Exile: A Novel of the Gilding

Chapter 1: Informant

2007-08-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

From the Book of Valten, taken in Year 22.3.753 of the Vision of the Lady of Holy Waters:

The man craved the stir of city air, wished through the endless hours of compressed darkness to feel the oily, metallic pre-dawn eddies thrown by gargantuan black-glossed motor coaches and the ancient trains that whispered across the baleful waterfront sky on sleek but archaic elevated rails. He missed the slick southeastern wind roughened by exhaust from truck parks that abutted the shipyards behind his old flat. Over the hush imposed by the concrete and steel of Zoran Station, tonight at least, at least tonight, the man called John Valten Manegold would have welcomed even the grind of mammoth cranes, hard on task and belching their funnels of toxic smoke.

The man clung to these images and remembrances of home, his third home, which was a machination merely, a hypothetical buoyed as much by half-truths as outright lies. For instance, he had been born far from the city on the water, in a high place carved from the Goraneg Mountains in the uplands of eastern Volodya. He was nineteen before he experienced the queer rubbery smell of a truck park and felt the heat that wafted through welded manhole covers when supersonic trains sizzled through cement tunnels two stories below ground. As a boy his playground was Virog and Agotha, the dense forests of Nikusch that circled the somnolent, shadowy town of the same name, and the footpaths and horse trails that led to the family castle Petronille.

The air was not as sweet to him there at the castle as in the cities of the lower lands and the places to which he came later in life. Although he enjoyed somewhat the horse farm of the lower reaches, he considered the castle with its pale circular walls, hoary turrets, and seven busy little wings musty as the deep bottom of an old locker that kept within some decomposed artifact no one truly wanted.

When he was a little boy he had supposed all the world a moldy secret full of hushed doings discernible only to him, sadly, through an aberration of perception about which he was warned frequently and at an early age to conceal. He was special. And so he knew, at an early age, to fear not only the sordid things that he detected but also the ability that facilitated these undesired detections.

His parents lied to him.

There was no sound, you heard nothing.

There was no scream.

There was no motor car last night upon the high road, you’re making it up.

There was no sudden flare behind the stables, your eyes were playing tricks.

There was no stranger in the study with Sir last night, you imagined it. You imagine lots of things.

His parents spoke falsely by rote, thinking nothing of it.

Lies, a stream of them, and unending.

He was at first astonished and then fearful of the efficacy with which his parents told untruths. He learned, eventually, that lying was common and celebrated among Petronille adults. He was the youngest. There were two adult brothers and a sister, bred on presently deceased Manegold wives. Thus, he abandoned reliance on adults and brethren both, choosing over family the relatively happy children of the town four and a half kilometers downland. Always under the thumb of the patriarch of Petronille, he made earnest and fantastic games in which to escape. And when the little boys and girls, intuiting his gift, began to call him Val, he grew especially afraid, for it would not be long after they bestowed the grace of his gift name, a tradition among the old families of the Goraneg uplands, that his father, the old Sir, Burgolt Manegold, would call upon him to learn the meaning of it.

His namesake Val, the familiar of Valten, was a demian and a prince, albeit ancient and long departed, of the coveted race, the Volker. Valten, the Lord Valten of bygone days, had won and lost a kingdom, and then blighted himself in some ritual of which the child Val bore only the simplest comprehension, and which, albeit appealing in heroic terms, had no place in the brutal, self-serving enterprises of the Manegolds. The business of the Manegolds was Val’s birthright. Furthermore, Burgolt Manegold, head of the family, was distrustful of fine-featured things, art, weapons, women, and boys included. Sir Burgolt despised the gift-name Val and asserted his considerable might to expunge it from the child Val’s existence. But a gift-name was just that, and Burgolt had already given his child a formal one, John. Sir Burgolt could no more ignore the tradition of the gift-name than stop the wind, so the name stuck, and the child became John Valten Manegold, a prince of the mountains, and of the underworld.

It was when he stopped sleeping, around twelve or fourteen years-- the Manegolds, like most of the Volker were Amarite polytheists and as such did not celebrate or even acknowledge birthdays --it was when he stopped sleeping that Val was properly taken notice of. He was, by then, a credible mindwalker who, when intercepted by a brother or uncle, stayed mostly silent until called on to answer directly. Val was considered a boy of few words and (by those who knew no better) little thought. He was often observed in the library at his studies and otherwise among the high-bred East Ussurian horse stock in the lower paddocks or escaping the barrier walls of Petronille by some heretofore hidden hole or tunnel.

About the estate he wore a habitual frown, the emblem of a child in perpetual consternation. His elders tended to ignore him. His brothers would in general follow the example of the elders. Mud-smudges and shabby clothing notwithstanding, Val was never odious, or unclean. His teeth shone white and even. His gaze was a clear, fragile sort of eggshell blue. His fair hair, while generally in disarray, was fine and easily sorted with a sweep of determined fingers. His tutors were disposed to indulgence, given the child’s looks and aptitude. The example was not repeated among Val’s siblings.

Val liked his training terminal, which was a keyboard, flatdrive, and holographic screen. He easily mastered language and mathematics, achieving as a young boy the training level of post-secondary academy adults.

He liked, too, the big Ussurian horses bred on the adjacent family farm and could operate the family’s all-wheel, all-terrain Aiglen transports as easily as he mounted the sleek, high-hearted, half-wild purebreds.

In spite of such physical pursuits, he was sweetly and unusually fine-boned, with long limbs perfectly fashioned, arched feet, and long artist’s fingers. His mother, too, was beautiful, pale-eyed, and carved like a figurine. At a young age Val’s unique gift let him take notice of another person’s aura. His mother’s inner life was an immense, luminous, and milky butterfly. Sometimes his mother’s inner life was represented by limp wings tinged with shadow. That changed when she looked at him. When she looked at him, her aura brightened and warmed like gold-veined crystal, the occasional silver and ashen density burned away.

Seated around the big kalonice dinner table, Val would drift through his mother’s thoughts, layered like the best confection and yielding as affection, until he found himself in them. Unlike his father, she enjoyed being near him. He liked to watch her lift the silver goblet between ringed fingers, her lips parted slightly, her gaze slanted toward him. She wore sweater dresses, white and black, to dinner, and sometimes gowns with lace and jewels and bits of silk. Her shoes were slim with dainty straps. She hung gold, emerald, sapphire, and lapis lazuli from her ears. Wore diamonds on her fingers.

She was required by custom and her husband to keep her distance from male offspring but often had a sidelong glance for Val and the inclination to draw her hand along his cheek. A bubble would swell beneath her heart, which she suppressed, and which Val sensed through his endowment as other children detected the spice of cookies fresh from the oven. Val’s only full brother, Marcus, reckoned two years older, possessed none of Val’s strangeness, though he was, early on and for a short while, something of an ally. His brother Marcus was also fond of their mother. In time, though, his brother was taken by knowledge of the family business, by the magnitude and weight of it, and so Val lost Marcus, as he supposed he would one day lose himself.

