Fall of the White Ship Avatar (16 page)

"What else?" Aside from the place itself, there was the matter of the real Hecate's astounding powers.

What she'd done, especially with no visible equipment, was impossible to any human technology Alacrity knew of. The impact of that brought him around fully. What it meant to his campaign to win—

win
back,
as he thought of it—the White Ship was almost as strong a stimulus as his survival mechanism, which had sweat standing out all over him.

He rolled over to the impostor, who knelt next to him, making a grab for her as she yelped, "
Chikusho
!"

Before she could counter, he snagged one of her handguns. It
was
merely a lousy flashlight, a low-intensity beamer good only for producing pretty light effects and triggering holotarget detonations. No wonder the Lebensraum cops let her use them.

"Where'd she go?" Alacrity snapped. "How long's Hecate been gone? Did you spot a way out of here?"

The Epiphany site had had a wide adit allowing easy access. There didn't seem to be one close to hand at the moment though.

Floyt was sitting up, rubbing his temples and eyes. For the first time he noticed that Alacrity's brolly and the impostor's evening shawl were lying nearby, though there was none of the debris and wreckage the real Hecate had kicked up back in the arena. That suggested an astonishing degree of fine control.

The impostor shook her head, brushing black hair back off her forehead so that the moonpure flashed blue-white. "I only came around a minute ago myself. I heard her off laughing, somewhere in the dark.

Over that way, I think. She was moving away from us, by the sound."

Floyt glanced around, saying "Maybe it's best we exit in the opposite direction, eh?"

"Napoleon couldn't have said it any better, Ho. C'mon, angel; we'd better—"

That was all he'd got out of his mouth when Hecate came screeching down at them out of the darkness like a harpy, wild hair fluttering, lit as if by St. Elmo's fire, shedding green flame and comet bursts.

They ducked and Alacrity almost fired at her with the useless target pistol, but thought better of it. As she swooped on them the place grew bright, light coming from the terraced systemry jungle. Hecate pulled up short, barely missing the impostor's head, then soared away again. The smell of her was ozone, file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...y%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (79 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

unwashed body, and rancid, rotting clothes.

She banked and came rocketing down again, to decelerate and alight without a jar, strobing with power and throwing off multicolored streamers of energy, her aura seething and rotating. The younger woman backed away from her with a desperate look on her face and hands raised for defense. Against his better judgment, Alacrity found himself moving to intervene. He wanted very much to avoid violence. He wanted even more to wrest from Hecate, by whatever means it took, the Precursor secrets the deranged hag had discovered.

"You! Lying cow! What's your real name?" Hecate's voice made the place resound. She set her claws on the butts of her corroded pistols.

The impostor swallowed loudly before she could get out an answer. "Paloma. Paloma Sudan. I haven't done anything to you! Let us go!"

"Not done anything? Only stolen my name! Only traded on my reputation! Only shamed me, you ugly little
pendeja
!"

Hecate advanced on Paloma Sudan, her long, cracked claws raised. Alacrity automatically took a step to restrain her, but Hecate's aura touched his fingertips and it felt tike every joint in his body was being tractored apart, the flesh sliced from him by flensing beams.

Hecate seized his shipsuit and tossed him aside. Alacrity flew like a sack of clothes, losing the pistol, to bounce across the black floor, nearly out again, seeing motes of light whirl before his eyes.
Oo-oo!

Lookit all the pretty neuron firings!

Floyt began easing toward the umbrella; bare hands plainly weren't much good.

Paloma tried to dodge but Hecate's responses were down in the single-digit millisecond range. She instantly grabbed a handful of Paloma's hair and let the aura die away. She was oblivious to Paloma Sudan's hysterical kicks and punches.

Winding the handful of hair tightly, Hecate forced Paloma to her knees. Then she threw her free hand up in a grand gesture. The cascading systemry flowed with brilliance and gave off rich, strange tones stopping Floyt in his tracks as he planned his attack. Parts of the instrumentality appeared to be moving.

Alacrity paused in trying to regain his feet, transfixed. No one anywhere had ever done anything to compare with what he was witnessing. Mad Hecate had made a major, probably pivotal breakthrough in penetrating the secrets of the Precursors—the First Ones, as she called them.

"This is Hecate's power!" she trumpeted, coal-eyes blazing. "Take a good look at it, dearie, because in a moment I'm going to cram you into a tiny pocket of limbo and leave you there forever!"

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

She pointed a finger. A green globe appeared, pulsing like a Cepheid, going from one meter in diameter down to the size of a handball and back up again every few seconds.

And Ho and me are here as witnesses, or will it be cellmates?
Alacrity wondered. The hair stood up all along the deep V-mane that grew down his spine, and the blood drained from his face at the thought of being wadded up in some miniverse until the end of time.

Floyt's thoughts were running along the same lines, and he was also concerned for Paloma's life. So he discovered his mouth was shouting a very unwise thing:

"Why should we believe you? This doesn't prove you're the real Hecate!"

The laser eyes swung to him, and he discovered that his knees were knocking. He realized that he had the brolly raised, and brought it down to lean on it.

"So, you don't believe I'm Hecate, you little
germ
? Well, I've got a simple remedy for that! In you all go
together.
The more the squirmier! You'll have eternity to figure out how badly you just
fucked up
!"

The green globe began to expand, large enough to take three bodies inboard at its maximum, shrinking back to a toy with the same regularity. Winds came up in the far corners of the chamber. The sphere drifted closer to Floyt. Alacrity got set to give Hecate his last, best shot.

But Floyt got a grip on himself and spoke first. "Th-there's a much simpler way, if you
are
Hecate." The storm died a little; Hecate's eyes narrowed suspiciously, sending out flat, fiery swaths of light.

