“Done,” said Aenea. “Three new and improved medpaks. One whole pouch of plasma ampules. A portable diagnosticator. Ultramorph … but don’t ask, you aren’t getting any today.”
I held out my left hand. “See this? It just stopped shaking this afternoon. I won’t be asking for any again soon.”
Aenea nodded. Overhead, feathery clouds glowed with the last evening light.
“How long do you think these generators will hold out?” I said to the android. The hospital was one of only a handful of city buildings still lighted.
“A few weeks, perhaps,” said A. Bettik. “The power grid has been repairing and running itself for months, but the planet is harsh—you’ve noticed the dust storms that sweep in from the desert each morning—and even though the technology is quite advanced for a non-Pax world, the place needs humans to maintain it.”
“Entropy is a bitch,” I said.
“Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.”
“When?” I said.
She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.”
“That’s a hard phrase to say quickly,” I said. “What despotisms are we talking about here?”
Aenea made that casting-away gesture, and for a minute I thought she was not going to speak, but then she said, “The Huns, the Scythians, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Egyptians, Macedonians, Romans, and Assyrians.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but …”
“The Avars and the Northern Wei,” she continued, “and the Juan-Juans, the Mamelukes, the Persians, Arabs, Abbasids, and Seljuks.”
“Okay,” I said, “but I don’t see …”
“The Kurds and Ghaznavids,” she continued, smiling now. “Not to mention the Mongols, Sui, Tang, Buminids, Crusaders, Cossacks, Prussians, Nazis, Soviets, Japanese, Javanese, North Ammers, Greater Chinese, Colum-Peros, and Antarctic Nationalists.”
I held up a hand. She stopped. Looking at A. Bettik, I said, “I don’t even know these planets, do you?”
The android’s expression was neutral. “I believe they all relate to Old Earth, M. Endymion.”
“No shit,” I said.
“No shit, is, I believe, correct in this context,” A. Bettik said in a flat tone.
I looked back at the girl. “So this is our plan to topple the Pax for the old poet? Hide out somewhere and wait for entropy to take its toll?”
She crossed her arms again. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Normally that would have been a good plan—just hunker down for a few millennia and let time take its course—but these damn cruciforms complicate the equation.”
“How do you mean?” I said, my voice serious.
“Even if we wanted to topple the Pax,” she said, “which—by the way—I don’t. That’s your job. But even if we wanted to, entropy’s not on our side anymore with that parasite that can make people almost immortal.”
“Almost immortal,” I murmured. “When I was dying, I must admit that I thought of the cruciform. It would have been a lot easier … not to mention less painful than all the surgery and recovery … just to die and let the thing resurrect me.”
Aenea was looking at me. Finally she said, “That’s why this planet had the best medical care in or out of the Pax.”
“Why?” I said. My head was still thick with drugs and fatigue.
“They were … are … Jews,” the girl said softly. “Very few accepted the cross. They only had one chance at life.”
We sat for some time without speaking that evening, as the shadows filled the city canyons of New Jerusalem and the hospital hummed with electric life while it still could.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING I WALKED AS FAR AS THE OLD groundcar that had hauled me to the hospital thirteen days earlier, but—sitting in the back where they had made a mattress bed for me—I gave orders to find a gun shop.
After an hour of driving around, it became obvious that there were no gun shops in New Jerusalem. “All right,” I said. “A police headquarters.”
There were several of these. As I hobbled into the first one we encountered, waving away offers from both girl and android to act as a crutch, I soon discovered how underarmed a peaceful society could be. There were no weapons racks there, not even riot guns or stunners. “I don’t suppose Hebron had an army or Home Guard?” I said.
“I believe not,” replied A. Bettik. “Until the Ouster incursion three standard years ago, there were no human enemies or dangerous animals on the planet.”
I grunted and kept looking. Finally, after breaking open a triple-locked drawer in the bottom of some police chiefs desk, I found something.
“A Steiner-Ginn, I believe,” said the android. “A pistol firing reduced-charge plasma bolts.”