And when he stopped sleeping, when he became a nightwalker, Sir Burgolt called upon Val, received him smiling faintly from the head of the great hall of stone and hand-carved wood. Sir Burgolt called Val with burly arms flung apart for the cheek to cheek kiss that signified kinship. After Val suffered this greeting, he sniffed against his will the drug his father had imbibed to excess the previous night, catching within the dull flashes of Burgolt Manegold’s brain the face of the woman his father had diddled, a face that did not resemble his mother's.

Val settled silently at his father’s side. Val’s four brothers, including Marcus, and their gold-haired sister Katherin, surrounded the high seat, which Sir Burgolt filled as a king might an ancient throne. There was applause from the siblings, grins splaying their solemn, disdainful faces as though chipped out of stone by a knife.

Val’s mother was conspicuously absent.

Shortly after this exhibition, the soldiers of Petronille, armed to the teeth, admitted an elegantly clothed middle-aged man. The man brought ledgers and other records on his flexible mobile access, a hand-held computer the size of Val’s palm. Burgolt accepted the flex with a grunt. The newcomer delivered a flowery recitation of his enterprises. While the man yammered on, Burgolt abruptly swung his large, rough-lipped mouth to Val’s ear, whispering hotly, “Does he lie?”

Val thought, You all lie. He thought this with all his body, and with his heart.

He said, “Yes.”

At which Burgolt Manegold shifted a heavy hand to his hip, drew a brute of a pistol, and fired at his guest.

It was not the first murder of which Val was aware. He had become aware that men and women were murdered on the grounds so long ago that he no longer remembered knowing otherwise. It was, however, the first death he witnessed. The ping of the ejected shell casing skipping along the bare floor accentuated the eddy of well-being that surged from his father, a pleasure response that carried with it the odor of sour internal gasses. The newcomer had stiffened with barely a breath. With his heart perforated, he was catapulted into shock. The release of the muscles that held him on his feet occurred after death, which Val understood perfectly, as he saw through his gift the departure of the man’s soul. He stared as the discarnate entity wended outward and upward, pausing-- astonishingly --to gaze back on Val, but not at Val, not really, for it seemed even to the boy Val the soul of the expired man only turned to acknowledge the thing inside Val, the unfathomable thing, the faculty that whispered and offered up without explanation all the world’s secrets.

Val felt his brothers and sister and father’s thoughts pointing his way. Felt their combined searching, their suspicion. Saw his father’s head with its swirls of dark hair and its thick, barbered beard pivot on massive shoulders to angle a look in Val’s direction. This had been his initiation rite, Val knew. They would kill him if he faltered, all of them, with the understanding of beings whose survival depended on secrecy, conspiracy, and absolute loyalty.

Val held back his horror and survived.

By daylight he did mostly as expected. At night he nightwalked the high hills. Had the moons, although hemmed in as they were by the titan walls of the Goraneg he rarely saw all three at once. The mingled moonslight, most often pale as gossamer and vivid as sapphire, illuminated Val’s nights, sunset to daybreak, night after night, and calmed him. Except every ninth night or so Val fell heavily to sleep and could not be revived. The slumber lasted twelve to eighteen hours and, once, swallowed a day entirely. The family grew accustomed to these “fits,” as Burgolt Manegold called them, and assigned Val a pair of guards who appeared at the onset of this sickness and watched over Val until the fit released the gifted Manegold prince to consciousness.

Otherwise, Val knew nothing more of childhood. He tracked the hills of his boyhood under the cover of night, solitary and alert, and with a complete absence of joy. With puberty he acquired keen eyesight. Another mystery. Under proper conditions he literally folded distance, drew to him the object of observation, so he might scrutinize its folds and creases, its essence. He saw perfectly at night. Though he perceived darkness, he was able to look through night into its supernal light and by this light see in shadow as by sunlight. These things he told no one.

He told no one of Celesta, the girl from town. She had come to Nikusch from Symon after the death of her parents. A childless aunt took her in. Celesta was fifteen. He supposed he was sixteen. Lured after twilight into the forests above the town by rumor of a man-child who nightwalked near the river, Celesta encountered Val (who allowed himself to be encountered) on the upper banks of the Agotha.

Celesta was a poet, a charmer of words, a composer of thought, an innocent.

When he looked at her, he saw fine tendrils of her inner life, her soul. Celesta’s inward being was snowy, nearly translucent, blossoming two or three times the girl’s size. There was no ash in her aura, no shadow.

He loved to look at her through the mechanism of power. He liked it, too, that Celesta believed in the Others, beings fabled to have haunted upper Volodya before the Purge: tremonas, morfran, and other sorts of demi-humans. She wrote, generally incorrectly, about such things-- she lacked proper education in certain histories.

Val happily brought for her enlightenment the leather-bound, gold-crusted antique manuscripts from the castle library. These relics, lugged about in a nylon backpack, had been inked seven hundred years ago in the age of half-humans and world-bound gods. Such was the true history of the world, he told her.

His namesake, Lord Valten, had been the real thing, let there be no doubt. Valten the Volker was a figure of indefinable ability.

Delighted, Celesta copied outright whole passages into her flexible mobile access, pinning with little white teeth her plump lower lip and breathing softly on the back of Val’s hand while he held the fragile pages of his father’s manuscripts under a flashlight.

When she spoke, which was not often, Celesta’s whispered words echoed perfectly the music of her other voice, the lyrical resonance of her inner self. Val sensed this.

Like many people in the region, Celesta believed in the Amarite way and left crumbled bread to the gods of the forest, and of the water. She knelt to shrines when they came upon them, as he did, and closed her soft brown eyes in worship. When he said he heard inside his mind the voice of a goddess she did not snicker.

“What does she sound like?” Celesta asked.

Val tried to tell her: “It is a voice that makes my body tingle,” he said.

“Tingle where?” Celesta wondered.

“All over,” Val answered.

Celesta nodded, understanding. She saw nothing improper, though others might. She was uncritical in other ways, too.

His tooled leather garb, inappropriate for proper farm work, was handsome in her eyes. She never cared that his hair was long enough to flow into his eyes or that he wore a small-frame pistol under his belt at the small of his back. She knew that he came from the castle.

She thought him a servant of the Manegolds, warned him to take care. There were rumors (correct of course) the current generation of Manegolds, following the inclination and appetite of their noblemen ancestors, beat errant servants.

He let her go on thinking of him this way, though he never spoke an untruth, and told her to call him whatever she liked.

She named him Stephen Kessler after the waif child of Bero. It was romantic, his anonymity. And when, in town, she said she had found Stephen Kessler, the country’s most famous lost boy, the towners of Nikusch laughed politely and said she possessed a fine imagination and then they left Celesta alone.

