Empery (25 page)

“
Selir bi’chentya
,” she began chanting in a voice that trembled and broke. “
Darnatir bi’maranya en bis losya. Ti bir naskya en bis pentaya. Loris bir rownya. Qoris nonitya—
”

Suddenly chilled through, she hugged herself and retreated a few steps from the surging water.
There
, she thought.
I’ll never leave You now, Mother. I have given myself to You. Make me forever part of You—

With an effort, she made herself turn away and walk backup the sloping beach. She picked up her shoes where she had discarded them and, surrendering to the sand clinging to her feet, tucked them under one arm. For just an instant she hesitated, stealing another glance back out to sea. Then she reached up and firmly pressed the stub of her transceiver.

“All right, Joaquim,” she called in a voice husky with emotion. “You can come back for me. I’m ready to go now.”

“Coming up on the starboard side now is
Regal Bearing
, a typical yacht of the Adara yards,” intoned Jeffrey Hawkins,
Viking
’s tour guide, in a cheery, practiced voice. “
Regal Bearing
was built in 312 A.R. for a Journan corporate collective and spent most of its active years legging from Journa to Advance Base Perseus…”

It had been four hours since
Viking
had left its moorings, and more than a hour since the tour had begun. Already there was some restlessness among the tour cruiser’s fifty-odd passengers, and some chatter among those who had already tired of Hawkins’s ongoing narration. One or two were even sleeping in the dimly lit main cabin.

But others were listening and looking out through the viewports as raptly now as they had when the first great bulk had loomed up out of the darkness and suddenly been lit by
Viking
’s powerful spotlights. Among them was a towheaded three-year-old boy seated in the back row on the starboard side. At the announcement he squirmed in his chair and craned his head in an unsuccessful effort to see past the heads, shoulders, and backs between him and the viewport.

“Pick me up, Mommy, please?” he asked plaintively.

“Sssh. Be quiet, Matt,” whispered the young woman to the child’s right.

But an elderly man with a close-cropped white beard who was sitting on the child’s left reached down with a pale, oddly scarred hand and hoisted the boy onto one shoulder. “There you go,” he said. “Can you see it now?”

The boy’s answer was a beaming smile and a gleeful, “Can you see it? Ye-ah!”

From his vantage point in the guide’s booth Jeffrey Hawkins took note of the byplay. He smiled to himself as man and child together peered out through the synglass at the still and silent shapes of the Unified Planets Spacecraft Museum slipping past.

Hawkins knew them all: sprints and warships, freighters and yachts, scattered across the blackness as though painted in place. The stillness was illusion. In reality the Museum’s exhibits were hurtling along in formation, a hundred-odd ships scattered through a hundred cubic kilometres, their hulls bronzed by light from the giant red star Arcturus. Moving as one, they traced an orbit between the habitable planet Cheia, home to the Arcturus New Colony, and the Jovian planet Chryseis.

It was Hawkins’s third season as
Viking
’s tour guide. Three weeks out of every two years, the Museum passed close enough to Cheia for
Viking
to carry the curious for a visit. The tours were not run to provide a profit but rather a service. They were a way to say to the Service bureaucracy at Central,“Yes, we value what you’ve sent us—send us more.”

In those three seasons Hawkins had come to know the two kinds of people who came to the Museum as well as he had the ships themselves. The first group, those Hawkins thought of as the believers, usually comprised the majority of the visitors. They were the ones who came to marvel at the technology, to steep themselves in the history. Like Hawkins, nearly all had been born on Cheia. Also like Hawkins, they had no real hope of ever leaving it.

The believers came to the Museum with a wistful longing and the conviction that circumstance had conspired to deprive them of something wonderful. For them the ships represented other worlds, other times, other lives. The bearded man with the child on his shoulder was one such; Hawkins could read the emotions on his face, could see it in the way he had treated the child’s request as something important.

By contrast, the child’s mother belonged to the category Hawkins called the skimmers. Some skimmers were tourists in the true sense: members of visiting packet crews who came to the Museum only to he able to say when they returned to Boötes Center or Earth that they had been to a place that was beyond the reach of their audience.

But most skimmers were native Cheians. They were the type of social gadflies who were only interested in championship games, finish lines, and opening nights. Their interest in an event or activity was related less to the inner satisfaction that might be derived from it than to its snob value and trendiness.

