Empery (23 page)

He saw a flicker of dismay cross Sujata’s face, but he did not stop to measure how deeply his words had pierced her. He continued on, driving the blade deeper. “The very first thing that Wells told Teo after raising his clearance was that eight and a half years ago a new generation of data analyzers in the Perimeter listening posts began to report weak and uncorrelated emissions from Mizar-Alcor. That coincides with the beginning of Wells’s campaign for Triad.

“The Mizari are real, Chancellor. And Wells knows where they are.”

Even Sujata’s surrender, when it came, was controlled. As Berberon was speaking, her eyes had widened as though trying to absorb the enormity of the deception. Then suddenly she pressed her folded hands against her forehead, squeezed her eyes shut, and curled into a rigid ball in her chair. But her retreat could not shut out Berberon’s words, and she shivered violently in reaction to his last sentence.

From his chair across the room Berberon looked on with genuine sympathy. He understood her pain, and her anger at his part in it. The fact that he felt the same humiliation did not reduce his responsibility. His empathy was empty of comfort, and so he made no attempt to communicate it to her.

“Thank you, Teo,” was all he said. “You can go now.”

Then, when Farlad was gone, Berberon himself withdrew to an adjoining room so that Sujata might have an opportunity to restore the privacy of self that he had been obliged to so rudely violate.

Ambushed.

There was no single word that could adequately describe what Sujata was feeling, but that one captured the highest points. Sujata felt victimized by those she had trusted, ambushed, and then cruelly misused by them. Everyone had lied to her. Wells had lied and she had failed to detect it. Berberon had lied and she had failed to detect it.
A feeble gift you have
, she whispered to herself.
Too little for Maranit—too little even for here
.

But the cut that had gone the deepest was Farlad’s. A “caretaker” Chancellor, he had called her. She could not deny it. She knew well her own selfish inclinations. They were her answer to her anger at being cornered into taking the Chancellorship, an anger that even six years of selfishness had not completely erased.

But she had a conscience as well, which demanded she give her position its due. She had not always placed herself first. In her six years she had canceled two sabbaticals and returned from a third early to deal with minor crises. Her conscience would leave her at peace only as long as the Service was functioning smoothly.

But Farlad’s revelations were a brutal lesson that though she had attended to appearances and to the day-to-day detail, she had neglected larger concerns. She had not led the Service but had been content merely to manage it. And by doing so, she had given Wells his opportunity.

Curled up in her chair, eyes turned inward, Sujata had barely been aware of Farlad and Berberon leaving the room. She was only slightly more aware when Berberon returned. He walked toward her slowly but deliberately, stopping a polite distance from where she sat.

“You have to stop him,” he said quietly.

His words roused Sujata out of her withdrawal. “Stop him!” she exclaimed, coming up out of her chair with a sudden, violent motion. “You slitter, you were the one who said to help him! Look where we are now.”

“Sorting out the degrees of blame can wait for another time. Right now you need to decide what you’re going to do.”

She turned her back on him and walked toward the closed greatport. “What else? I’m going to have to recall
Charan
, order it to return here as quickly as possible.”

Across the room she heard the deep breath Berberon took before answering. “I wish it were that easy. Did you forget she’s flying deaf, in the craze? She won’t rejoin the net until the approach to Lynx Center.”

Sujata sighed, the outward sign of a sudden wave of self-recrimination that washed over her. “Of course, you’re right. And I did that. I wanted Wells to be isolated from his network here. He wanted to have
Charan
make the run in pogo mode, coming out of the craze every few months to pick up dispatches. I insisted otherwise.”

“It was a good decision with what you knew then,” Berberon said. “Unfortunately, it just makes things more complicated now.”

Sujata barely heard Berberon’s reply. Her mind was busy casting about for another solution to the dilemma. “I’ll have to remove him from the Directorship,” she said at last, turning to face the Terran Observer. “Wells will arrive at Lynx Center to find he has no authority.”

“How’s it to be done?” Berberon asked. “The accused has the right of reply during a recall. How can Wells defend himself in absentia?”

“The Committee will surely allow an exception in this case—”

“Why should they? Don’t you realize that what upsets you will please them? They
want
the Triads to have operational weapons. They assumed all along that the Mizari are real.”