She was never too long with Val. She attended classes, she had her chores. A proper girl, she was expected indoors before the hour turned indecent. And when the snows came to the Goraneg rings, night came more swiftly and that, too, took from their time together. She marveled that he did not mind the cold, tracking four and a half kilometers through snow, over ice, without a horse (too dangerous) or a vehicle (the big ATTs drew attention) to meet her at the river for a poem, kiss, and a pot of warmed ginger cider. She told him he made her feel pretty, at which he felt some sorrow, because she was pretty and did not know it.

Near the end of winter, as he woke in his bed from the long, special sleep, the sleep of the dead, he felt Celesta’s breath pass his cheek. He screamed in panic and ran to the balcony. From his suite at Petronille the hills shone under a new and heavy mantle of snow.

He had felt, before he gave in to his affliction, the coming storm, but what was one storm among many? He was a child of winter, living so high in the hills.

Celesta, too, knew better than to go out after sunset during winter storms but gone out she had, and not returned.

Nikusch let out the dogs to find her. Long before Val fought his way through the drifts of the high mountain plains onto the unplowed roads between Petronille and Nikusch, the towners found her.

Val went as far as the town edge, where the unpaved country road intersected the paved main one, and a row of sturdy brick houses sat behind picket fences and tiny patches of yard. He met no one. The towners had all gone east toward the market, where Celesta had lived. With his special sight, he looked on the ritual of mourning, the towners crunching through the snow down the converging lanes. He wished with all his being to go among them, but then the towners would know Stephen Kessler had been real.

Towners saw nothing wholesome in Manegolds. They would think he had come down from the stronghold to corrupt the girl, that she had given herself to him when in fact he had touched nothing of Celesta but her little hand and the flower petal of her mouth.

After that he learned the uses of stit. He never smoked stit. He purchased med-injects from the stablemaster and scored his stit raw, in powder form, from stores that passed through the farm on the way duty-free to the lower cities, letting the powder soak in saline until it could be strained and absorbed into the injection device and pushed into his veins. He abhorred lies, though he would later engage in several at length. When pushed to mindwalk, Val delivered with the efficacy of a freshly stropped razor drawn against young flesh. Gladly, he laid bare whoever crossed him and so earned a wide berth. He was by this time a participant in family affairs, privy to its caches and bank accounts and international holdings, liaisons and partnerships, scope and ambition. Sometimes he remembered to be afraid.

As with Celesta, it was after the long sleep that he learned of his mother’s passing. In autumn, right before Harvest Festival. He was most likely seventeen years. He woke and dressed without speaking, then padded quietly the corridors of the residential wing.

When he entered the great hall, he felt the silence sharply.

Flickering eyes pierced his skin.

He advanced as though his legs were heavy as iron.

At the antique hearth, Burgolt lumbered to his feet, struggling, seemingly, with grief. Marc cowered at Sir’s knee, his white face sloppy with tears.

“My son,” Burgolt uttered, his eye on Val.

Val extended his hand.

Burgolt mumbled something, for some reason pleased to receive publicly Val’s token comfort. Then Burgolt coughed. Coughed and gagged. Shoulders and arms contracting, the big man doubled over in agony. Veins bulged in his neck and brow.

Dismay and alarm broke across the hall.

Val, his hand out, experienced the thrashing, failing muscle of his father’s heart. He tilted his head. In the torrent of anguish he had come upon a new ability the way an infant comes from the womb to the nipple and knows to suck. It seemed to Val that he could wrench Sir Burgolt’s heart with his power as easily as he could breathe. He went at it slowly, though. He wanted the wheezing man to suffer. He wanted death to come creeping, its maw widening slowly, so Burgolt, Sir Burgolt, might see it, fear it.

And then Val fell. Dropped like a sack, his head bouncing. His eldest brother Adam, clutching an iron poker, hovered above. Val saw two Adams, understood the world was spinning, and felt sick in his stomach. He could not make his limbs obey or stop the rolling thunder within his skull.

Burgolt shuddered violently, froze, and heaved his bulk upright. He blinked wet, wide eyes at his sons, the clobbered youth on the planking, the older man with the blood-stained poker, and patted fretfully at his chest. The pain, of course, was gone. What remained was the taste of pain, pain’s echo.

Adam lifted the poker for a second blow, looked at his father for permission.

Katherin shrieked, “No!” She bore some fondness for Val but knew better than to allow fondness to betray her into mortal danger. “This is our home,” she reminded archly. “Do it somewhere else. We do not spill family blood within the walls.”

Burgolt shoved off Marc’s arm, which was offered in support, and lurched to Adam. He spoke huskily, so even Val, writhing on the polished planking, could hear: “The wolves, give him to the wolves.”

When Val recovered his senses he lay on the stones of the main courtyard. It was shortly after nightfall. Val’s wrists had been bound behind his back and his head oozed when he tried to lift it. He observed the spinning sky, the juxtaposed turrets of the east wing with their distant windows blackened by occupants afraid of the doings below, and finally he blinked at the staring faces of his brothers Adam and Gabriel. His brother Arnulf and three of his five cousins lived near the family offices in the city Moukib of West Ussuria. Two of his six uncles lived in Hupei, and one resided in Asthrinasipal as liaison to the Eastern Union syndicates. Two uncles, three brothers, and a small host of first and second cousins circled menacingly. They waited, Val supposed, for him to turn his curse on them, though he did not come to this conclusion through his hyped sensory package. When he was hurt or tired, his abilities sank below awareness and eluded his will. In other words he had no supernal power, no otherworldly weapon with which to defend himself. Gabriel squatted, caught Val’s shirt, and dragged him to his feet. An ATT, piloted by an uncle, rolled to a stop outside the gathering. Adam gestured angrily. Gabriel and Marc hefted Val into the cargo hold, then jumped in beside him. Adam and his uncle climbed into the cab. Adam waved at the guards as the vehicle bounded past the gates of Petronille into the countryside.

The pale daughter moon and her blue sister had taken the sky. The stars hung above in a crisp void, frozen. Val tore his arm from Gabriel’s grasp, and when Gabriel seized him again, Val called him a slave, a thrall, and a bootlicker.

“Stop, no more,” Marcus snapped. In the dark of the transport, Marcus seemed strange, unknowable. He brushed the dirt from Val’s arms and side. “It’s not his fault,” Marcus barked at Gabriel. “We’ve all wanted to slit the old man’s lying throat. You know we have.”

“Shut up, Marcus,” Adam warned from the cab. One spied in him already the makings of a Manegold patriarch.

“I’m going to shut up. And we’re going to bury him. Say it here, now, or I go no further.”

Adam canted Marcus a bemused look. “I’ll dig a hole for him if you’ll use the gun.”

“I’ll do it. I’m sorry, Val, don’t look at me that way. I won’t make it hurt. And we’ll bury you, okay?” He looked around. “So let’s everyone stop yelling. We can do it at Herta, all right? Herta’s not far. The soil is soft and Sir will never know.”