"The true Hecate owns shares in the White Ship, from long ago when she still went under the name Loebelia Curry. Loebelia Curry, yes, that was her name. Hecate would recall that."

Alacrity held his breath and Paloma froze. The old woman's lips were shaping the name
Loebelia Curry
over and over, eyes unfocused, releasing orange radiance into the distance, thoughts flung back far through space and time.

Apparently befuddled, she abruptly looked back to Floyt. He followed up on his sally desperately. "You owned voting shares in the Board of Interested Parties, do you recollect that? But you haven't exercised your franchise in a very long time. Er, perhaps you remember the ownership code numbers? And the access passwords?" He activated the pickup for his proteus's sound-recording mode. Alacrity silently did the same, sucking in breath through clenched teeth.

But instead of blurting the codes, Hecate roughly pushed Paloma aside, set her fists on her hips, threw her head back, and shook with high-pitched laughter. It was a partial transformation; there was less demented cackle to it.

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

Hecate laughed until she was out of breath, until she clutched her middle, slapping her thigh. The captives held their poses. The old woman waved at Floyt, as if telling him to stop. At last she ran down, trying to straighten.

"Hoo! I'd forgotten how it feels, this body, when it laughs." Then she was off in another paroxysm as the others swapped uncertain glances. "That ship, that … White Ship!" Hecate managed after a while. "Are those fools still working on her? I'd forgotten all about her. Oh, that's the funniest thing I've heard in a star's age!" The beams from her eyes danced.

"Those pinheads! They wouldn't listen to me, no! Oh, that's ripe!"

"Could you let us in on the joke?" Alacrity hazarded. "We could use a chuckle." Paloma was on her feet, watching Hecate guardedly.

"I told them years and years ago," the old woman managed. "I told them, 'This White Ship project will
never
be finished!' I saw that they'd never
wring
the secrets of the First Ones out of the universe. 'You don't grab Creation by the scrote and
twist
revelations out of it!' I told them."

"And they were too stupid to listen,' Floyt steered deftly. "Too stubborn and arrogant to do it your way."

She suddenly looked crafty. "My way, yes. You want to know what my way is, hey? Do you, germie?

All right, but it's nothing you'll ever use. It's nothing anyone will ever use but Hecate!"

She gave them a twisted grin. "You don't force secrets out of the artifacts of the First Ones. You entice them out. You
seduce
them out. Now, how do you seduce someone?"

The three looked at one another helplessly.

"Oh, you numbskulls! You
join
with them. You
mate
with them. You marry yourself to the secrets of the Precursors body and soul and spirit and mind!"

And go insane in the doing,
Floyt thought. Perhaps human beings could only uncover Precursor secrets through madness. He glanced to his friend, wondering if Alacrity would be willing to.

Alacrity was carefully stifling his urge to leap at Hecate and beat the secrets out of her. "You mean, you've got all their knowledge?
Trois fois merde
! You're up there with
them,
the Precursors!"

She laughed again, but bitterly. "What year is this? Ah, never mind; I have eternity to play with now.

No, I'm barely a zygote on the scale of the First Ones, but you … you're not even alive! And you never will be!"

The power of the instrumentality strobed brighter. Alacrity tried to gulp but couldn't.

"But you're still one of us," Floyt said, trying to lay on conviction he didn't feel. "No matter how file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...y%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (82 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

different they are, humans are still human. I know; I'm a genealogist. Human beings all share—"

She didn't vaporize Floyt on the spot, which was what Alacrity expected to see. The fires swept up from her, coiling and expanding.

"Genealogy? What an absurd pastime! I became bored with it long since. Would you like to know how you little homo-ape-ians connect to me, perhaps? I doubt that mudpie you call a brain could encompass it."

She raised her hands high. A megadetonation of luminosity and sound staggered the three captives. Floyt leaned back to look up, nearly teetering back on his rear end, and saw a family tree, or at least part of one. It took him a few seconds to figure out what he was looking at.

The thing was infinitely complex. Details seemed to spring out at him and leap into clarity as he focused on them, then retreat as he scanned on—the names or identity quanta of more human beings than there were stars in the galaxy. The ones he focused on he saw vividly, feeling he knew them and had a grasp of their lives.

More, there were connections, the whole webwork of human history in four dimensions, lucid and immediate, so that the connections between any two or more, living or dead, were emphatic and plain enough to understand. A part of him speculated on whether he was seeing into Hecate's mind, her instrumentality, or some wisdom of the First Ones.
Something like the causality harp?
he wondered.
Or
has every sentient being somehow left its mark on Infinity?

He tried to scan his Overvision back to the beginning of things, but a numbing disorientation came over him and he felt his grip on himself slipping away, breath short and blood kettledrumming in his forehead. Hecate was right; his brain wasn't capable of what he was attempting.

He renounced his Overvision, terrified. The great family tree was gone; Floyt was back on the floor, groaning. "That's a little of what I can do." Hecate sniggered. "Do you still think I'm one of you? What should I care about your White Ship for?"

Paloma looked around at the forest of instrumentality. "No reason, when you've got Precursor machines serving you."

Hecate scowled at her, some of the anger coming back, then cackled and slapped her thigh again.

"Precursor? That? Why, you daffy little tramp!
I
built that! What'd you think I've been doing all this time?"

"You?" Floyt and Alacrity both yelped at the same time.

The expression Hecate gave them was almost coquettish, in a loopy way. "Who else? It's not much. It's file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...y%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (83 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

like exploring the Central Library at Spica and barely learning the alphabet. But it
is
so wonderful, my god-lover! Who do you think heard the songs of the First Ones you were playing in space and brought them to my attention? And that's when I found out there was a faker using my name."

She gazed about at her god-lover/instrumentality. "It is so wise. In fact, there are some regions of it I don't quite understand myself."