Sujata fought her own rising panic. “Then the only answer is to cancel Triad. He’ll get there and he’ll have nothing to start a war with—”

“Try, and you’ll no longer be Chancellor,” Berberon said gently. “The hawkish tilt of the Committee is worse now than it was when Erickson tried to stop Triad. One politically incorrect move on your part and Loughridge will move into your office.”

“What’s the answer, then?”

“Don’t let him be out there alone,” Berberon said simply.

Sujata shut out the unwelcome words. “I—I don’t know what I was thinking. It doesn’t matter if he can’t return right away. I can still recall him,” she said, the words tumbling out on top of each other. “The dispatch will be waiting for him when he gets there. He’ll just have to turn around and comeback. Or no, even better, we can conduct a hearing on his dismissal through the Kleine. He can have his say and then we’ll be rid of him—”

Berberon shook his head slowly. “Two thirds of the people on Lynx are Defense personnel. They have seventeen years to think about him coming. More than time enough to create a powerful mythos about the man who’ll lead them as they rise up to vanquish their enemy and reclaim their pride. They’ll receive him as a soldier-messiah. He’ll become something larger than life to them.”

“No—”

“Just as Teo said, they won’t be looking to you—they’ll be looking to him. Once he’s there alone, he doesn’t have to obey you. And if he chooses to follow his conscience instead of the Service charter, there won’t be anything you can do about it. You can’t touch him there.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” she said, a note of desperation in her voice. “Teo says otherwise—and I agree with him. So do you, if you’re honest with yourself.”

Sujata threw her head back and stared up at the ceiling as a cascade of anger and indignation flooded through her.
No! Why should I have to pay the price again? I’ve only just gotten back what it cost me the first time. Damn it all, it isn’t fair—it isn’t fair
—Although those thoughts ravaged her, still she kept them bottled within her.

“The only answer I can see is for you to be even more imposing a figure and just as close at hand,” Berberon continued. “You have to follow him, in
Wesley
. You have to enforce your objection in person.”

“What good will that do?” she demanded. “You said Defense owns Lynx Center. If Wells has decided to break with the Service and follow his own path, he can refuse my orders as easily in person as he can with me here.”

“I don’t have the answer to that,” Berberon said. “He may not listen to you.” He hesitated briefly, then went on. “It may be necessary to remove Wells another way.”

She stared disbelievingly. “You can’t be serious—”

“I am perfectly serious. Teo will take care of it if we tell him it’s necessary. But even so, it already may be too late to stop this war,” Berberon said. “I’m going to have to tell my government to assume that war is coming.”

At that moment she saw in his face and heard in his voice the fear he had been trying to hide from her: a helpless fear of the ending of things, of the inevitable loss of all that was worth saving. He did not fear for himself so much as for his people, and suddenly she thought of Maranit with a vividness she had not known for years.

Berberon’s fear stilled the streets of her memories, and littered the burning maranax with bodies of her friends. Her knees suddenly weak beneath her, Sujata felt her way back to her chair. “The Committee will never permit me to leave.”

Berberon came closer and crouched down within arm’s reach. “Don’t tell them you’re going there to stop him. Tell them you’re going there to join him, because of the gravity of the situation.”

She pressed her palms to her temples and stared down at the floor. Each noisy breath carried the echoes of tears trapped within her.
I don’t want to leave Earth!
she thought in one last furious, selfish cry.
I don’t want to leave what I’ve found down there—

As though he could read her, Berberon said softly, “Janell—I’m sorry. But it has to be you. There’s no one else.”

A heart-rending sound, half cry, half moan, escaped her lips as the mask shattered and the tears came. “God damn you,” she said, sobbing. “You take and take and take. You—steal—
everything
that matters to me.” Her face twisted into an ugly rictus as she fought to stem the flood of anguish and despair. Failing, she came up suddenly out of her chair and fled with quick strides to the far wall. She threw one forearm up against the wall at head height and buried her face in the crook of her elbow.

Presently, as her sobbing weakened and slowed, she turned her face toward Berberon. Her mask was not yet up: her eyes radiated hate.

“
Fècuma. Ka’arrit
. I’ll go, God damn you,” she snapped.“I’ll catch your runaway soldier and I’ll try to cage him. But you’re coming with me, you slitter. You tell the Council whatever you have to, I don’t care. But you’re coming with me. This time it’s going to cost you too.”

