skiff was suddenly over water again and Capital was in sight.

The once free-floating artificial island had been permanently located in the shallows of the Gulf of Venice for the better part of a century, ever since the practical difficulties of maintaining it had begun to outweigh the symbolic value of a Capital not physically “belonging” to any traditional nation-state.

At first, it had been moored still afloat. Later, when the
bora-
whipped waters of the Gulf and the unpredictable seiches of the Adriatic continued the structural assault begun in the free-roaming years, Capital had been elevated out of the sea on pillars in a feat of engineering arguably more remarkable than the city’s construction.

Berberon had always found it both ironic and appropriate that the island city had ended up in sight of the ruins of the City of Canals. Both Capital and Venice were centers of economic and political power for their eras, and both had made a devil’s pact with the sea—acquiring a unique beauty and character even while sowing the seeds of self-destruction.

After decades of fighting subsidence and flooding, Venice had succumbed to entropy and neglect in the Black Years preceding Reunion. Capital’s end was even now being preordained by efficiency analyses, which pointed up the undeniably high cost of the endless maintenance of an architectural white elephant and proposed moving the seat of government elsewhere.

But until the Council turned analysis into action, Capital would continue its life as a modern reincarnation of
La Serenissima
.

The airskiff delivered Berberon to the elevated passenger-only landing deck on the west edge of the city. From there an open-air slidewalk carried him to the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Council Hall. By the time he reached it, he was gasping for breath despite the drugs he had taken that morning.

On the other side of the checkpoint an aide-courtier was waiting to escort him to the meeting. From the route they took, Berberon knew almost immediately that their destination was one of the four sumptuous lounges on the sixteenth floor of the Hall, each of which looked out to a different compass point through a broad expanse of seamless synglas.

Being taken there instead of to the regular Council chamber confirmed Berberon’s suspicion that he would not be facing the full seventeen-member Council but its unofficial inner circle: Tanvier and the five High Ministers. They were waiting there for him, seated as though they had known his arrival was imminent, talking quietly among themselves.

Berberon knew them all in varying degrees. The closest he had to a personal friend in the group was Aram Wolfe, the High Minister for Economic Planning, who was the oldest of the six by several years. The two women, Hu and Aboulein, were nearly strangers; Hu by dint of a retiring personality and Aboulein because she had been in office less than a year.

The blunt-spoken Breswaithe regarded Berberon with a certain amount of personal antipathy; presumably it arose from incompatible personalities, since they often agreed on matters of policy. By contrast, Berberon had had several heated disagreements, public and private, with President Tanvier, most notably over his strategy for appeasing the Nines. Yet Tanvier was enough of a professional that those conflicts had never taken on personal dimensions.

Dailey was the hardest to take, for he held the seat Berberon thought by rights should have belonged to him. Worse, the chisel-featured North American seemed somehow to charge every look and utterance with his self-satisfied awareness of that grievance.

There was one chair left unoccupied, and Berberon eased his weary-limbed frame into it gratefully as the ministers shifted their attention from each other to the newcomer. “Capital is enjoying a cool summer, I see,” Berberon offered conversationally.

“Do you think so?” Tanvier asked lightly. “Perhaps you have become too thoroughly acclimated to Unity. I know I always find it oppressively warm there.”

His control of the meeting established, Tanvier paused and glanced down at the slate in his lap. “We’ve reviewed your most recent dispatch with a great deal of interest,” he said, looking up. “As you well know, Felithe, no Chancellor has faced a Vote of Continuation since Delkes withstood three of them early in his first term. And no Chancellor has lost a Vote since Ryan Bodanis was shown the door in ’twenty-four.”

“Quite true,” Berberon said.

“Then you understand why I thought it would be a good idea for you to come and review the process with us, for the benefit of those of us whose political memories don’t reach back that far.” Tanvier smiled at Aboulein as he spoke.

At first blush, Berberon was insulted by the request. There were probably fifty political analysts, including at least five who were experts on the USS, with offices within ten minutes of the conference room. Any one of them could have easily provided what amounted to a second form polisci lecture. And what’s more, it was their job.

