The Rifter's Covenant (63 page)

“She confessed
treason to you and you said nothing?” She knew he was angry; his expression
remained shuttered but his entire body radiated tension.

“Her confession to
you was her penance. But even had she refused that, the matter of Confession in
a religious context may not be revealed for any reason.” He knew that, surely;
it was common to many religions in the Thousand Suns.

“Yet you used it
for your own ends.” He picked up a seed cake then set it down again on his
plate.

“They are not my
ends, Your Majesty.” The memory of the taste of blood tightened her throat. “I
have not had such liberty since my third hejir commenced, back on Desrien.” She
rubbed the image the Digrammaton had burned into her palm after its mysterious
leap from Arthelion. It had still been searing hot from the nuclear atrocity,
meant for Brandon, that had killed her predecessor. The Panarch’s eyes followed
the motion, but he showed no reaction.

“Before you were
brought to Desrien I was shown Vi’ya, and others. I was left no doubt that they
were a Hinge of Time, a pivot of great affairs.” She sipped at her tea to wash
away the remembered taste of blood. This present moment, too, was part of that
chalice.

The Panarch
remained silent as his long, slender fingers crumbled the seedcake. He tossed bits
of it out onto the lawn, where small birds, red, blue, yellow fought greedily over
them. How could she explain to him the inevitable interlocking of events and
people that announced, more clearly than sight or touch or any physical sense,
the movement of the Hand of Telos?

“Have you ever
body-surfed, Your Majesty?” she asked.

He glanced up at
her. “Yes.”

“Then you know how
the wave picks you up and bears you forward irresistibly. You can choose your
direction, to some extent, but you cannot go back.”

He nodded, brushing
his hands together. The seedcake was gone.

“That wave is the
summation of countless currents and winds and storms of which you have no
knowledge. It is such a wave that impels me.” She hesitated, reluctant to
commit personal trespass. “I do not know Vi’ya as well as I would have liked,
but I am certain of one thing. No one could have kept her here against her
will. She would have kept trying to escape until an attempt killed her.”

Brandon sat, head
bent, then stirred at last. “Do you think that she can activate the Suneater
and wrest it from Eusabian?” he asked finally, and she knew he had accepted her
reasons, if not her actions.

She stared down
into her cup, sorting impressions, words.

“You said once
there was another in your vision that you never found,” he added when she
didn’t answer immediately. “If the Unity is incomplete . . . .” He paused,
leaning forward to pick up his cup again. She sensed the motion was a
sublimation of his intense hope that the missing person was not part of the
Unity. That Vi’ya could succeed.

Eloatri remembered Anaris’s
sneering face from the vid of the Gehenna action. The Panarch’s enemy, more
even than Eusabian. This might seem the worst part of her betrayal.

“The last member of
the Unity is already on the Suneater, Your Majesty.”

Brandon raised his
head to look directly at her, the delicate chinois cup forgotten in his hand.

Eloatri returned
his gaze without flinching. This was her own penance. “It is Anaris, Eusabian’s
son.”

Lysanter
personally assisted the dazed tempath back to his quarters, exulting in his
first success. Norio had survived!

The gray-uniformed
ordinary lowered the tempath onto his bed. “Be careful!” Lysanter said,
mangling the harsh Dol’jharian consonants. It was one of the few phrases he
knew. There was so little time for anything but Urian science, and he really
disliked the Dol’jharian language.

Dismissing the
guard, he then stooped and lifted one of the tempath’s eyelids. The eye glinted
out at him in rapid motion. REM sleep. The Negus was catching up with him.

Lysanter was
fascinated by the mix of drugs that Norio had concocted; the man had an
interesting cookbook mind. But it was apparent from the minimal effects of the
tempath’s first contact with the Heart of Kronos that they would have to cut
down the dose in careful increments, to find the balance between control and
insanity or death.

Lysanter lowered
the neural monitor into range and tapped it; a flicker connected it to the
dataconsole. Then he pulled the portable leads off Norio’s head and neck, the
skin affinity of the plasflesh sensors puckering the tempath’s sallow skin over
the neural nexi. The man’s dreaming mind apparently incorporated the stimuli
and his loose, petulant mouth pursed in a prurient sigh. His hand groped,
grasping Lysanter’s.

