Starfire Saga, page 46
“Is this another legend the starfire told your na-sire and Venacrona to create?” I asked him.
Ashkalin looked at me curiously.
Jemeret shook his head, not bothering to explain the basis for the question. “The legend of the Isle of the Wise is much older than the meteor shower that occurred just before the starfire appeared here.”
Ashkalin seemed to debate asking, but didn’t. It’s interesting how people who understand something about secrets often don’t ask questions they might otherwise pursue. It’s as if the very recognition that you have a secret—and Ashkalin shared with Jemeret, Venacrona, Sabaran, and Sandalari the big secret of the existence of the Com—prepares you to accept that other people have secrets, too. Instead, the Lord of the Marl said, “My ships have looked for the Isle of the Wise on their long-water runs, but even then we don’t seem to have gone far enough to find it. The ocean stretches much farther than we can go when we’re fishing. As far as I know, it’s never been fully explored.” He turned back to my lord. “And if you’re not back in time for Convalee?”
“If we aren’t at the Plain of Convalee in latesummer next year, then hold all of the normal activities except the Day of the Bell and agree to meet again two years later. But—” He paused. “—we’ll send you word if it doesn’t look like we’ll be here.”
I wanted to say that we were sure to have returned by the second summer from now, but then it occurred to me that I had little right to be sure of very much. And, though Ashkalin seemed to know what Jemeret meant by the stakes he would be playing for, I didn’t.
“So how are we going to get you back across the Honish lands when they’ve got an army waiting on the border?” Ashkalin asked.
“Can’t we go around them, by ship?” I asked, looking from one of them to the other.
“We can’t,” Jemeret said, “but it may be better for us if Ginestra, Lyrafi, and Tatatin go that way. It’s not just that the sea roads would delay us nearly a month and I want to be off-world as soon as possible. It’s that I feel we have to give the Honish a lesson, and if Krenigo—or some agent they placed with the Vylk—arranged for them to pick this spot and time, I’m for seeing they get it.”
Ashkalin masked his surprise, but I was reading him fairly steadily, and I recognized its depth. “You will not convince me that you want a war with the Honish now any more than you want a war in the tribes of the Samoth,” he said.
“I said a lesson,” Jemeret corrected him, “not a war.”
The two men looked levelly at one another for a moment and then slowly smiled, as if sharing an understanding. Ashkalin asked, “You’re truly going to try to shut down the machines?”
My body jerked as if I’d just received an overload, which, in a way, I had. Jemeret’s gray eyes swiveled to me even as he nodded to Ashkalin. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m tired of giving them our children and having them throw back the broken ones. When I couldn’t save Zitten—the young man from the Resni who wanted the sting so much he took all those drugs about fifteen years ago—when I recognized that your son had paid with his life, when I saw what had happened to Ronica, I swore there had to be a way to break the Com’s hold over us, and if I have to break it over everyone else to accomplish that, then that’s what I have to try to do. They rely on the MIs for everything. They’ve given the machines too much of what belongs to us.”
I stared at him. He sighed. “And then when the starfire told us that the Com isn’t letting talent evolve the way it should, that the entire human race is in jeopardy because of that enforced restraint, I had even more reasons to want to act.”
I was utterly flabbergasted. I’d known for some time that my Lord Jemeret was a confident man with great power, but I had never believed him to be reckless. Indeed, in the time I’d been on Caryldon, he’d been extremely cautious, almost conservative. But he’d just made several of the most foolhardy statements I’d ever heard, and I knew from the way he was watching me that he was waiting for my reaction.
I took a swallow of the really terrible shilfnin and asked slowly, “Did I understand you? You want to go up against the power of the Com? You want to shut off the MIs?”
He didn’t answer directly, just watched me.