As a four-time veteran of the transplant trauma, Sujata knew exactly what it represented. It was not unlike extracting an ingrown wandering vine from the hedgerow. Given enough time and a patient hand, both the hedgerow and the vine could emerge from the sundering largely undamaged. Get the transplant into new soil soon enough and almost always it would smoothly recover from what shock it necessarily endured. And in most cases the hedgerow would never even notice it was gone.

But when time was short and the direct took precedence over the delicate, both organisms were going to suffer grievously.
Cut here, uproot there, and never mind the fragile new leaves. We can prune away the damage later—

Sujata had begun the delicate business of disengaging her life from that of Wyrena Ten Ga’ar six years ago. But despite early success and the passage of time, she had never pressed the process to a conclusion. There came a time when the emotional price of the final break outweighed the gain to be had from making it. Equilibrium set in, a new equilibrium that found the circles of their lives still overlapping, but no longer congruent.

Ten Ga’ar had her own residence, her own friends, and the comfortable illusion that she was still first in Sujata’s love. In truth, Ten Ga’ar had moved to the periphery of Sujata’s emotional life. But respecting the illusion, Sujata made no effort to move anyone else into the space Ten Ga’ar had vacated.

For her part, Sujata kept her
xochaya
mates, Allianora and, later, a new émigré named Lochas—Ten Ga’ar did not know enough of the depth of those relationships to be jealous of them. And during her sabbaticals on the surface, Sujata merged herself with the mother, engaging her senses and her sensibility with the living fabric of a homeworld now more precious to her than her own. Between the two she saw to her own needs, or enough of them to keep her whole.

But she and Ten Ga’ar were still lovers; they were comfortable friends. And they were going to have to say good-bye.

Sujata had kept her decision to pursue Wells to herself as long as possible. There was no reason to deal with its ramifications until the Committee had spoken. Now, returning from the Committee chamber with that body’s permission, there was every reason to hasten the unpleasantries. The grapevine would soon be humming with rumors, and it would be crueler by far if Ten Ga’ar heard it from another.

She briefly considered taking Ten Ga’ar home with her as a courtesy, breaking the news to her where they would have the privacy to fully and freely express their feelings. But she convinced herself that Ten Ga’ar would accept the decision more readily if the Service’s needs were emphasized and the personal consequences downplayed. The impersonal atmosphere of her conference room was more conducive to such a strategy than the intimacy of her suite.

Ten Ga’ar arrived in the Chancellery Office a minute after Sujata, and they walked to the conference room together.“How did your special session go?” Ten Ga’ar asked, stopping so that Sujata could enter the room first.

“It was—productive.”

“Am I allowed to know yet what it was about?”

“That’s why I wanted to see you.”

They settled on opposite ends of a backless divan. “I don’t quite know where to start,” Sujata said. “Certain matters came to light yesterday that are going to mean a lot of changes. I don’t want to go through what those matters were or what the changes will be now, because it would just delay getting to the point. What it all means in the end is that we made a mistake.

“I made a mistake,” she corrected quickly. “I shouldn’t have let Wells leave. And to correct the mistake I’m going to have to follow him out to Lynx in
Wesley
.”

Ten Ga’ar’s eyes cast randomly about for focus as she grappled with the implications of that statement. “All right,“she said finally. “It’ll be crowded, but we can find two berths—”

Please don’t make this harder
, Sujata begged silently. “Observer Berberon will be going with me.”

“Three berths, then. We can double up some of the ratings—”

Sujata could not let the misapprehension take any stronger hold. “You won’t be going.”

A look of wounded surprise, like that of a dog whose nose has been smacked for no obvious reason, passed over Ten Ga’ar’s face. “Why?” she asked plaintively.

“In the first place there isn’t room.
Wesley
has combat accommodations. Even adding two people to the manifest will make for a miserable thirty days to Lynx.”

“But I could stay with you, in your cabin—that wouldn’t put anyone else out—”

“I’m only going to request a single command cabin, which Observer Berberon and I will share. There isn’t room for a third person.”