But a moment’s reflection persuaded Berberon that perhaps Tanvier was more concerned about security than professional courtesy. In any event, there was nothing to be gained by demurring.

“A brief review before we move on to the particulars of the present situation would very likely be time well spent,” Berberon agreed. “According to the revision of the bylaws adopted in 640—”

“Excuse me, Observer Berberon,” Aboulein interrupted. “I am one who requested your appearance here. I’ve read the bylaws, as I hope every Councilor has. What is not clear to me is whether the high officers of the Service actually follow their own rules.”

“Oh?”

“After all, with the autonomy granted the Chancellor and the degree of secrecy that surrounds Committee decisions, it would be very difficult for the Service Court to make a case against the ruling oligarchy, even if they were inclined to do so. I would very much value your observations along that line.”

Berberon nodded, his pride somewhat assuaged by the young Mideasterner’s redefinition of the question. “I understand that it’s hard for the members of a body such as the Council, with all the elaborate checks and balances under which it operates, to see what restrains those who hold power more absolutely. And it’s true that from time to time, as in any large organization, there exists a distinction between the way things are officially done and the way they are really done.

“However, in this particular area the bylaws have always been very carefully observed. The Chancellor’s term is ten years. The only way to remove her before that time is through a Vote of Continuation, the rules for which are very specific. Wells or any other Comité can ask for a Vote of Continuation at any meeting or request a meeting for that purpose. He will be allowed to state why he believes a change is desirable. The Chancellor will be allowed an equal amount of time—be it five minutes or five hours—for rebuttal.

“Once the statements are on record, the Committee votes secretly, with no further discussion. Once the Committee’s vote is recorded—but not announced—the Observers are polled publicly, in order of seniority.”

“So you would vote first,” Breswaithe observed. “Would you say that that gives you any useful influence?”

“Of course. The process was meant to allow those with the longest perspective to set the tone,” Berberon said. “Where was I? Oh, yes—for Erickson to be removed, a majority of both the Committee and the Observers—each counted separately—must vote against her.”

“So Chancellor Erickson could conceivably alienate eight of the eleven concerned and still stay on,” Dailey said. “I find that remarkable.”

“Remember that before Atlee’s reforms, the chief executive of the Service could not be removed at all. The Service has always been interested in long-term stability. These rules were meant to protect against frivolous concerns being used against a sitting Chancellor,” Berberon said.

“It still strikes me as reckless and politically naive,” Dailey said.

“You apply a false standard,” Berberon said firmly. “Fundamentally it is not a political system. It is an administrative one—”

Tanvier interrupted, imposing a truce on the skirmishing parties. “You haven’t addressed the selection of a replacement.”

Berberon nodded. “True, I have not. But then, there is little I can say, because the Observers—which is to say the Worlds—have no role in it. Should a Chancellor lose a Vote of Continuation, he or she becomes a temporary member of the Committee. The Committee then meets daily in private—no Observers present—until one of its members is elected Chancellor, again on a majority vote. But, of course, a majority is now
four
votes, not three. You see the potential for stalemate, I trust.”

“The former Chancellor could conceivably wield considerable influence in choosing her successor,” Aboulein suggested.

“That’s often been the case at the end of a term, when the same procedure is followed,” Berberon agreed. Wolfe joined the discussion for the first time. “How do you see things proceeding should Erickson lose the vote?”

There was something unspoken in the question that troubled Berberon, prompting him to answer more bluntly than he otherwise might have. “You can count on at least six weeks of posturing and bloodletting before a replacement is chosen,” he warned. “It’ll take that long for everyone to stop promoting their own cause and come together for the common good.”

“Not unlike the College of Cardinals,” Tanvier observed.

“Except that the ghost of the last pope gets to vote—and may even get to succeed himself.”

“Is that your prediction in this instance?” Tanvier asked. Berberon shook his head. “I don’t think it’s possible at this time to predict who will emerge as the new Chancellor.”