“I know what it is,” I said. There were two magazines in the drawer. That should be about sixty bolts. I went outside, aimed the weapon at a distant hillside, and squeezed the trigger ring. The pistol coughed and the hillside showed a tiny flash. “Good,” I said, fitting the old weapon in my empty holster. I was afraid that it would be a signature weapon—capable of being fired only by its owner. Those weapons went in and out of vogue over the centuries.
“We have the flechette pistol on the raft,” began A. Bettik.
I shook my head. I wanted nothing to do with those things for a good while.
A. Bettik and Aenea had stocked up on water and food while I had been recuperating, and by the time I hobbled to the landing at the canal and looked at our refitted and refurbished raft, I could see the extra boxes. “Question,” I said. “Why are we going on with this floating woodpile when there are comfortable little runabout boats tied up over there? Or we could take an EMV and travel in air-conditioned comfort.”
The girl and the blue-skinned man exchanged glances. “We voted while you were recovering,” she said. “We go on with the raft.”
“Don’t I get a vote?” I snapped. I had meant to feign anger, but when it came, it was real enough.
“Sure,” said the girl, standing on the dock with her feet planted, legs apart, and her hands on her hips. “Vote.”
“I vote we get an EMV and travel in comfort,” I said, hearing the petulant tone in my voice and hating it even while continuing it. “Or even one of these boats. I vote we leave these logs behind.”
“Vote recorded,” said the girl. “A. Bettik and I voted to keep the raft. It’s not going to run out of power, and it can float. One of these boats would have shown up on the radar on Mare Infinitus, and an EMV couldn’t have made the trip on some worlds. Two for keeping the raft, one against. We keep it.”
“Who made this a democracy?” I demanded. I admit that I had images of spanking this kid.
“Who made it anything else?” said the girl.
All through this A. Bettik stood by the edge of the dock, fiddling with a rope, his face a study in that embarrassed expression that most people get when around members of another family squabbling. He was wearing a loose tunic and baggy shorts made of yellow linen. There was a wide-brimmed yellow hat on his head.
Aenea stepped onto the raft and loosened the stern line. “You want a boat or an EMV … or a floating couch, for that matter … you take it, Raul. A. Bettik and I are going on in this.”
I started hobbling toward a nice little dinghy tied up along the dock. “Wait,” I said, pivoting on my stronger leg to look at her again. “The farcaster won’t work if I try to go through alone.”
“Right,” said the girl. A. Bettik had stepped aboard the raft, and now she cast off the forward line. The canal was much wider here than it had been in the concrete trough of the aqueduct: about thirty meters across as it ran through New Jerusalem.
A. Bettik stood at the steering oar and looked at me as the girl picked up one of the longer poles and pushed the raft a
way from the dock.
“Wait!” I said. “Goddammit, wait!” I hobbled down the pier, jumped the meter or so to the raft, landed on my recuperating leg, and had to catch myself with my good arm before I rolled into the microtent.
Aenea offered me her hand, but I ignored it as I got to my feet. “God, you’re a stubborn brat,” I said.
“Look who’s talking,” said the girl, and went forward to sit at the front of the raft as we moved into the center current.
Out of the shade of the buildings, Hebron’s sun was even fiercer. I pulled on my old tricorn cap for a bit of shade as I stood by the steering oar with A. Bettik.
“I imagine you’re on her side,” I said at last as we moved into the open desert and the river narrowed to a canal once again.
“I am quite neutral, M. Endymion,” said the blue-skinned man.
“Hah!” I said. “You voted to stay with the raft.”
“It has served us well so far, sir,” said the android, stepping back as I hobbled closer and took the steering oar in my hands.
I looked at the new crates of provisions stacked neatly in the shade of the tent, at the stone hearth with its heating cube and pots and pans, at the shotgun and plasma rifle—freshly oiled and laid under canvas covers—and at our packs, sleeping bags, medkits, and other stuff. The forward “mast” had been raised while I was gone, and now one of A. Bettik’s extra white shirts flew from it like a flapping pennant.