“You and I would only need one bunk—”

“Wy, I’m sorry—no. There’s a more important reason, besides. I need you here. I had to agree that
Wesley
would run the leg in pogo mode. We’re going to drop down for dispatches every second day, which means every nine months or so on this time track. I need someone I know and trust here to distill that nine months of activity down into something I can deal with in ninety minutes, and then to see that my decisions get carried out. Not to mention make all the little decisions that will need to be made on the spot.”

“Regan can do that, just like he has during your sabbaticals.”

“With you helping, as you have during my sabbaticals.”

Ten Ga’ar hugged herself as her eyes brightened with moisture. “You don’t want me to go. If you wanted me, these other things wouldn’t even matter. You never even considered taking me.”

The attempt at emotional blackmail triggered a rush of anger in Sujata. “No, Wy, I didn’t. I’ve been thinking about trying to stop Wells from plunging the Worlds into war. In that kind of company our relationship moves pretty far down on my list of concerns.”

Ten Ga’ar half turned away and stared down at her feet. She sat rigid and motionless except for her left hand, which played idly with a fastener on her blouse.

“I shouldn’t be surprised, really,” she said in a voice almost too faint to be heard. “You’ve been looking for a reason to break with me ever since you became Chancellor. I couldn’t move with you to the Chancellor’s suite—security, you said. I knew it was because you were embarrassed by me. The parties I wasn’t welcome at—business, you said. I knew better. The sabbaticals you took alone—once you talked about us exploring Earth together. Then, I was afraid to. But you never asked me again. You made clear I wasn’t welcome.”

Ten Ga’ar raised her head and turned a tear-streaked face toward Sujata. “I kept waiting for you to push me all the way out. But you never did. I suppose you wanted me to decide I wouldn’t stand for just a little of you and take that last step myself. Or maybe you were just reducing me to what you really wanted me for—a hand between your legs, a mouth on your breast—”

“Wyrena, stop,” Sujata said, a command and a plea. “We were living on top of each other. I needed more room, and so did you. It was never that I didn’t love you.”

Ten Ga’ar’s lost and distant look did not waver. “You never loved me as much as I loved you.” Sujata sighed. “I loved you as much and as well as I was able to.”

“And I never asked for more, did I? Even though I wanted it. Wanted what you gave Allianora. No, don’t be surprised. Even though you never talked about
xochaya
, did you think I couldn’t find out elsewhere? That still hurts, Janell. I wanted to be part of all your secrets, but you never thought me good enough.”

“It isn’t something you teach someone in an afternoon,“Sujata said helplessly. “You can’t put on another person’s culture like a change of clothing. It would have been empty of meaning.”

“Not to me,” Ten Ga’ar said, her eyes brimming over again. “Not to me.”

Infected by the other woman’s sadness, Sujata edged toward Ten Ga’ar and opened her arms. “Let me hold you.”

But Ten Ga’ar drew back defensively. “No. No, I don’t think so.” She rose from the divan and retreated a few steps to the center of the room. “I guess when I think about it, you really haven’t been very good to me—or for me—after all,“she said, her back to Sujata. “I—I don’t think I would care to go with you to Lynx, anyway. I’ll make—I’ll meet with the captain of the
Wesley
and arrange space for you and Observer Berberon.”

“Regan and Captain Hirschfield are coming in at 13:00 to work out the final arrangements,” Sujata said, though she .hated having to do so. “I wasn’t sure you’d feel like being involved—”

“I’m fine,” Ten Ga’ar said stiffly, her back still turned.

“It’s part of my job, isn’t it? I’ll come back at 13:00, then.”

She moved toward the door.

Sujata realized then that she had chosen her office for the encounter, not in the hopes of inhibiting Ten Ga’ar’s feelings, but to inhibit her own. She came to her feet and called after Ten Ga’ar, “Wy—please understand. I don’t want to do this.”

Ten Ga’ar stopped a step from the doorway but did not turn.

“Going to Lynx is the last thing I want,” Sujata said pleadingly. “I would have been happy to stay here and keep you in my life. Wy, I did love you. I still love you. I didn’t let you into my life lightly. I don’t leave easily. And I’ll never let go of the feeling.” She held out her arms, an invitation to an embrace. “Please,” she begged. “Please, Wy. Let me hold you.”