“I’m not walking two kilometers for him--”

“Shut up, Gabriel,” Adam snorted. “You are and you will, because we would for you.”

After that the ATT droned on in silence. Val kept an eye on the daughter moons, called Modron and Ubel in the uplands, Prima and Secuba elsewhere, and from their cold light found the strength to draw his body upright, to stop reeling with the hammer inside skull. He considered the furtherance of his existence. His brothers were seasoned brawlers, even Marcus. He, Val, was the only one in the ATT who had not killed. He was tied up and unarmed. Perhaps it was best to let it end. No, he scolded, and shook his head to clear out such thoughts. If he had use of his abilities, well … but he did not have access to them while his hurt was fresh. He suspected his power turned inward to feed the healing process, but he was not sure. He could run, force Marcus or Adam to hole him in the back. If he ran it would not be a clean death. It might take several shots to finish up. And then his brothers might leave him as he fell, confident in the appetite of the mountain wolves. He should try anyway, his heart spoke. And if he succeeded he might have one day another opportunity to kill his father.

The instant the ATT pulled over, Val sprang over the tailgate and bolted. He dashed sideways and took off on the balls of his feet. The terrain buckled, stubbled with shrubbery and pocked by loose stone. It was rough going by moonlight but Val knew his way. He knew it by daylight and moonlight, with and without his magic eyes. Adam pivoted with a pistol in hand, took a breath of an instant to line up his sights. And Val dove. The ground swelled just where he landed, shielding him. He heard the shot, continued to roll, and paused only to draw his legs and feet through the hoop created by his bound hands. He leaped to his feet, dove again. This time there were many shots. His brothers and uncles refusing to give chase. Their weapons were trained on the horizon, their narrowed gazes awaiting movement. Val put his head down and crawled. He accomplished this as quickly and quietly as he could.

With about five hundred paces between him and pursuit he came to his knees.

They fired, all of them. And hit the ground running. His brothers and uncles knew better than to swing the big all-wheelers out onto the loose, hilly ground at night. During the day, maybe. And at a safe speed. But not in pursuit. They’d roll the vehicle or just end up crawling around when they could move faster walking backward in the snow.

The hunt was on.

Val jumped into a depression, skidded on loose stone, and then hurled his body downward, long-striding the slope. He had maybe ten seconds, maybe a little more, before his pursuers locked on him.

At the last moment, he cut west, zigging around the hill instead of going over it to put ground between him and the guns. He heard hard breaths behind, and cursing. His pursuers cursed him, cursed the gods, and they cursed the uneven, rolling land they did not know as he did. Forget the mingled moonlight. His pursuers were in danger of getting lost. Stones rained down on Val’s right, while the thud of running feet echoed to his left. His pursuers had split up. Time to abandon caution, he realized. He took off at a straight run. The hills below Herta were too open to elude gunmen attempting to flank him. If he did not pull ahead now, he never would. Shots whizzed by. His brothers and uncles stopped shooting only to reload. Gradually, they fell behind. They were older, bigger men. In many ways, they were harder men but in the way that mattered that night they were soft, they were slow, and they were blind. Val gained the tall trees of the forest above Virog River about an hour later. He had not heard a shot in twenty minutes and his pursuers were no longer visible. When the forest took him, he stopped to shred the rope on his wrists on a stone. He descended through Virog into Agotha, and then he turned north by east, away from Nikusch. The downland roads around Nikusch would not be friendly tonight, or ever again.

Just before dawn he felt the kindling of his special power. Felt the strange but well-known sweetness of it in his veins. His vision sharpened. His mind cleared and began performing calculations. He was alive and alert, his sensory net confirming he was alone. And when the helicopter swooped down from the direction of Petronille, coming in low above the treetops, Val understood it had detected him on thermal scan and meant to deploy soldiers. His father was aboard. Maybe Sir would come down, maybe he wouldn’t. Val didn’t care. He wanted to hurt the machine with his father inside it and his power told him how. With a nudge of his mind, Val touched the helicopter’s engine in the same way that he had touched his father’s heart. The engine was a living thing too and Val could mess with it, though why he could was not revealed to him. The chopper’s instruments detected the engine’s sudden instability. Its pilots veered, hauling ass, and did not bring the distressed helicopter or any other flying thing after Val again.

Val descended for seven days. He stayed clear of the towns of Aliz, Konradas, and little Armina at the base of the Goraneg foothills, did not trust the local officials, many of whom his father had seated at Petronille.

Ulka was a city, the first city he saw with his own eyes. The forest bundled up to paved and lined roads and finally the forest receded. Motor traffic was thin but steady at the fringes, where residential districts gathered around little shopping hubs and restaurants and an arena. As he drew closer to Ulka the skyline flattened and expanded, shimmering with light. The big country trucks and ATTs were replaced by small efficiency vehicles, mini-buses, and sleek luxury cars. The shopping hubs moved closer to the road, which widened further into six boldly lined lanes with concrete dividers and overhead lamps. The hubs had car parks the size of paddocks that abutted the highway and through these car parks people strolled in numbers Val could not at first comprehend.

His senses were overwhelmed. Not his five senses but the inner ones. He thought of Celesta speaking softly by the Agotha while his mind and his power extended from his core in sync with her soul, his thoughts flowing smoothly inside and around hers. He could not think now. The light of life, merging into a bright core, and the drone of minds bent inward, hurting him. He could not find his own thoughts. The engines of the cars, their electrical systems, the energy snapping along the power grid adjacent to and over the highway, the minds of the people sizzled inside his skull until he stopped moving, stopped thinking, until he pressed his hands to his temples and ordered his power, Stop.

It stopped.

Stopped sifting, burning, sampling, searching.

Stopped everything.

He began to breathe, cautiously.

There was a heavy dullness where his power had been. It was unpleasant and constricting but he knew he could survive the numbness.

Knew he had to go on with the shield between his abilities and the new world.

Ulka loomed, revealing skyscrapers, vehicles cruising overpasses, super-highways, and, finally, canyons of concrete through which avenues stretched with shops, theaters, business, and people crammed side by side careening about with no expectation of order, like animals in a controlled stampede.

They paid, collectively, no attention to Val. For all his life he had been unable to produce body odor. His gift. His body seemed to operate in a state of renewal. He was, however, filthy. His clothes were unmistakably rustic, put together to endure the rough country of Goraneg, out of fashion, now stained, torn, and unattractive. Val’s skin, where it showed, was dirty. When he stopped to ask directions, the people of Ulka artfully dodged him and kept going.

Val went into a low-end restaurant. No one looked at him but the young man operating the counter. Val located the restroom, which was a closet really, with a filthy commode and a filthier sink. He exhausted the supply of disposable towels, clearing the wildlands from his skin with thin liquid soap. He straightened his hair, which was long enough to hang behind his shoulders, with cleaned hands. He rinsed his mouth, which, too, never had any odor. His gaze in the mirror was fresh, as usual, if a bit sullen and shadowy. He had no appreciation, otherwise, for his looks.