He was a powerful man, but the Com was—the Com. The MIs were—I didn’t know I believed it until then—overwhelmingly powerful. And I knew the Com. It had raised me. It was two hundred and fifty worlds, their resources and people, supported by a union of human and machine intelligences governing the far-flung empire with economic, technological, political, and military persuasion. The unity of government and MIs was the greatest force imaginable, seemingly impregnable, its methods as subtle as the offer of scientific upgrading, longer life and greater wealth, or as gross as the clone army called the Drenalion. All it asked was that the populations contributed as required and never created problems.
“It can’t be done,” I whispered.
“The starfire says it may be possible,” Jemeret told me calmly. “You were standing right beside me when they said it.”
“Your wish was that the Com be—” I found I couldn’t say it, as if speaking it and making it real would bring the whole weight of the Com down on us.
Jemeret smiled at me. “Don’t panic, love. We won’t be doing anything until we have a course of action we can follow. And I don’t have any notion of trying to destroy the government as such, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just want to rewrite a treaty. To do that, I only want to turn off the MIs.” His smile widened; it almost reached his eyes. “Someone, sometime, turned them on, you know.”
He sounded as if he were explaining it to a child, as if the vulnerability of the MIs was a given, a concept I simply didn’t grasp. I was fighting not to become angry, not to sting him in utter disregard for his point of view. I was convinced that the MIs were entirely invulnerable. They were so much larger than we were, so far-flung, so complete, that it would be tantamount to suicide to threaten them.
I remembered an incident when I was only eleven, when a group of crazies from Selleran, of all places, under the influence of an insane leader little better than a witch doctor, got passage to Orokell, strapped themselves up with fullnite smuggled in from Teraton, marched up to the demographics center, and ate the fusings to blow everything to bits. While the Drenalion sponged up the mess of people and circuitry, the engineers shifted the data and workings to extra capacity elsewhere in the system. The MIs never even said ouch.
After that attack, the government ordered work to begin on a major program simulating judgment in humans when they were in danger. I didn’t know if it had been completed and activated, but I thought it very likely.
Jemeret would be putting himself in mortal peril by his goal, which to me was infinitely foolish. And yet I couldn’t say so. Most of my history with my Lord Jemeret was as student, as surely as I had been Mortel John’s student. And now that I had come to love the man who had braceleted me, I recognized that I couldn’t just tell him how wrong he was, couldn’t just say, “What you want isn’t faintly within the realm of possibility. Don’t be ridiculous. Give it up.” I thought I owed Jemeret too much to argue with him. I thought he’d been wiser than I for too many months now. Even though his wisdom was Caryldon wisdom, I thought I should not—well, enough. I didn’t say anything.
Ashkalin took a sip of the shilfnin, made a face, and poured his mugful into the cold fireplace. “Will you want any of the Marl going with you to the border?”
“I think not,” Jemeret said. “Where I’ll hope you and Sabaran come through is in convincing your tribes that an absent High Lady is a High Lady all the same.”
The leader of the Marl nodded once, then looked at me. “When he wasn’t sent back, I thought my son was doing well.”
“He was doing well,” I said. “He just had a blind spot when it came to me. If I’d known then what I’ve learned since—”
“But you didn’t,” Jemeret said smoothly. “Keep remembering that. The Com mishandles talent to the point of outright abuse; the greater the talent, the worse the abuse. It’s got to stop.”
I wasn’t certain that I could accept this premise. I didn’t blame the Com for what I saw as my own flaw. I had thought that if I failed as a Class A, it must also be the failure of all those men who had trained me. But the killing—that had to be on my own head, because I did not know how to be moderate, because for me it was all or nothing. Jemeret insisted it was the Com that had the ultimate responsibility for everything, and, even though he had never lied to me—except once, for a few hours, about something I had to arrive at the truth of myself—I thought that his love for me made him unwilling to tie to me the wrong of which I was guilty, just as my love for him made me forbear to tell him he was crazy to take on the MIs.