Lysanter yanked his
hand free and jumped back, prickling all over with intense disgust and under
that shame, although no one was there to see. He hated being so polar, which had
led him to flee the sexual sophistication of his Douloi upbringing as soon as
he came of age. Perhaps that was why he was comfortable enough among
Dol’jharians, even if he couldn’t talk to most of them. They were rigidly puritanical
and at least theoretically heterosexual—a word with only clinical meaning in
most of the Thousand Suns—as their four-times-yearly sexual ritual was
expressed only in terms of procreation.

When he was assured
that Norio’s vital signs were stable, he left, hurrying back to his datacenter.
He spent so much time there that they’d had to install more stasis clamps.
Other offices weren’t tenanted long enough to animate the station’s substance.
In fact, only the top Bori bureaucrats had offices; all others were condemned
to circulate through open-space work centers. Lysanter had noted how unhappy
they looked.

Barrodagh was
waiting in the datacenter, dwarfed by the towering data arrays that the cims
were laboring nonstop to replicate. The station was so complex! Two things that
he would never have enough of, Lysanter thought, were quantum interfaces to
gather the data and compute arrays to analyze it.

“What were the results?”
Barrodagh looked haggard, and one side of his face was twisted oddly, almost as
though he’d had a stroke.

“We’re still
analyzing them,” Lysanter replied in what he hoped sounded like a soothing,
cooperative tone. “It will take hours, although a preliminary report is ready
for you to download.” They wouldn’t even have that if it weren’t for Tatriman,
the little Bori noderunner Morrighon had brought with him. She was a marvel.

“But,” he added as
Barrodagh frowned, “It was a resounding success. Norio lived through it, and
remained sane!”

Barrodagh’s cheek
twitched. “Was there any augmentation of the station’s power?”

“Apparently not.”

Obviously
unsatisfied, but apparently, finally aware of his, Lysanter’s, near-equal power
when dealing with the Avatar, Barrodagh launched into a familiar litany of
complaint.

This was the
difficult part of dealing with Dol’jharians and their minions. They thought
only in terms of power and control—which had to make the Suneater a very
uncomfortable place for them. He stifled the flutter of humor in his throat.
That was one of the few pleasures in which he indulged aside from his work:
watching Bori and Dol’jharian reactions—never the Avatar, of course—to the
organic and ingestion archetypes the station evoked. And ghosts and spirits,
not that there was much opportunity for those metaphors here.

Although Morrighon
didn’t seem as much in thrall to such fears as the other Catennach Lysanter
came in contact with. Was that due to his service to Anaris, who had been
partly raised as a hostage on Arthelion, and who thus might himself be less
subject to discomfort here on the station? Well, he could never know: the only
way of falsifying the hypothesis had the mindripper at the end of it.

As Barrodagh began
winding down toward his usual threats and exhortations, Lysanter nodded, but he
heard scarcely two words in twenty. Thinking over his last communication with
Ferrasin at Arthelion, he wondered what was happening in the Mandala: had the
mysterious computer phantom really become flesh? Surely not.

All things
considered, as uncomfortable as the Suneater was in many respects, he was glad
not to be responsible for dealing with something the Dol’jharians called The
Mask.

Barrodagh saw that
Lysanter had drifted off again. He was always tempted to take advantage of it,
but the scientist had demonstrated the futility of that on more than one
occasion. His reveries were not lapses of alertness.

“What about the
drugs?” Barrodagh asked in an abrupt change of subject. Time to wake up, idiot
.

Lysanter started,
his eyes flickering, causing an acidic spurt of triumph in Barrodagh. “We’ll
cut down Danali’s dosage incrementally until we find a safe level for
manipulation of the station.”

“No,” said
Barrodagh impatiently. “I meant, what are they? Have you had them analyzed yet?”
His cheek twinged again through the numbness; this was the most vitally urgent question,
though he dared not let anyone suspect why.