He sat alone, silent, the clamp on his sensory package inhibiting. He faced the window, his bones reacting to the cessation of movement. He had been moving so long. He was beginning to feel hungry. Generally, he did not. He did not eat. Did not make waste, usually. Did not function as the humans across the way, in the next booth, on the street. At Petronille, they were perfectly aware. In Ulka, while he sat unserved, unspeaking, and lost, they began to stare, an entire restaurant full of people. And finally he turned his head to look at them. He let down the shield inside his mind and felt this: how beautiful.

He did not get it.

The stir of hunger meant that soon he would feel lethargic. Once the heaviness crept into his limbs he would have to lie down. Sleep would take him for twelve or eighteen hours. He would be vulnerable.

He needed a safe place.

A server edged over, bewildered, smiling awkwardly. She held a flexible mobile access and a stylus. Gazed at him as though she knew him. “May I take your order?”

Val was born to the dialect of the uplands, a dialect brought to Volodya by his Volker ancestors. He spoke, too, the common tongue, called Volodyan, as well as the common languages of five countries under the Intercontinental Treaty of Allied Nations. He steadied himself to answer and be understood. “Do you know me?”

The accent made the young server grin. “You’re from the filming down the street, right? You’re”-- and she named some film actor about whom Val knew nothing, or next to nothing. She pointed to his haggard dress. “It’s a future flick, right? The one you’re doing? I like the costume.”

“I need help,” he said. “Do not call your local police. Call the Federal Authority office. There is one in Ulka, yes? If you are unable to call the FA, tell me. If you are able to do as I ask, I will wait here.”

The girl’s smile melted. She stared, and he stared back. He saw in her mind that she would do whatever he asked, as long as she was assured that he would be grateful.

He said, “I would be forever in your debt if you would contact the Federal Authority now.”

She said, “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

And she was.

Her customers, unaware of their exchange, returned gradually to their meals and their lives. The server, whose name he learned and then promptly forgot, sat in front of him as though to shield him with her body until the arrival of the FA agents. She’d told the Federal Authority switchboard that an international film star requested emergency assistance. She supposed the film star was being stalked or harassed in some significant manner. It was a local police matter, really, but the Federal Authority said it would send agents. Sometimes foreigners needed special handling.

She said, “They’re here. Are you going to be all right?”

He owed her kindness. The truth would not be kind. Val nodded at the girl and constructed his first lie: “Yes.”

Two bored, middle-aged FA agents in crisp autumn suits collected Val from the restaurant. The agents escorted him to a government sedan parked in the travel lane of the main thoroughfare, disdainfully, indifferently obstructing motorists. Val sank into the back seat. The agents spoke to him across a widening sea of exhaustion, asking his name.

“John. Valten. Manegold.”

The agents were perplexed. They looked at one another. And then they stopped being bored.

“Who did you say you were?”

“I am a Manegold. I come from the castle above Nikusch. I am Goranegi.”

"Do you have papers to be in Ulka?" one asked.

"No, I do not."

"That's unfortunate. We're going to arrest you for felony stupidity. Just so you know."

"Maybe knock you around a little for wasting our time," said the other.

"And then send you back."

Val closed his eyes. "I'm aware of the segregation law. Burgolt Manegold is my father. I've worked several years in the family business." They reacted. Val’s eyes were closed. He knew from years of handling weapons the sound of a semi-automatic safety clicking off. A gun was trained on his chest. “That’s right, that’s good,” Val murmured. “You aren’t on my father’s payroll, are you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the passenger agent, gripping the gun, demanded angrily.

“There is a contract against my life. If you will take me to a place where I can sleep, I will explain. I will tell you whatever you wish to know about who I am, my father, and the business.”

An hour after he was chauffeured to the Federal Authority complex in the Apecz district of Ulka, Val slid into the deep sleep and woke on the security medical ward inside the Authority’s complex. He was scrubbed clean and dressed in a hospital gown. A junior agent sat with him.

“Are you really a Manegold?” the agent asked.

Manegold births were attended by private physicians and local midwives. Public records in the region were unreliable.

Val said, “I have four brothers and one sister.”

“You’re going to be popular around here,” the agent predicted. “The justiciary has been after information on Burgolt Manegold and his syndicate for a long time."

Val moved to a sub-level isolation unit. The quarters were comfortable but bland. The air was recycled. The furniture was polyfiber, steel, or plastic. One wall was reinforced concrete. The rest were black polyfiber and two-way mirrors. Every centimeter of the residence was recorded every moment of every day.

The Authority fitted him with a tunic and linen trousers and introduced a case supervisor named Caspar Libing. Observed by FA hierarchy and brass from the Special Security Agency and the Chief Military Office, Caspar Libing over a period of several days debriefed Val.

The sessions were in a tight interview room adjacent to Val’s sleeping closet and toilet. A small table separated Libing and Val. The two-way mirrors were blackened to simulate polyfiber.

An experienced and intuitive interrogator, Libing had some knowledge of Goraneg culture, and he was a father. When Val said he did not know his true age, Libing moved on. Val gave the agent the names and approximate ages of his brothers, cousins, and uncles. He identified corporations posing in international industry while serving Manegold interests. He revealed bank accounts, supply stations, recruitment offices, and storage facilities.

Libing said that based on Val’s disclosures the Federal Authority had been ordered by the federal justiciary to seize Petronille and any persons occupying the castle. Libing wanted Val to suggest the best way to approach the castle.

Val said, “Fighter jets with guided missiles.”

Libing thought he was joking.

Val looked Libing in the eye. “You cannot approach Petronille undetected from the ground. There are two gunships and a fleet of ATTs. No one will be where you expect. If anyone at all is there.”

Libing said, “The warrant requires us to search Petronille for evidence to use at criminal trial.”

Val supposed the courts would want this. He had studied federal law and criminal procedure. Growing up outside such precepts, Val thought Libing’s statement seemed a bit naive. His father would not care about federal warrants and criminal procedure.

“My family has security systems on the two stit warehouses. After the gas kills your agents, the buildings will detonate. We kept nothing else at Petronille that would interest your court except the gunships and small-arms armories. I suppose if you could reach the hangars, and the gunships were there you could take them. But the armories, no, they will detonate if you do not use the correct code. And whatever code I give you is obsolete by now.”

“What about computers?”

Val frowned. “No, no, you could not access those. If they were still there, which they are not. They are terminals anyway. The hub is in Moukib, not Volodya. And the police officials in Moukib will laugh at you. To protect the hub Sir pays the Chairman of West Ussuria the equivalent of the operating budget of a small country. He’ll move it anyway, now that I am gone. As soon as he can he’ll move it. Maybe if you can find the grid, well, no, because you cannot break the encryption, you never will. And even if you find the new hub and hit it with a warhead, you will not stop business, because Sir only has to build his hub elsewhere. He can build it off the backup systems. Business will work independently a short while and upload once the matrix is initialized.”