“Well,” I said at last, “screw it.”
“Precisely, sir,” said the android.
The next portal was only five klicks out of town. I squinted up at Hebron’s blazing sun as we passed through the arch’s thin shadow, then into the line of the portal itself. With the other farcaster portals, there had been a moment when the air within shimmered and changed, giving us a glance at what lay ahead.
Here there was only absolute blackness. And the blackness did not change as we continued on. The temperature dropped at least seventy degrees centigrade. At the same instant, the gravity changed—it suddenly felt as if I were carrying someone my own mass on my back.
“The lamps!” I called, still holding the steering oar against a suddenly strong current. I was struggling to stay on my feet against the terrible drag of increased gravity there. The combination of chilling cold, absolute blackness, and oppressive weight was terrifying.
The two had loaded lanterns they had found in New Jerusalem, but it was the old handlamp that Aenea flicked on first. Its beam cut through icy vapor, across black water, and lifted to illuminate a roof of solid ice some fifteen meters above us. Stalactites of patterned ice hung down almost to the water. Daggers of ice protruded from the black current on either side and ahead of us. Far ahead, about where the beam began to dim at a hundred meters or so, there seemed to be a solid wall of icy blocks running right down to the water’s surface. We were in an ice cave … and one with no visible way out. The cold burned at my exposed hands, arms, and face. The gravity lay on my neck like so many iron collars.
“Damn,” I said. I locked the steering oar in place and hobbled toward the packs. It was hard to stay upright with a bad leg and eighty kilos on my back. A. Bettik and the girl were already there, digging for our insulated clothing.
Suddenly there was a loud crack. I looked up, expecting to see a stalactite falling on us, or the roof caving in under this terrible weight, but it was only our mast snapping where it had struck a low-hanging shelf of ice. The mast fell much faster than it would have in Hyperion gravity—rushing to the raft as if someone had fast-forwarded a holo. Wood chips flew as it hit. A. Bettik’s shirt struck the raft with an audible crash. It was frozen solid and covered with a thin coat of hoar frost.
“Damn,” I said again, my teeth chattering, and dug for my woolen undies.
35
Father Captain de Soya uses the power of the papal diskey in ways he has never before attempted.
Mare Infinitus Station Three-twenty-six Mid-littoral, where the hawking mat was discovered, is declared a crime zone and put under martial law. De Soya brings in Pax troops and ships from the floating city of St. Thérèse and places all of the former Pax garrison and the fishing guests under house arrest. When St. Thérèse’s governing prelate, Bishop Melandriano, protests this highhandedness and argues the limits of the papal diskey, de Soya goes to the planetary Governor, Archbishop Jane Kelley. The archbishop bows to the papal diskey and silences Melandriano under threat of excommunication.
Appointing young Lieutenant Sproul as his adjutant and liaison during the investigation, de Soya brings in Pax forensic experts and top investigators from St. Thérèse and the other large city platforms to carry out the crime-scene studies. Truthtell and other drugs are administered to Captain C. Dobbs Powl—who is being held under arrest in the station’s brig—the other members of the former Pax garrison there, and all the fishermen who had been present.
Within a few days it becomes obvious that Captain Powl, the late Lieutenant Belius, and many of the other officers and men of this remote platform had been conspiring with area poachers to allow illegal catches of local game fish, to steal Pax equipment—including one submersible that had been reported as sunk by rebel fire—and to extort money from fishing guests. None of this interests Father Captain de Soya. He wants to know precisely what happened on that evening two standard months earlier.
Forensic evidence mounts. The blood and tissue on the hawking mat are DNA tested and transmitted back to the Pax records section in St. Thérèse and at the orbital Pax base. Two distinct strains of blood are found: the majority is positively identified as the DNA pattern of Lieutenant Belius; the second is unidentified in Mare Infinitus Pax records, despite the fact that every Pax citizen on the sea world has been typed and recorded.
