The two synthehols were placed in front of them.
Kebron looked McHenry straight in the eye, and there was a coldness in that gaze as he said, “Are you one of his people? From his continuum?”
McHenry openly laughed at that. “One of his? Oh, come on, Zak! You’ve known me since we were practically kids! Do I act like a Q?”
“You don’t act like any other human I know.”
“That just makes me unusual. Not omniscient or all-powerful or . . .” He shook his head. “If I were all-powerful, don’t you think I’d have stopped the ship from blowing up? Don’t you think I would have saved the captain? You should never look for simple answers, Zak.”
“You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” said McHenry, and he drank his synthehol.
Kebron didn’t touch his. “But I’ll still look for answers,” he said, continuing to scrutinize McHenry.
Slowly McHenry lowered his glass. And he smiled in that same old McHenry manner.
But there was something else there as well.
And Kebron suddenly knew that he wasn’t going to rest until he figured out just what that was.
SI CWAN
“I WILL NEVER FORGET the first time I saw him.”
Si Cwan, Kalinda, and the students were seated around the simple table in the central dining room. Food had been prepared, but much of it had gone untouched.
“Calling Olivan a student, as you and I were, would be to understate it,” continued Si Cwan. “He was more of a disciple than anything else. Jereme would bring Olivan with him to help demonstrate his techniques. It helped to make the lessons more accessible, for Jereme was, of course, Jereme. He was in a class of his own. But Olivan was as near his level as anyone had ever been, and to see him in action gave the rest of us hope. It was as if they were saying to us, See? It can be done. You can learn. You can accomplish these things, because Olivan did it.”
“Where did he come from?” asked Kalinda.
“He was a Terran,” said Si Cwan. “Our understanding is that he was an orphan, his parents having died when he was quite young. He was sent to relatives to care for him . . . but apparently they did not. So he ran away. How he heard of Jereme, I have no idea. But he came, entirely on his own. Made his way through a series of freighters and the like, working his way across until he got to this very facility. By all accounts, he was quite a sight when he arrived. Thin, haggard, bedraggled. He stood in the doorway, shivering, ill with fever, barely able to stand up. Jereme took him in. For the first week that he was here, the fever raged, and Jereme thought for a time that he was going to lose him. Eventually, however, the fever broke, and Olivan recovered, for the most part.”
“For the most part?” asked Kalinda.
“He had a slight physical tic or two as a result. Nothing noticeable. In any event, he stayed with Jereme in full-time residence. Why not? He had nowhere else to go. Jereme always said that he saw something in the young man . . . seeds of greatness. There was one time where Jereme and Olivan came to the palace. A number of young nobles, including me, were given a simple assignment: Find them.”
“Anywhere in the palace? Si Cwan, that place was huge. You could hide a spaceship in there. Where’s the challenge in that?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, it was a rather confined area. A three-room radius, that was all. We spread out and we thought we would be able to round them up in no time. We were wrong. We wasted an entire hour, didn’t even so much as catch sight of them. Finally, we became convinced that we had been victims of a hoax. While we were scurrying around, we reasoned, the two of them had left entirely. We figured they were out having a nice meal somewhere while we ran about in an exercise in futility. And I swear to you, the gods are my witnesses . . . the moment, the moment we gave voice to that belief, they were there. Right there, in the room. Jereme even began quoting things we’d been saying to each other during the previous hour, things we were muttering to each other. He practically would have had to be at our shoulders in order to hear it, but we never saw Jereme or Olivan.”
“He would do that sort of thing to us as well,” Ookla said softly, and there was pleasant, reminiscing laughter from around the table. For a moment it helped to break the somber mood.
“And once,” continued Si Cwan, “I actually fought Olivan, face-to-face, head-to-head. I was not yet even a teen, and by that point he had gone from being the trembling teen who first appeared on Jereme’s doorstep to Jereme’s full-grown assistant. More than that; he was the heir apparent. Even at that point, Jereme was already not a young man, and he was grooming Olivan for taking over the school someday. Me, I was an arrogant young man back then . . .”
“As opposed to the arrogant older man you are now,” Kalinda said playfully.