It was the skimmers who had packed
Viking
for this tour, just as they had every tour this season; ordinarily the four rows of seats would have been half full or less. It was the skimmers who were talking and dozing and shifting impatiently in their seats. They had no interest in a typical yacht of the Achernar yards, or the bulk-cargo packet retired from the Cygnus-Maranit run, or any of the Museum’s proletarian vessels. They had come to see the royalty. They had come because of
Munin
.

Five years earlier
Munin
had arrived at Arcturus New Colony from Boötes Center carrying twenty-six emigrants and as great a volume of technological trade goods as could coexist with her human cargo. From the first, her presence had caused a sensation. While she was being unloaded at Equatorial Station so many people left their jobs elsewhere on the orbiting base to come see her that the station manager felt obliged to declare the docks restricted. Six hours later he surrendered in the face of a, near mutiny and issued a visitation schedule instead.

However extreme, the interest in
Munin
was perfectly understandable. With
Pride of Earth
now a ground-based monument in the Journan capital,
Dove
destroyed, and
Hug in
scrapped,
Munin
was the oldest surviving pioneer survey ship, the last of the Pathfinders on whose exploits the entire Survey Branch had been founded.

But transcending even that,
Munin
was “Merritt Thackery’s ship”—the instrument of the Revision, by extension a symbol of the D’shanna themselves. Such was her cachet that already several hundred Cheian colonists claimed to have emigrated aboard her, and the number was sure to grow in the years to come.

With such a pedigree
Munin
immediately had become the centerpiece of the Museum, most of the holdings of which were of little intrinsic value. They were there more or less by default; ships that, one step from being scrapped, had made one last journey as part of Arcturus New Colony’s one-way lifeline. That was reflected in the care they were given; though their external appearances were maintained by the Museum staff, no effort was expended to keep their systems operational. Many could no longer even hold an atmosphere.

Munin had been treated very differently. When her last passengers had disembarked, her hold had been emptied, and her final crew had signed off, she had been turned over to the Museum historians. Their charge was to see that
Munin
was restored inside and out to match as closely as possible her appearance when, with Thackery commanding, she had crossed paths with the D’shanna among the stars of Ursa Major.

During the Museum’s last close pass to Cheia the curators had still been at their task, their tug and work barge moored alongside and
Munin
’s exterior further hidden by work rigging. Many had come to see
Munin
then and gone back disappointed. Now
Munin
was ready, not only to be seen but also to be boarded. Hawkins was not surprised, then, that his show was now playing to a packed audience. But he also could not help but feel more kindly toward the believers aboard than toward the skimmers.

On this particular tour Hawkins had spotted someone he knew among the passengers, a man who did not qualify either as believer or skimmer: Colonel Ramiz. As second-in-command of the Defense Branch’s small contingent on Cheia, the little man with the jet-black hair, pinched face, and unpleasant manner was a familiar sight around the Equatorial Station—much noticed but little regarded.

But why Ramiz was aboard
Viking
was something of a puzzlement to Hawkins. When
Munin
had come in, Ramiz had gone aboard in the company of a gaggle of shipwrights, trying to decide whether she could be turned into a sort of bargain-basement Defender for the ANC. Surely he had seen all that he needed to of her then—unless he had changed his mind about her usefulness?

“There she is,” someone cried suddenly. “There’s
Munin
!”

Fifty heads turned as fifty pairs of eyes searched space beyond the viewports. There was a chorus of oohs and ahs, and Hawkins forgot Ramiz. He liked to let his passengers spot
Munin
for themselves, tried to allow them that little thrill of discovery, but once they had, it was time to go to work.

“That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. That giant ship coming up to starboard is none other than S3
Munin
, last surviving Pathfinder, flagship of the Unified Worlds Museum, and still carrying an honorary commission from the Survey Branch of the USS. In just a few minutes we’ll be going aboard, starting with those of you sitting on the portside—no, sorry, too late to change seats, but you’ll all have your chance—”

As Hawkins had guessed, Colonel Raymond Ramiz was not aboard
Viking
for the tour. He was there to keep an eye on the bearded man who called himself J. M. Langston, but who years ago and cees away had had another name.

