The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.
***
Chapter Ten
Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.
—LEWIS ORNE’s Report on Hamal
For Orne, there had been an intermediate period in a blank fog, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a crechepod. He had to be. He could remember the sudden disrupter explosion on Sheleb ... the explosion like a silent force thrusting at him—no sound, just an enveloping nothingness.
Good old crechepod. It made him feel safe, shielded from outside perils. Things still went on inside him, though. He could remember ... dreams? He wasn’t sure they really were dreams. There was something about a hoe and handles. He tried to recall the elusive thought pattern. He sensed his linkage with the crechepod and, beyond that, a connection with some kind of merciless manipulative system, a mass effect reducing all existence to a base level.
Is it possible that Man invented war and was trapped by his own invention? Orne wondered. Who are we in the I-A to set ourselves up as a board of angels to mediate in the affairs of all sentient life we contact?
Is it possible we are influenced by our universe in ways we don’t readily recognize?
He sensed his brain/mind/awareness churning, visualized all of this activity as a bizarre tool for symbolizing the drives and energy desires of all life. Somewhere within himself, he felt there was an ancient function, a thing of archaic tendencies which remained constant despite the marks of the evolution through which it had passed.
Abruptly, he felt himself in the presence of an overwhelming thought/presence. The most misguided effort of sentience is the attempt to alter the past, to weed out discrepancies, to insist on fellow-happiness at any price. To refrain from harming others is one thing; to design and order happiness for others and to enforce delivery invites an equal-and-opposite reaction.
Orne drifted off to sleep with this convoluted thought winding and twisting in his awareness.
***
Chapter Eleven
The human operates out of complex superiority demands, self-affirming through ritual, insisting upon a rational need to learn, striving for self-imposed goals, manipulating his environment while he denies his own adaptive abilities, never fully satisfied.
—LECTURES OF HALMYRACH,
private publication files of Amel
Orne began to show small but steady signs of recovery. Within a month, the medics ventured an intestinal transplant which increased his response rate. Two months later, they placed him on an atlotl/gibiril regimen, forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers and eye, restore his scalp line and erase the other internal-external damage.
Through it all, Orne found himself wrestling with his soul. He felt strangled by the patterns he had once accepted, as though he had passed through profound change which had removed him from the body of his past. All of the assumptions of his former existence took on the character of shadows, passionless and contrary to the new flesh growing within him. He felt that he had been surprised by his own death, and had accepted the total denial of a life which had melted into a sandpile. Now, he was rebuilding, willfully accepting only a one part definition of existence.
I am one being, he thought. I exist. That is enough. I give life to myself.
The thought slipped into him like a fire which bore him forward out of an ancestral cave. The wheel of his life was turning, and he knew it would go full circle. He felt that he had gone down into the intestines of the universe to see how everything was made.
No more old taboos, he thought. I have been both alive and dead.
Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been picked up on Sheleb “as good as dead,” Orne walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, accompanied by an oddly silent Umbo Stetson.
Under the dark-blue I-A field cape, Orne’s coverall uniform fitted his once-muscular frame like a deflated bag. The pixie light had returned to his eyes, though—even to the new eye which had grown parallel with his new awareness. Except for the loss of weight, he appeared to be the old Lewis Orne. It was a close enough resemblance that most former acquaintances could have recognized him after only a moment’s hesitation. The internal differences did not show themselves to the casual eye.
Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak’s greenish sun. It was midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn, tugged fitfully at border plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital’s landing pad.
Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill air. “Beautiful day,” he said. His new kneecap felt strange, a better fit than the old one. He was acutely conscious of all his new parts and the regrowth syndrome which made all crechepod graduates share the unjoke label of “twice-born.”
Stetson reached out a hand to help Orne down the steps, hesitated, put the hand back in his pocket. Beneath the section chief’s look of weary superciliousness there was a note of anxiety. His big features remained set in a frown. The drooping eyelids failed to conceal a sharp, measuring stare.
Orne glanced at the sky to the southwest.
“Flitter ought to be here soon,” Stetson said.
A gust of wind tugged at Orne’s cape. He staggered, caught his balance. “I feel good,” he said.
“You look like something left over from a funeral,” Stetson growled.
“My funeral,” Orne said. He grinned. “Anyway, I was getting tired of that walkaround-style morgue they call a hospital. All of my nurses were married or otherwise paired.”
“I’d stake my life that I could trust you,” Stetson muttered.
Orne glanced at him, puzzled by the remark. “What?”
“Stake my life,” Stetson said.
“No, no, Stet. Stake my life. I’m used to it.”
Stetson shook his head bearlike from side to side. “Be funny! I trust you, but you deserve a peaceful convalescence.”
“Get it off your chest,” Orne said. “What’s brewing?”
“We’ve no right to saddle you with an assignment at a time like this,” Stetson said.
Orne’s voice came out low and amused: “Stet?”
Stetson looked at him. “Huh?”