He afforded her a brief, slightly annoyed, smile. “Very amusing. Very droll,” he said. “Anyway, I took an instant dislike to Olivan. He seemed condescending, insufferably pleased with himself. During the course of one of our lessons, I made the incredible mistake of challenging him. He accepted the challenge. It was the only time I ever saw Jereme openly express anything along the lines of annoyance with him, but he did nothing to interfere. I faced off against Olivan, convinced that I could take him.”
“What an honor that must have been,” said another student, “that he agreed to engage in single combat with you.”
Si Cwan chuckled. “It didn’t feel like an honor at the time, I can tell you. He destroyed me. I didn’t have a prayer against him. As you know, Jereme’s main discipline was to teach defense, rather than offense. I was standing about as far from Olivan as I am sitting now from you, and no matter how many times I would swing—arm thrust, kicks, what have you—I could not come in contact with him. He was as lightning. He could strike at will, and remain untouched by me. I was infuriated. I felt that this was certainly no way to treat a prince, a noble of Thallon. And he laughed. That was all he did: laugh. He thought I was quite the spectacle.
“I came at him faster, more intent with every passing moment to flatten him, show him that his attitude and arrogance were misplaced. I came right at him with a series of kicks and punches that—by all subsequent accounts—was quite impressive. Didn’t land a one. Wherever I was, he wasn’t. He completely wore me out, which naturally was his intention all along. And when I was sufficiently exhausted, without having injured him in the slightest, he knocked me flat. Jereme used that as a way of driving home a lesson. The wise thing to do, whenever possible, is to cause an opponent to use his strength against himself. Wear himself out, do the work for you. Useful in face-to-face combat. Also useful in Jereme’s amazing ability to conceal himself. At first I saw little point to it. It seemed almost cowardly to me, hiding while an enemy is running around trying to find you. My reasoning was, if someone wishes to engage in combat with you, the honorable thing is to meet him head-on. Hiding was cowardice. Jereme, however, taught me that the art of concealment was just that: an art. Simply another weapon to be used, no more or less than that. Let an enemy expend all his resources trying to find you, while you watch him from hiding. Build up his level of frustration until, when you finally do make your appearance, he is so frustrated that he makes stupid mistakes.”
The others were nodding, recalling similar words that had been spoken directly to them by Jereme.
Ookla’s mandibles clicked worriedly. “But there is something I do not understand, Ambassador Cwan.”
“What would that be?”
“Well, if he was that great a student . . . why have we never heard of him.” He looked around at the others for confirmation, and they all nodded. “Jereme never spoke to us of him. We have not seen him in the time that we were in residence here. There are no pictures of him, nothing . . .”
“They had . . . a falling-out,” Si Cwan said slowly. “I heard about it secondhand, from another student. You see . . . Olivan developed what can only be termed a streak of genuine cruelty. He became self-obsessed, overconfiden
t. He felt that he had learned everything that Jer-eme could possibly teach him, and who knows? Perhaps he had. But his further sentiment was that there was much that he could turn around and teach Jereme, and that the master was not interested in learning. He felt that Jereme’s techniques could be refined further, not just to frustrate or defeat an opponent, but to humiliate him entirely.”
“What would be the purpose of such humiliation?” asked Kalinda.
“That was the point, you see. Olivan felt that such humiliation was necessary in order to crush one’s opponent. Jereme did not share that belief. He felt that the best enemy was one who could eventually be turned into a friend, and utterly demolishing an opponent’s spirit—humiliating him, dragging him through the mud, as it were—would preclude any sort of future alliance. After all, who would ever wish to ally themselves with someone who rejoiced in their mortification.”
“And that wasn’t something that Olivan agreed with.”
“No, Ookla, he didn’t. He felt that an enemy is an enemy is an enemy. That defeat was not sufficient; they had to be crushed entirely, and even that wasn’t necessarily enough. The ideal, as far as he was concerned, was to use them as an example for anyone else who might be foolish enough to try and combat you.
“Olivan wanted Jereme to change his methods. To teach students to be more ruthless, more aggressive. Jereme, unsurprisingly, was not interested in altering his way of doing things just to accommodate anyone else . . . even someone who had been with him for as long as Olivan had.
“So it came down to a confrontation between Olivan and Jereme. It started out verbally . . .”
“And escalated into something physical?” asked Kalinda.