Ramiz’s instructions had come not from the Defense hierarchy but from the Upper Tier, and they were simple. Langston was not to leave Cheia—ever. So long as he kept to himself and led a quiet life, Ramiz was to let him be. But if Langston tried to get near any ship capable of intersystem flight, he was to be stopped.

In the five months since his arrival, Langston had given every indication he intended nothing more than to disappear into the woodwork. Take the matter of
Fireside
; his first act had been to sell it to the Colony Manager’s office, under terms that would make him comfortable on Cheia for as long as he might be expected to live.

Aside from what it said about his intentions, the sale also showed his willingness to adapt to local conventions. Though technically operating on the official Service currency, Arcturus New Colony was loath to embrace those who brought only paper wealth to the community. They took from the colony with their Coullars more than those Coullars could bring back to the colony, since the once-every-five-years packet schedule created a bottleneck that prevented exchanging the surplus for something useful.

So new Coullars brought from the outside could only cheapen old Coullars, and those who brought them and nothing else faced the community’s opprobrium. Langston had that kind of wealth but left it untouched. He lived within the limits of his locally derived income and so escaped any unwelcome notoriety.

But the thought of Langston aboard
Munin
, even as a visitor, made Ramiz uncomfortable, and so he had tagged along. He was even more concerned after seeing how careless the Museum was about security. As each passenger had paid his fare the clerk had collected his name—but had not checked those names, even against their own identification. Ramiz knew that for certain, since the phony name he himself had given to test them had gone unchallenged. They did not know who they had aboard.

At least the young tour guide took the elementary precaution of tallying up with a hand counter the number going aboard. Ignoring the indignant looks from the other passengers, Ramiz edged his way forward until only two bodies separated him from Langston. He did not know what he thought Langston might do, but he was confident that he could stop him.

The group gathered briefly on the ed-rec deck to listen to Hawkins outline the ground rules for the tour. When Hawkins led the way downship, Ramiz made sure that Langston started down the climbway first, so that he would have him in sight at all times.

They paused for a short spiel at the drive-core access hatch, again at the contact lab, and ended their descent in the dress-out room and the gig bay. When they started back, by virtue of having been one of the last down, Ramiz found himself trapped into being one of the leaders going up. He comforted himself with the realization that there was really nowhere Langston could go.

On the way back up, Hawkins took them through the wardroom and allowed them to peek inside two of the restored cabins, including Thackery’s. Then it was on to their last stop, the bridge.

A surprise was waiting on the bridge: animated holograms of the ship’s crew moving in synchrony with the canned chatter. There was Thackery at his command station, and Amelia Koi, and Derrel Guerrieri, and Gwen Shinault. Chuckling to himself, Ramiz turned to catch Langston’s reaction. But Langston was not there.

Pushing his way past the others, Ramiz rushed to the railing at the edge of the climbway and looked down. Neither of the two tourists still climbing was Langston. Swinging himself over the railing, Ramiz started back down.

He descended the climbway slowly, with catlike agility and a light step, trying to sort out any unusual sounds from the cacophony filtering down to him from Hawkins and the others. He did not have to go far. Langston was standing facing one of the now-closed doors on B-deck, where the command cabins were. On the door before him was a small brass plaque that read M. THACKERY, CMDR. in three-centimetre-tall block letters.

“This is wrong. This wasn’t here,” the bearded man whispered to himself as he traced the grooves of the engraving with a fingertip.

Ramiz had seen enough. “You,” he barked, stepping off the climbway. “What do you think you’re doing? You’ve got no special privileges here. Get upship with the others.”

Langston started and looked back over his shoulder with a frightened look in his eyes. As he did, Hawkins materialized on the climbway just above and behind Ramiz. The tour guide gave both Langston and Ramiz long, hard looks, then continued down past them. “Come along now, folks,” he called backup the climbway, “I’m sure your friends and companions back on board
Viking
are mighty impatient for their turn.”

Eyes downcast, Langston brushed past Ramiz and joined the migration back to the entry port. Ramiz waited until the last of the passengers was by, then took his time descending, studying the ship’s interior from a different perspective than he had the last time he was aboard.

But as he reached the port and tried to pass Hawkins, the tour guide stepped away from the wall and blocked the way.“What are you doing here?”