“Save the noble act for someone who doesn’t know you,” Orne said. “You’ve a job for me. All right. You’ve made the gesture for your conscience.”
Stetson managed a wry grin. He said: “The problem is we’re desperate and we haven’t much time.”
“That sounds familiar,” Orne said. “But I’m not sure I want to play the old games. What’s on your mind?”
Stetson shrugged. “Well ... since you’re going to be a house-guest at the Bullones’ anyway, we thought ... well, we suspect Ipscott Bullone of heading a conspiracy to take over the government, and if you ...”
“What do you mean take over the government!” Orne demanded. “The Galactic High Commissioner is the government—subject to the Constitution and the Assemblymen who elected him.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Orne, we may have an internal situation which could explode us into another Rim War. We think Bullone’s at the heart of it,” Stetson said. “We’ve found eighty-one touchy planets, all old-line steadies that’ve been in the Galactic League for centuries. And on every damn one of them we’ve reason to believe there’s a gang of traitors who’re sworn to overthrow the League. Even on your home planet—Chargon.”
“On Chargon?” Orne’s whole stance signaled disbelief.
“That’s what I said.”
Orne shook his head. “What is it you want from me? Do you want me to go home
for my convalescen
ce? I haven’t been there since I was seventeen, Stet. I’m not sure I …”
“No, dammit! We want you as the Bullones’ houseguest. And speaking of that, do you mind explaining how they were chosen to ride herd on you?”
“That’s odd, you know,” Orne said, withdrawing reflexively. “All those trite little jokes in the I-A about old Upshook Ipscott ... then I discover that his wife went to school with my mother—roommates, for the love of all that’s holy!”
“Your mother never mentioned it?”
“It never came up that I can recall.”
“Have you met Himself?”
“He brought his wife to the hospital a couple of times. Seems like a nice enough fellow, but somewhat stiff and reserved.”
Stetson pursed his lips in thought, glanced to the southwest, back to Orne. He said: “Every school kid knows how the Nathians and the Marakian League fought it out in the Rim Wars—how the old civilization fell apart. It all seems kind of distant now that the Marakian League has become the Galactic League and we’re knitting it back together.”
“Five centuries is a long time,” Orne said, “if you’ll pardon a statement of the obvious.”
“Maybe it’s no farther away than yesterday,” Stetson said. He cleared his throat, stared penetratingly at Orne.
Orne wondered why Stetson was moving with such caution. What had he meant by that reference to the Nathians and the Marakians? Something deep troubling him. Why speak of trust?
Stetson sighed, looked away.
Orne said: “You spoke of trusting me. Why? Has this suspected conspiracy involved the I-A?”
“We think so,” Stetson said.
“Why?”
“About a year ago, an R&R archaeological team was nosing into some ruins on Dabih. The place had been all but vitrified in the Rim Wars, but an entire bank of records from a Nathian outpost escaped.” He glanced sidelong at Orne.
“So?” Orne asked when the silence became prolonged.
Stetson nodded, as though to himself, said: “The Rah-Rah boys couldn’t make sense out of their discovery. No surprise there. They called in an I-A cryptanalyst. He broke a complicated cipher into which the stuff had been transferred. Then, when the stuff he was reading started making sense, he pushed the panic button without letting on to R&R.”
“For something the Nathians wrote five hundred years ago?”
Stetson’s drooping eyelids lifted, opening his eyes into a cold, probing stare. He said: “Dabih was a routing station for selected elements of the most powerful Nathian families.”
“Routing station?” Orne asked, puzzled.
“For trained refugees,” Stetson said. “An old dodge. Been used as long as they’ve been …”
“But five hundred years, Stet!”
“I don’t care if it was five thousand years,” Stetson snapped.
“We’ve intercepted message scraps in the past month that were written in the same code. The bland confidence of that! Wouldn’t that gall you?” He shook his head. “And every scrap we’ve intercepted deals with the coming elections!”
Orne found himself caught up in Stetson’s puzzle, excited, interpreting it all through the I-A’s prime directive—prevent another Rim War at all costs.
“The upcoming election’s crucial,” Stetson said.
“But it’s only two days off!” Orne protested.
Stetson touched the time-beat repeater at his temple, paused to get the cronosynch, then: “Forty-two hours and fifty minutes to be exact. Some deadline.”
“Were there any names in those Dabih records?” Orne asked.
Stetson nodded. “Names of planets, yes. And family names, but those were translated into a new code system which we haven’t broken and may not break. Too simple.”
“What do you mean, too simple?”
“They’re obviously cover names relating to some internal Nathian social understanding. We can translate the Dabih records into words, but how those words have been translated into cover names is beyond us. For example, the code name on Chargon was Winner. That ring any bells?”
Orne shook his head from side to side. “No.”
“I didn’t expect it to,” Stetson said.
“What’s the code name on Marak?” Orne asked.
“The Head,” Stetson said. “Can you make that tie up with Bullone?”