“So how did Belius’s blood end up on the flying carpet?” asks Sergeant Gregorius. “According to everyone’s testimony under Truthtell, Belius was knocked in the drink long before the fellow they captured tried to escape on the mat.”
De Soya nods and steeples his fingers. He has turned the former director’s office into his command center, and the platform is very crowded with three times its former population now aboard. Three large Pax Sea Navy frigates are at sea anchor off the platform, and two of them are combat submersibles. The former skimmer deck is full of Pax aircraft, and engineers have been brought in to repair and extend the thopter deck. Just this morning de Soya has ordered another three ships to the area. Bishop Melandriano transmits his written protests at the mounting costs at least twice a day; Father Captain de Soya ignores them.
“I think our unknown stopped to pull the lieutenant out of the … how did you call it, Sergeant? … out of the drink. They struggled. The unknown was injured or killed. Belius tried to make it back to the station. Powl and the others killed him by mistake.”
“Aye,” says Gregorius, “that’s the best scenario I’ve heard.” In the hours since the DNA results were transmitted back from St. Thérèse, they had woven many others—plots with poachers, conspiracies between the unknown and Lieutenant Belius, Captain Powl murdering former coconspirators. This theory is the simplest.
“It means that our unknown is one of those traveling with the girl,” says de Soya, “And he has a merciful—if stupid—side to him.”
“Or he could have been a poacher,” says Gregorius. “We’ll never know.”
De Soya taps his fingertips together and looks up. “Why not, Sergeant?”
“Well, Captain, the evidence is all down there, ain’t it, sir?” he says, jerking a thumb toward the surging violet sea outside the windows. “The navy boys here say its ten thousand fathoms deep or more—that’s almost twenty thousand meters of water, sir. Any bodies there have been eaten by the fishes, sir. And if he was a poacher who got away … well, we’ll never know. And if he was an offworlder … well, there aren’t any central Pax DNA records.… We’d have to search the files on several hundred worlds. We’ll never find him.”
Father Captain de
Soya drops his hands and smiles thinly. “This is one of those rare times where you are wrong, Sergeant. Watch.”
In the next week de Soya has every poacher within a thousand-kilometer radius rounded up and questioned under Truthtell. The rounding up involves two dozen sea-naval ships and over eight thousand Pax personnel. The cost is enormous. Bishop Melandriano becomes apoplectic and flies to Station Three-twenty-six Mid-littoral to stop the madness. Father Captain de Soya places the cleric under arrest and has him flown to a remote monastery nine thousand kilometers away, near the polar ice caps.
De Soya also decides to search the ocean bottom.
“You won’t find anything, sir,” says Lieutenant Sproul. “There are so many predators down there that nothing organic makes it a hundred fathoms deep, much less to the bottom … and according to our soundings this week, that’s twelve thousand fathoms. Besides, there are only two submersibles on Mare Infinitus that can operate at that depth.”
“I know,” says de Soya. “I’ve ordered them here. They will arrive tomorrow with the frigate Passion of Christ.”
For once Lieutenant Sproul is speechless.
De Soya smiles. “You’re aware, aren’t you, son, that Lieutenant Belius was a born-again Christian? And his cruciform was not recovered?”
Sproul’s mouth hangs open for a moment. “Yessir … I mean … yes, but … sir, to be resurrected, I mean … don’t they need to find the body intact, sir?”
“Not at all, Lieutenant,” says Father Captain de Soya. “Merely a good-sized segment of the cross we all bear. Many a good Catholic has been resurrected from a few centimeters of intact cruciform and a bit of flesh that can be DNA typed and grown to order.”
Sproul shakes his head. “But, sir … it’s been over nine Big Tides, sir. There’s not a square millimeter of Lieutenant Belius or his cruciform left, sir. That’s a giant feeding tank out there, sir.”
De Soya walks to the window. “Perhaps, Lieutenant. Perhaps. But we owe it to our fellow Christian to make every attempt, do we not? Besides, if Lieutenant Belius were to be granted the miracle of resurrection, he has to stand charges for theft, treason, and attempted murder, doesn’t he?”