No matter what had come before it, no matter what directly motivated it, I had killed my friend Kray, and I thought I ought to have been able to avoid that. It made me angry that he had raped me, but I’d hurt myself worse than he had hurt me, and the only reason I was a “normal” person again was because Jemeret had committed himself to healing me.
I cleared my throat. “I understand the need to alter how the Com deals with Caryldon,” I said carefully. “But they’re very powerful, and I am under oath to them.”
“I’m not,” Jemeret said strongly, “and neither is Sandalari.” He drank half his shilfnin off without grimacing. “And I’ll remind you now—but probably not again—that you’re under oath to me, too.”
He was right. I had sworn submission to him when I formally became a Boru, joining my life to his as inevitably as any other member of his tribe, and then even more because we shared the same kind of power—power we were about to take to a Com that was nearly starved for it.
Some instinct made me say, “I don’t think I’ll tell them about the second oath. They might not like the conflict of interest that implies.”
“You’d better come to terms with it yourself,” Jemeret said quietly, then looked at Ashkalin. “If you want to come to the border with us, you’re welcome to. Just don’t bring too many guards. And if, while we’re gone, Venacrona sends for you, get to Stronghome as fast as you can.”
Ashkalin nodded. “I’ve never failed to respond to the code words. I want them to leave us alone as much as you do.”
“What code words?” I asked.
“We have to try to keep the secret, even though this absence—and whatever it causes to happen there—will stress it far more than anything else has,” Jemeret said to Ashkalin, ignoring me. “Whatever happens, things will probably change, one way or another, and we may not be able to come back here. We’ll try to send word to Veen when we can.”
It was the first time I had ever heard him admit that a return from the Com might not be possible. I knew how much that admission would have distressed him, and I knew then, if I had had any doubts, how determined he was to try to do what I considered undoable.
“What code words?” I repeated.
“Whenever we have to deal here with the world outside, we signal one another by saying, ‘The need is great,’” Ashkalin said, obviously deciding that one of them should answer me. “It means the survival of our way of life is endangered, and we had better be aware of it.”
Jemeret set down his mug. “We’ve got to get started. I want to be across the Honish lands by tomorrow morning.”
“What kind of plan do you have?” I asked him. “If there’s an army at the border—”
He reached over and took my hand. “Don’t worry about the Honish army. We’ll get past it. This is just something that needs a scenario.”
I squeezed his hand, still unused to his easy command of Com jargon, and without the slightest idea of what he might have in mind.
It is a basic fact of life on Caryldon that the Honish are deeply, inherently superstitious. They live in a world of propitiation or punishment, and the darkness around them is peopled with spirits more powerful than themselves. Their fear gives us powerful weapons over them, the kind of weapons Jemeret loves to use most—those that persuade rather than destroy. I think he was already trying to formulate a bloodless scenario when we left Salthome.
Tatatin objected to being shipped off the long way, but Lyrafi and Ginestra of the Dibel had no such misgivings, and eventually the Chief of the Elden gave in. We had decided to pack the Ilto off with them, ostensibly to guard them, since the ship had to sail through Honish waters, but in truth it was because Jemeret suspected that the Ilto’s chief, Ustivet, was just as capable as Krenigo of betrayal. We all agreed we’d be better off without them. Ustivet protested. Jemeret stung him, and he went.
Lyrafi looked a little puzzled at the strength with which I hugged her in parting, but she didn’t ask questions, and I deliberately forced myself to ease up. I had begun, unavoidably, thinking that I might never see her again, that I might never be returning to Caryldon. It was what I’d devoutly wished for when I first arrived here; now it meant a depth of loss I did not want to explore. Sometime during my stay of less than a year on this world, the acceptance that my exile here was inevitable had turned into happiness to be a part of it. Now, going back to my former life was not a prospect I could view without trepidation. But it was nothing I could avoid, either.