“I see what you mean. Then, how do you …”
“They’re sure to’ve changed the names by now anyway,” Stetson said.
“Maybe not,” Orne said. “They didn’t change their cipher system.” He shook his head, trying to capture a thought he sensed lurking just beyond his awareness. The thought didn’t come to him. He felt drained suddenly by the effort of following Stetson’s cautious unveiling of the plot.
“You’re right,” Stetson murmured. “We’ll keep at it, then. Something may show up.”
“What leads are you working on?” Orne asked. He knew Stetson was holding back something vital.
“Leads? We’ve gone back to our history books. They say the Nathians were top-drawer political mechanics. The Dabih records give us a few facts, just enough to tease us into frustration.”
“Such as?”
“The Nathians chose cover sites for their trained refugees with diabolical care. Every one was a planet so torn up by the wars that its inhabitants just wanted to rebuild and forget violence. The instructions to the Nathian families were clear enough, too: dig in, grow up with the adopted culture, develop the political weak spots, build an underground force, train their descendants to take over.”
“The Nathians sound long out of patience,” Orne said.
“By any measurement you use. They set out to bore from within, to make victory out of defeat.”
“Refresh me on the history,” Orne said.
“The original human stock came from Nathia II. Their mythology calls them Arabs or Ayrbs. Peculiar customs—space wanderers, but with a strong sense of family and loyalty to their own people. Moody types, very volatile, so it says. Go review your seventh grade history. You’ll know almost as much as I do.”
“On Chargon,” Orne said, “our history texts referred to the Nathians as ‘one of the factions involved in the Rim Wars.’ The impression I got was that they shared the blame just about equally with the Marakian League.”
“There are places where that might sound seditious,” Stetson said.
“How does it sound to you?” Orne asked.
“The victors always write the history,” Stetson said.
“Except perhaps on Chargon,” Orne said. “What has you haring after High Commissioner Upshook? And while we’re on that question, why’re you parceling out your information like a miser giving money to a spendthrift son-in-law?”
Stetson wet his lips with his tongue, said: “One of Upshook’s seven daughters is currently at home. Name of Diana. She’s a field leader in the I-A women.”
“I seem to’ve heard of her,” Orne said. “I think Mrs. Bullone mentioned the fact she was at home.”
“Yes, well ... one of these Nathian code messages we intercepted had her name as addressee.”
“Wheeewww!” Orne exhaled in surprise, then: “Who sent the message? What was the content?”
Stetson coughed. “You know, Lew, we cross-check everything.”
“So what else is new?”
“This message was handwritten and signed MOS.”
When Stetson didn’t go on, Orne said: “And you know who MOS is, that it?”
“Our cross-check gave us an MOS on a routine next-of-kin reply. We followed it down to the original. The handwriting checks out. Name of Madrena Orne Standish.”
Orne froze. “Maddie?” He turned slowly to face Stetson. “So that’s what’s eating you.”
“We know for certain that you haven’t been home since you were seventeen,” Stetson said. “We can account for all the significant blocks of time in your life. With us, your record is clean. The question is …”
&nb
sp; “Permit me,” Orne said. “The question is: Will I turn in my own sister if it falls that way?”
Stetson remained silent, staring. And Orne noticed now that the man had retreated behind the mask of I-A senior officer, holding one hand concealed in a uniform pocket. What was in that pocket? A transmitter? A weapon?
“I read you,” Orne said. “I remember the oath I took and I know my job: see to it that we don’t have another blowup like the Rim Wars. But Maddie in this?”
“No doubt of it,” Stetson grated.
Orne thought back to his own childhood. Maddie? He remembered a red-headed tomboy, his ready companion for adventure, a fellow conspirator when adults pressed too closely on the secret world of the young.
“Well?” Stetson pressed.
“My family isn’t one of these traitor clans you refer to,” Orne said. “How can Maddie be mixed up in this?"
“This whole thing is all tangled in politics,” Stetson said. “We think it’s because of her husband.”
“Ahhhh, the Member for Chargon,” Orne said. “I’ve never met him, but I’ve followed his career with interest ... and Maddie wrote me and sent a picture when they were married.”
“You like this particular sister very much," Stetson said. It was a statement, not a question.
“I have ... fond memories,” Orne said. “She helped me when I ran away.”
“Why’d you leave home?” Stetson asked.
Orne sensed the weight behind the question, fought to keep his voice casual. “It was a family thing. I knew what I wanted to do. The family objected.”
“You wanted to join the Marines?”
“No, they were just a way into the R&R. I don’t like violence. And I don’t like women running my life.”
Stetson glanced to the southwest where a flitter could be seen approaching. Green sunlight glinted from it. He asked: “Are you willing to ... infiltrate the Bullone family for …”
“Infiltrate!”
“To find out whatever you can about this plot centered on the upcoming election.”
“In forty-two hours!”
“Or less.”
“Who’s my contact?” Orne asked. “I’ll be trapped out there at the Residency.”