But Si Cwan shook his head. “No. Everyone who bore witness to it was certain that it was going in that direction. Jereme, however, simply said, ‘Would you raise your hand against one to whom you owe so much?’ Olivan seemed daunted by this question, and considered it, and then finally said, ‘No. No, I would not. But there are . . . other ways. And you will regret the decisions you have made this day.’ Then he left, and that was that. It was many years ago, though.”
“What happened to Olivan?” asked Ookla.
“I’ve been doing some checking on that,” said Si Cwan. “I admit, I have not been keeping track of him all these years. But it appears that, after departing, he developed quite a power base. My surmise is that he traded upon alliances he made while he was here. Used the skills he had developed and honed through the years, not for self-defense, but to accomplish questionable deeds of even more questionable nature. He built up wealth, power . . . became quite the industrialist. And then he died.”
There was a stony silence from around the room.
“I’m sorry . . . what?” said Kalinda.
“He died. That’s what my research has told me.”
“How?”
“All right . . . I missed something,” admitted Ookla. “I admit, Ambassador, that my culture is somewhat different from yours. However, in mine, when someone dies . . . that precludes their returning and causing more problems.”
“Well and delicately phrased, Ookla,” Si Cwan said with quiet sarcasm. “I appreciate your concern over my tender sensibilities. In my culture as well, the deceased generally do not pose much of a difficulty.”
“Generally,” Kalinda softly chided him.
“The thing is, I have not been able to determine precisely how he died. He was simply ‘reported’ dead, by supposedly reliable witnesses. Witnesses, however, can be bought off, ‘facts’ altered to suit the needs of whoever is doing the altering. I wouldn’t consider it satisfactorily conclusive.”
“This person you saw in your vision,” Ookla said, turning to Kalinda. “What did he look like?”
She proceeded to describe him. It was not difficult. Clearly every aspect of his face was permanently embedded in her mind.
“That,” Si Cwan said thoughtfully, when she had finished, “presents a bit of a problem. Alive or dead, the man you’ve described is considerably younger than Olivan would be.”
“But Jereme called him Olivan. I didn’t pull that name out of thin air.”
“I know you didn’t,” he told her. “The thing is, your description of him does match the man that I recall from many, many years ago. The resemblance may be ascribed to any number of things. Still . . . I mislike it. A simple resemblance would not fool Jereme. If he called him Olivan . . . then he was. There is simply no other explanation possible.”
“So . . . what happens now?” asked Ookla. “What do we do?”
“We?” echoed Si Cwan. “We . . .,” and he looked around at them sadly, “have a ceremony that needs to be performed. I look forward to it no more than do you. But it must be done. I have spoken with the authorities. All has been prepared.” He rose from the table, and the others did as well. “Come, gentlemen. As with all things in life . . . we must do what needs to be done.”
It was a simple ceremony. Jereme’s body lay upon the pyre that had been built, with reverence, in a great open field. It was an ancient, traditional means of disposal that had not been practiced on Pulva in over a hundred years, but Jereme’s will had requested it specifically. The will had very minimal provisions. The building he had left to his students, to do with as they willed. And his body . . . his body he desired to be returned to the nothingness from which it had come.
They stood around the pyre, watching the smoke curl to the skies. Si Cwan, Kalinda, and the students stood in a semicircle around it, looking as if they had lost a piece of themselves.
And then Ookla said, in much the same tone as he had earlier, “Now . . . what do we do?”
Si Cwan actually laughed softly at that. “Again, ‘we.’” He rested a large red hand on Ookla’s shoulder and said, “We do nothing. You, young men, go on with your lives. You have homes, yes?” They nodded as one. “Then you return to them. You carry with you the lessons that you have learned here. As for me . . .”
“Us,” Kalinda quickly corrected.
“Us,” he amended agreeably. “As for us . . . I have some ideas, some plans. I have managed to compile a list of known associates of Olivan. When one carves a career as an industrialist, there are many—friends and foes alike—that one encounters in that career. One of these people knows what happened. One of them knows the truth,” and his voice became graver, more intense. “And we will go to all of them, and to everyone they know, and we will do whatever is necessary, and we will track down Olivan, whatever he may be calling himself. For he has slain our teacher . . . and he will pay.”
To Be Continued in
Star Trek
New Frontier
Book Ten:
Renaissance
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