Libing molded his spine to his backrest and sighed. In the subterranean vault Val was comfortable sampling his handler’s thoughts. Libing believed him. Val’s interaction with Libing was unconstrained.

“What exactly is the Manegold business?” Libing asked.

Val did not immediately answer. An Amarite priest, when asked to defend his belief in his gods, typically replied, “The sky is not blue because you believe it is blue. The sky is blue because it is.”

Val had lived the family business. How was something so basic, so embedded, explained to one who knew nothing, to an outsider? How did one explain the color of the sky to the blind?

Libing pressed. “What does the family do?”

Val said, “Acquire capital.”

Libing, feeling he had come to a subject of definite interest to the joint security and military observers, leaned forward. He was a tall man, lean and wiry with a creased and frowning face. His suit was well cut. His hair with its wires of gray was always in place. That was the extent of his bureaucratic persona. He seemed a man of understanding and intelligence, a study of history whose programmed antipathy toward descendants of the Volker was tempered by a wider view of the distant past.

“Acquire capital. That makes sense. But John, John, I’m trying to understand how your family went about doing that. In other words, a shopkeeper makes a profit by selling his wares at a price above the one for which he purchases his goods from the wholesaler. How does your family make profit?”

“We interface with criminal organizations that need its gains filtered into mainstream markets. We will take an organization’s profit and for a percentage run its cash through our holdings.”

“Since you are big enough to buy the governments of small countries …” Libing said. “Are you big enough?”

“Yes, but it’s harder to work with governments actually. Governments are corrupt. Politicians skim more than any other breed of man.”

Libing nodded. “What is another way?”

“Moving stit at wholesale quantities without paying import freight.”

“Stit powder or leaves?”

“Powder.”

“Do you have your own labs?”

“No, we take orders from the pharmaceuticals in Nimre and Tribries.”

“And they ship to you to get around the tariffs?”

“Annually it amounts to hundreds of millions of International Union Credits.”

Libing swallowed softly. “What else?”

“We sell weapons.”

“What kind of weapons?”

“Every kind of weapon.”

“Do you manufacture them?”

“No, that would not be cost effective. We have acquired a number of different fronts and we sell that way to governments.”

“Only to governments?”

“That was true for a long time, but no longer. We will sell to anyone.”

“What kind of weapons?”

“Small arms, shoulder assault rifles, grenades, launchers for rocket-powered grenades, machine guns, surface to air missiles, forty and fifty caliber mounteds, point four and point four-oh springers, the shells for the point four and point four-oh springers, black powder, bilton land mines, bouncers, plastics, L- and M-class attack helicopters, Aiglentine gunships, Super Warmen, armor-piercers, laser point weapons, martins, and stingrays.”

“All right,” said Libing, shifting his rump. “How are you able to get your hands on laser point weapons?”

“We bribe officials inside the Intercontinental Treaty nations just as easily as in non-allied nations, perhaps more easily. Officials in ITAN countries like their comfort.”

Libing only paused a little, considering the magnitude of Val’s revelation. Volodya was not a member nation but wanted to be. Such information, if proved, would further Volodya’s agenda. “Do you know the names of your contacts in, say, Brianovia? What about the UKSB? Aiglentina? Cobriva?”

“I recall the names of some. I did not care to learn their names. I was not allowed to meet with them and I did not manage that aspect of the family business. The family was afraid for important men in governments to see me.”

“I would like to come back to that. For now, how else does your family acquire capital?”

“We sell information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Any information that comes into our hands.”

“You will sell to bidders?”

“Somehow we would sell it. I’m not aware of the process. I never cared.”

“Did the information get people killed?”

“People died for a number of reasons because of the business. I cannot count the dead. People have died.”

“What else did you sell?”

“We sold people.”

“People, how?”

“They were given to us and we sold them. They were arranged with a buyer and price before the abduction occurred. We did not kidnap these people. We were in between. We profited from it.” Val said, “The people would be relevant to political processes, the award of a large contract, a merger that involved large blocks of capital.”

Libing sat forward, raised his hand slightly and then lowered it. “Did you kill anyone, John?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be. Nevertheless in Ulka and throughout Volodya many would hate Val. They would hate him because his ancestors had invaded Volodya, and when the Volker abandoned what they no longer wanted, Val’s ancestors had refused to surrender their perch. They would hate him because his family was wealthy and blatantly, unrepentantly lawless but immune to prosecution because of its (former) invisibility to federal officials and its hold on regional authority.

Val was grateful for Libing’s concern and the opportunity to be clear: “I have never killed.”

“Surely you had opportunity.”

“They never asked me to. I was their truthsayer, a talisman.”

“A what?”

“I was their truthsayer. I can tell the truth from a lie by being in a room with a person.”

Libing assumed this was a Goranegi quirk, a folk story, and moved on. “In what criminal enterprises did you have a hand?”

“There’s stit in my bloodstream. I am a user.”

“A user? Why not just smoke stit? Rolled stit is legal.”

“I have an unusual constitution. Smoking stit doesn’t affect me.”

“Are you addicted?”

“No.”

“You’re a heavy sleeper.”

“Stit injections did not cause that.”

“All right, I’m not that interested right now in your drug problem.” Val had already discerned this was not true. “What else did you do?”

Though he proceeded with his emotions firmly under his heel, Libing possessed contrasting feelings about an adolescent who mainlined stit and spoke levelly of murders.

“I managed our investments,” Val said. “Using algorithms and derivative math, I wrote the program we used to invest in the market.”

“You’re a bit young for that.”

“Code and math come easily to me.”

“Who was your source?”

“No who, what. When the market-makers began to move money, we knew. We were heavily into stock manipulations. It was not my place to know what or why, just to do what the math told me to do, and at the appropriate time. I did this for many accounts, not all of them ours.”

“Were people providing your stock data in violation of trade laws?”

“Of course.”

“Did you make calls to discuss these criminal acts, and did you discuss the sale of weapons, the sale of people, did you hold down anyone, stand in a room in which an abducted person was held? Our criminal justice policy considers those acts to be criminal. To arrange immunity for you, we must know what we will be forgiving. Did you do any of those things?”

“Petronille was not a theater of violence, at least not in the way you mean. It was more like the country home of a chief executive who never went into the home office. No abducted persons were brought to Petronille. And the people who died on the grounds were accomplices, employees, and occasionally Sir Burgolt’s wives.”

“Your father’s wives?”

“Sir does not believe in divorce. When he wants a new wife, he murders the current one.”

“Does your mother know about this practice?”

“She knew. We all knew. She thought the last time was the last time. She’s dead now. When he killed her I tried to kill him. I failed. Forgive me for that.”

“For trying to kill your father?”

For failing, Val thought. “Tell your agents to reconsider a ground attack. Nothing will be there. And still the automated systems will incinerate your soldiers.”