“Oh, yes. You’ll
find that in my report. Basically a complex polysaccharide from a Vilarian
plant, plus a number of other compounds: some desensitizers, mod stabilizers,
anxiolytics, REM-sleep moderators, that sort of thing.” Lysanter dismissed the
slapdash chemistry with a wave of his hand.

Barrodagh
suppressed a snarl of frustration. He’d be up all night datadiving to figure
out what the compounds would do, and if any would help him. He certainly couldn’t
ask Lysanter; the word would get back to Morrighon immediately, perhaps even
the Avatar.

Barrodagh moved to
the next vexing subject: cims. He hated being so obvious, but directness often
seemed to work better for getting information out of Lysanter than threats,
though the increasing impatience of the restless Avatar was all too real.

“The Avatar has
left me no leeway there, serach Barrodagh,” replied Lysanter, formally, paralleling
Barrodagh’s thoughts in an unsettling way. Deliberate provocation? “The last
batch of stasis clamps went to Norio’s cabin, and you know that the Lord of
Vengeance has instructed me to hold a number in reserve should he request more.
The next batch is not scheduled for four days. I forget the precise schedule.
It’s in Delmantias’s report.”

Barrodagh’s jaw
ached. No, not deliberate—again, Lysanter seemed oblivious to anything outside
of his own interests. Except when the Avatar’s orders were direct, as they had
been in this instance. Infuriated by his impotence, Barrodagh forced himself to
listen as Lysanter went on.

“You really should
let me try tuning them. If you’re willing to accept a little movement,
especially in the floor, most of the other manifestations can be controlled
easily.”

Movement? Barrodagh
tensed to control the ache behind his sternum that presaged a shudder. How
could Lysanter stand it? He had very few clamps in his quarters. Barrodagh had
been there only once. The occasional heaving underfoot had terrified him.

He left. As
promised, the preliminary report was waiting on his console. He ignored the
rest of the data and tabbed straight to the report on the drugs.

An hour after that
he had his answer. Some of the compounds were useless to him: only a fool would
take euphorics around Dol’jharians. But two of the compounds were more
effective on tics and similar neural disorders than anything he had. And they
didn’t have the side effect of trigeminal numbness; the semi-paralysis that
caused was far too revealing. He cross-referenced their physical properties until
he found largely inert equivalents. The next time Norio was in the Chamber of
Kronos, Barrodagh would pay his cabin a visit. The tempath had more than enough
to spare.

o0o

Morrighon DL’d
the report into his compad while he watched Anaris slowly recover from the heavy
tranquilizer he’d taken before the scheduled experiment. The leaden prose
lulled him, slowly walling away the near-terror he’d felt when the Suneater
again trembled, the lights flickering as the station’s struggle against the
stasis clamps taxed the lighting circuits. And even though Anaris had been
unconscious, his t’kinetic power had again animated the furnishings of his cabin.

Morrighon had reached
the section concerning Norio Danali’s drugs when Anaris sat up slowly, then
massaged his temples.

“What did you
observe?” he asked. “It feels like there was a manifestation.”

“Very slight,
lord.” Morrighon swallowed. “Papers and small objects. They seemed to be
attempting to form a pattern. I could not make it out.” He tapped his compad
and held it out, replaying the t’kinetic display that had resulted when Norio
made his first contact with the Heart of Kronos.

Anaris took it,
stared, then dropped the compad on the bed. “The tempath?”

“Alive and sane. He
was apparently heavily drugged. They will reduce the doses incrementally to see
what happens. I have the proposed schedule for the next few experiments.” He
picked up the compad and retreated. “There will be no more surprises.”

Anaris made no
comment, merely asking, “What drugs were used?”

Morrighon read off
the list. Each compound had a brief description of its activity appended, with
links to the main databanks. Anaris took the compad back from him and tabbed
it, apparently following a reference.

“Euphorics.” He
snorted. “Might as well kiss a numathanat.” He looked further.

Numathanat? In a
world where an inappropriate smile could be fatal, Morrighon was convinced that
a numathanat—whatever that was—could hardly be more dangerous than a euphoric.

Anaris stopped
tabbing. “Negus.” His gaze diffused. “Some of the citations note that it mutes
tempathic sensitivity. I wonder if it would work the same on the other gifts of
the Chorei?”