My klawit companion, Tynnanna, leaped out in front of us as we started up toward the high plateau that led away from Salthome. He was eager to be on the move again, for the great hunting cats of Caryldon were accustomed to ranging over large areas. As we reached the plateau itself, we gave our tivongs their heads, and I glanced around at the group of people nearest us. Coney was riding just beside me, looking as if he would like to say something. When we slowed the animals to a walk for the first time, partway through the morning, he drew his tivong up beside mine, and Rocky rubbed his head against the neck of Coney’s mount, establishing dominance with one gentle scrape.
“Ronnie, I heard there could be trouble at the border,” Coney said in a low voice. He was always careful not to be overheard when he called me by my nickname or when we talked about the empire outside Caryldon.
I nodded, lowering my own voice to match his. “There probably will be some disturbance.” I smiled at him. “You haven’t seen Jemeret handle trouble yet.” And I told Coney how we’d averted a war after Convalee by drawing strength from the assembled tribes to keep the Honish troops asleep until the three tribes from the peninsula had crossed the Honish lands.
“Can you do it again?” he asked me.
“I wasn’t the one who did it. And I’d guess we can’t, because there aren’t enough of us now to affect the numbers that must be in the army the Honish are bringing. Besides, even if we could establish a cap, we couldn’t hold it for the seven or eight hours it will take to cross over.”
He thought about that as we rode in silence for a while. Then he said, “I’ll be fascinated to see what he tries.”
So will I, I almost said, and then mentally shook myself. I needed to try to think of scenarios myself. I’d been depending on my Lord Jemeret to solve problems since I got to this world, and I knew it was at least in part because he was wiser than I. Not only did he know far more about Caryldon than I did, but he also knew something about the Com, and he’d been building scenarios for decades longer than I had. However, I was officially High Lady of the Samothen. I would have to start acting like it.
Sandalari rode up on Coney’s other side and, still in the low voices that meant they would be discussing the Com, asked him some questions. I didn’t augment my hearing to intrude on their privacy. She was, I thought, a little nervous about the idea of going back to a Com she’d failed to find a place in before, but I admired her determination to go with us—and I would be grateful for her company. Once she took Coney’s attention away from me, I started thinking about the approaching problem, wondering whether I could come up with a scenario to prevent an incipient ambush.
The morning sun glinted for a moment, dazzlingly bright, off Jemeret’s silver brow-crown, which put me in mind of the brow-crown I was wearing. Mine was not made of silver, though that was its color, but of the metal from which the starfire appeared to us. Wearing it was already so familiar to me that I didn’t notice I had it on. Now, reminded of it, I was struck by a curious whimsy, and I pathfound my crown directly through the skin on my forehead. It was truly whimsical; I’d never before tried to understand and influence something as small and simple as a circlet of metal. It had no moving parts, no overt use other than as decoration, but it did have several unusual properties. First, it was the starfire’s chosen way to manifest itself; second, when I’d been declared High Lady of the Samothen, the starfire seemed to leave a tiny piece of its substance inside the crown, which even now was writhing subtly with the star colors. Since I knew that the starfire was a living, sentient creature or creatures, that implied something extraordinary about the circlet I was wearing, and dozens of additional questions about the nature of the starfire.
As with all basically primitive objects, the crown was very sluggish about responding. Mechanical systems are quicker, technological ones faster still. The more complex the system, the easier it is to get it to reveal itself.
Riding under the great bowl of sky that arched over the plateau, I pathfound the crown, asking it to reveal its structure and its properties, and as the morning wore on toward afternoon, and we speeded our pace to reach the boundary of the Honish lands as quickly as possible, it slowly opened itself to me.
The metal itself was not a vastly unusual substance. In molecular weight and shape, it was much like the silver it superficially resembled. Its molecular bond was, however, slightly more frangible, and it had more than twice the conductivity. It also had a property of containing and concentrating energy in the spaces between its atoms, as though creating a reservoir, so that when touched by an outside, motivating force, it looked as if it could behave like a laser weapon.