“The compilation of offenses is essential to lawful action,” Libing recited unnecessarily. “Even if your family fled the premises, we must seize the property, sort out its effects, begin to build a case. We have systems people and we have bomb technicians”

Val inhaled, his chest contracting. He sat back.

“We know our work,” said Libing, with less conviction. “When it’s done you can go up there, help us sort it out. Meanwhile why don’t you focus on helping the case from here? What did you do with your profits?”

“Me, personally? I was not a salaried employee. Now that I have left the family I have no resources.”

“No, I meant you, the business.”

“Profit was always used to advance the objective.”

“To acquire capital, ah. Then it was re-invested. Is that what you did with your analyses and programs?”

“Yes.” Val shook his head abruptly. “No, not as you mean. The family invested to advance the objective.”

Libing compressed his lips. “The objective being to make more money.”

Val locked onto Libing’s gaze. He had come upon an explanation of the family business that Libing might understand. “All profit went to upset economically and politically everything that was stable, and on as large a scale as possible, to bring about a new world order.”

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 2: Hiding in Plain Sight

2007-08-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Valten:

After that, Val was debriefed not in isolation tanks but in large conference centers and amphitheaters. There were several high-profile suicides and disappearances among Old Continent governments.

His interrogators were officials with diverging and converging interests, not all of them Volods, and so locations changed for each occasion. Val’s lodgings changed, too. His protection agents possessed an almost maddening anticipation of calamity. His transfers were attended by large-scale drama, in which he was dressed tactically and in armor. In spite of the politics and cost, Val was not a public item, but rather a very secret one. He was referred to by a code that gave away nothing of his ancestry to those with no need to know. Upon introduction, the positioned and titled men summoned to question him were often taken aback by his youth.

The effort to seize Petronille was a debacle. Libing described the tragedy. The access code on the armories, cracked by a systems technician with a polyflex hand-held, failed to deactivate anti-personnel thermal bombs because the detonations had been reset to respond to motion. Likewise the castle proper. Essentially, the property went up in a series of explosions that melted whatever evidence remained and wiped out seventy-seven federal tactical agents and nineteen civilian advisors.

Libing performed a mental readjustment. Burgolt Manegold could have incinerated Petronille without killing agents. Instead, the bastard planted motion sensors deep within key locations, ensuring maximum casualties.

Val had anticipated his patriarch’s maneuver.

You grew up with this man, Libing thought. Horror mingled with an appropriate portion of gratitude. Val’s defection had pissed off the old man.

The Manegold business had been dealt a blow.

In the end, for it must end, Val was two years older, taciturn, a quiet, cooperative inhabitant of lonely and secret places, ready for the final cleansing. It was Libing who said that Val was trying, in his way, to get clean. An old policeman’s term: get clean, get right. Val understood. The last step was a new identity, freedom. Or death.

The Federal Authority and its clients knew that one day Val would become a dry well. There were meetings to find an appropriate course. The decision fell to the Prime Minister, though not, of course, officially. But whatever she wanted the Superintendent of the Federal Authority would do.

She had Libing to her hunting lodge in Kodopovec. She dismissed her aides. She settled Libing on a sun deck overlooking a lake upon which a dark rain fell.

She was nearly ancient, physically fragile but well coifed, venerable. When Libing told Val about the meeting, he said nothing of the Prime Minister; he just thought about her. His heart pounded then as it did in the Prime Minister’s presence. There was a faint odor that day on the sun deck of decaying flesh and wet soil. When, later, Libing replayed the meeting in Val’s private chamber, Val said, “I don’t want to be cremated, I want to be buried.” Libing knew why Val said that, the association, and he was used to it, there was no alarm. But he had not thought of death when he gazed nervously on the back of the Prime Minister’s wrinkled neck. He was thinking of his service to Volodya, and to this old woman, with a passion that dismayed him. His love for Val notwithstanding (for he loved Val on a number of levels for a several reasons), he would do and say only what was best for his country.

The Prime Minister crossed twig-like legs and said, “Tell me about him, tell me about this gypsy.”

The old bias. Every Volod knew by rote the grievance of the Volker invasion, though it had been accomplished and undone seven hundred years ago. The Volker who stayed had married into the Volod race. That was why they stayed. There were no pure Volker in Volodya after the pullout. The middle and lower class mixed-blood families had been absorbed so thoroughly their Volker ancestry could be (and was) suppressed. In the Goraneg, the mixed-blood families retained the identity of the aristocracy that had given them wealth and status. They were not overrun because they had assimilated Volod culture. They had gone native. Only in the last hundred years had the rich Goraneg families faced the lacerating vagaries of prejudice. The turn in Volod politics seemed, to Libing, economically motivated. It was of no particular interest to the uplanders unless they wanted to hold public office, attend a state-run university, or buy a house in Bhavaja. Gypsies, the Volods called the uplanders. There were other names.

Libing said, “Excellency, he knows what he was taught, and what he is taught he rejects in favor of the true order of things. When given a choice of one or the other, he is drawn to truth. He is very young and unfamiliar with compromise. One suspects he would not have survived much longer if an incident had not forced him to flee.”

The Prime Minister, when he had been silent a while, blinked and stroked her chin. “I am afraid you have lost me.”

Libing assumed, “Yes, it’s difficult to render an opinion of John without discussing his skill as a mindwalker. Forgive me, Excellency, but if we terminate him, let it be for those things he may have learned sharing a chamber with agents and officials in government. He is not one of them. He’s only a Manegold in name.”

“What if they gave him to us, Burgolt Manegold and his brood, what if they gave us this mindwalker to pass through our world on his way back to theirs, taking with him our secrets?”

“He will have to contact them.”

“Can’t he?”

“No, Excellency, not while he is in custody.”

“Has he shown eagerness to be out of custody?”

“No.”

“Do we have any idea, any idea whatsoever, where Burgolt Manegold might be?”

“We can be fairly sure Burgolt Manegold is not aboard a Holland-Tchey orbit ship and so, yes, Excellency, we can say we believe he is on the planet. We cannot, today, be more specific.”

“What are our options?”

“If we release John with a new identity, we can place positive control on his communications solution. We can monitor his activity. We will require check-ins. What we cannot do is prevent him from acquiring an illicit communications tool, although we will eventually detect possession and he can only use it once. A monumental expense will be incurred if we capsulize every person with whom he makes contact--”

She waved this away. In a discussion about national security, cost was not a concern.

Libing said, “And we cannot keep him alive.”

She turned her gray eyes his way.

Libing elaborated. “If the Manegolds learn his identity, they will have penetrated our only effective means of securing John’s life. While we conduct surveillance we will never be close enough. We will never be fast enough.”

The Prime Minister straightened her legs and stood. “Thank you, Agent Libing.”

Val asked Libing, later, why it was necessary to paint such a picture for the Prime Minister, an image of John vulnerable, reliant.