But she knew it was too late. Ten Ga’ar’s own wounds were still bleeding, rendering Sujata’s pain irrelevant. “I’ll be here at 13:00 with the others,” Ten Ga’ar said with the barest shake of her head.

She never even looked back as she walked away.

“This is wonderful news you bring me for a change, Felithe,” Tanvier said, pivoting slowly back and forth in his bowllike chair. Though the two men were alone, the World Council President wore the insincere half smile of contentment that was his public face. “The Service leadership squabbling at the highest levels—first Wells and now Chancellor Sujata hying off to the Perimeter—this almost warrants a celebration. Certainly it demands some careful reflection on the opportunities that might now open up.”

“I am ever more convinced that you’ll never understand anything I tell you correctly the first time,” Berberon said sharply. “This is a disaster, Jean-Paul, the final failure of your attempt to neutralize the Nines.”

“Final failure?” Tanvier said, reaching for his pipe and lighter. “My dear Felithe, you are so dramatic. What has changed except that the USS is now headless and will soon topple to the ground dead? By the time Wells’s little convoy reaches Lynx, we will quite likely control the space over our heads again.”

Berberon glowered in the direction of the pipe and circled Tanvier’s desk to a spot where the room’s air currents were taking the plume of pollution away from him instead of toward him. The pipe’s contents were noncarcinogenic but far from nonallergenic; smoking the pipe was something Tanvier did specifically to annoy him.

“Enjoy your triumph while you can. Because when the Mizari return, I doubt you’ll have the same cheery view of things.”

Tanvier snorted. “Do you really believe that Wells means to start a war he can’t win? The Nines are radicals, yes, but they’re not insane—Wells least of all.”

“We’re all a little bit insane, Jean-Paul,” Berberon said, leaning over the desk. “It’s the reptile brain buried down thereunder all those cosmetic layers of cortex. It keeps asking us too things that made perfect sense in the Cambrian Era but no sense at all in the world we occupy. Mostly we ignore the voice, but every now and then we say yes. Wells has already said yes to his beast. I knew that ten years ago. All he’s been waiting for is the opportunity to follow through. Which, bloody goddamnit, we went and handed to him.”

Tanvier leaned back and spread his hands wide. “What do you want from me, Felithe? You said the Chancellor was on to him. She’ll put the bad genie back in the bottle.”

“I don’t think we can take that for granted.”

“Then let Farlad loose. He’ll handle it,” Tanvier said with a shrug. “I’ll place that option at your discretion.”

“I’ve already claimed it myself, thank you. But the opportunity may not arise. And we have no one else positioned to take up the ball.”

“None of our agents were tapped for
Charan
?”

“No. And, of course, we have no in-place assets at Lynx Center or Perimeter Command. Talk to the section head about that, not me,” he added quickly.

“So we’ll be spectators,” Tanvier said sanguinely. “I ask you again—what do you want from me?”

“For one, leave the Service alone at least until this matter is resolved. If he gets to Lynx and finds that we’re answering the phones at USS-Central, he’ll figure this is his one and only chance and be all the more determined not to waste it. I don’t care how good an opportunity this appears to be. We can’t cut Janell’s legs out from under her until Wells is under control.”

Tanvier pursed his lips and drew deeply at his pipe. “You may have something there. Very well. The Service can muddle along without our interference—for now.”

Berberon nodded gratefully and settled back into a chair.“That’s a good decision, Jean-Paul. See that you stick with it.”

“Felithe, have I ever pointed out to you that you’re a pushy bastard?”

“Less often than you’ve thought it, I’m sure. So when I tell you the next part, I’m sure you’re going to want to have that celebration, after all.”

“Why? What’s the next part?”
“I’ve promised to go with Chancellor Sujata to Lynx.”
“Why to God’s Earth would you do that? Wait—you’re
not—but I heard that she was—”

“Stop right there,” Berberon snapped. “I’m going so I can try to help her pull your irons out of the fire, that’s all.”

Tanvier screwed up his face into a daunting frown. “You’re the Terran Observer to the Steering Committee of the Unified Space Service. How can you fulfill that function from twenty-five cees away?”

“The only events that matter over the next fifty years are going to take place out there. Nothing even remotely as important is going to happen in the Earth locus. I assume that you’ll want me to be where I at least have a chance to make a difference?”