“It’s the truth.”

Following the Superintendent’s decision, Libing brought Val documents that assigned a birthday, educational history, and thumbprint to one Stephen Kessler, nineteen years old. The rules of release were explained and reviewed. Libing was being relocated. The agent could not follow Val, for his association with the project would compromise Val’s new identity. If all went well and the gods were kind, they would not meet again, Libing said. (In most of the lower lands, Volods were Reformist atheists. Through the years Val had spoken confidently and convincingly of the gods. Val’s precepts had rubbed off on the agent.) Libing said an account would be activated with some funds. Eventually, the government would cease to contribute to the account. Val must prepare for this, Libing warned. Val promised to be wise, to stay well.

“You don’t look excited but you don’t look scared, either,” Libing said. “Are you ready to go or not?”

“A child looks away to see what is out there, wondering how long until he is ready to run without a hand behind or above to help. A father looks away knowing that one day when he looks back the child will be gone. If I am not looking especially hard at the door, it is only so you will see my face and know I am grateful.”

Libing embraced him.

Released in Bhavaja, Volodya’s principal city, Val leased a flat near the Harespar University and told the building manager he was taking his entries the next day.

His forged school records had already been accepted by the private institution but he lacked a board score from an accredited secondary school. The FA was unwilling to fake one, since board scores were sacrosanct internationally and ultimately worth a fortune. This suited Val, for the FA had no idea how he would score if he took the test. The entries, offered in winter to applicants with adequate secondary education and enough money, were just as good. The FA paid his entries fee, and Val, remembering the throw a question here and there, scored higher than any Harespar applicant in the institution’s history. He won the coveted First Scholarship, full tuition, books, and fees, and enrolled as a mathematics major.

He did well at Harespar. He avoided the vertigo suffered on the outskirts of Ulka because he was working with a much stronger mental shield. Even when he limited his senses, he was all right. His experience with the FA had taught him the uses of interaction. He fit in. The accent of the uplands was gone. He knew how to dress. His hair was clipped at the nape of his neck. He smelled usually of soap but nothing else. His coursework was impeccable, his grasp of theory advanced, and his scores flawless. He stayed out of study groups, a decision he later regretted, and only joined committees when required by his scholarship. After devising an encryption program for one of his professors, he enrolled in a campus computer workshop. The workshop provided a certificate in computer programming. The certificate allowed him to intern off-campus in the summer. He found that he liked the machines better after spending time away from Petronille and stuck with it. He wrote anti-virus software programs. The company profited quite a bit, though Val never saw the money.

He kept up the habit of exercise but did not participate in sports. He missed Libing. He missed the warmth of that liaison, their shared purpose. Younger minds were erratic, relationships unstable. Most of the time, Val was lonely.

He earned his undergraduate degree in two and a half years. Began turning down, per FA directive, offers outside Volodya to pursue post-graduate work tuition-free. He was charmed by a profitable think-tank in the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa, widely considered the most revered post-graduate program in mathematics and mathematical theory in the world. He was offered positions in Aiglentina, Brenna, and Prokopia contingent upon completing, also free of charge, post-graduate degrees in their institutions. His Harespar professors assured him he had grown beyond them. They made recommendations and wrote letters and pressed, wrote letters and pressed, until Val left the Harespar. He left, too, the suburb of Harespreen, which had been his home while he attended the university.

He leased a flat downtown in the remnants of a neighborhood near the waterfront. Industry had driven away those who could afford to leave. Those who remained were wearied, stubborn, or both. Val’s special account, rarely touched while he attended school, was by no means low but he trusted Libing’s advice. He meant to get a job. He applied at a placement agency.

To his surprise he was inundated with calls from information services and similar disciplines. He withdrew his name from the placement agency, turning to GateKeeper Global for postings. He did not want to be in demand. He was wary of attention and omitted, therefore, the degree and programming license from his resume. His options dwindled to short order cook, delivery driver, and cleaner.

He decided to do all three, at least for a little while. He thought about the horses of Petronille, and driving the big ATTs. Certainly, he could drive a business economy rig or spoon soup into disposable containers. He was about twenty-two, on his way to an interview-- he supposed the job entailed emptying wastebaskets and scrubbing toilets. His mind was fuzzy under the mental shield, the way it usually operated. A woman strolled from a rotating glass door, strolled right in front of him, trailing a scent so remarkably similar to roses that he did not immediately remember where he was. Val angled his head to look after her, let down the shield around his faculties the way an animal in the wild, sensing something interesting, threw wide its senses. In the ensuing bombardment (he was, after all, on a busy city street), he lost her. The bombardment was like facing a glaring light when one’s eyes had adjusted to darkness. The attendant energy of people and machinery, diaphanous and glassy or ashen and billowy, fluttered and surged together, burning behind his eyes. He winced and recoiled. The deluge was in its way quite painful. He supposed the woman he had seen had been blond but he was not sure. He muted the noise with its sea-boom beating inside his ears, and isolated a single note of the woman’s inner voice, his memory of it, before all others voices attacked. He tasted it now, this note of hers. She was lonely, whoever she was, yet not merely lonely. Her life compressed loneliness, dressed it up, and served it like the main course of a banquet. There was art in it, complexity, and there was sadness. The note, he felt, was his song. She had played his song.

He turned to the door she had come through and went inside. He stood on worn but glossy tiles and looked across a large lobby to a logo that announced the Bhavaja International Children’s Health Center. He turned to an information kiosk that protected a bank of elevators, a reception area, and a small café. A woman in a lavender silk jacket asked, after looking twice at him, if she could help.

“Do you have jobs here?” Val asked.

The woman had been smiling. She was paid to. Presently, her expression aligned with her smile, a somewhat pleasant effect, and she directed Val to the human resource floor.

Val met a good-natured recruiter at the elevator. He completed an application, and, at the last moment, included his degree. The recruiter matched him in a number of positions Val thought were suffocating and unchallenging. She had, too, a position as an information specialist to Dr. Leuonic Sandor. The recruiter confided that Dr. Sandor, who oversaw the research divisions, had lost three information specialists in three seasons. She recommended the other positions only, she added, because Val seemed nice.

Val chose Dr. Sandor. The doctor dealt exclusively with terminal illness. The hospital served children. Val’s official workstation was an office outside the doctor’s suite but since the doctor spent most of his time in the fifth floor laboratories and on the ninth and tenth floor patient wards, Val worked in those areas as well. Val’s life took shape. He cloaked himself in purpose, which was not to say he had none while he worked with Caspar Libing. That mission had been about peeling away layers, and, to some extent, deconstruction. The hospital was about dancing with the gods, intimacy with life at a depth Val only imagined, and the serene and perfect message, This is why you were born.

Five years later, when he knew he was going to die, he wept. If his life had ended in Ulka, he would not have mourned deeply. Life came, and went, he believed then. Appetite, and the petty things others did to satisfy themselves, those things Val knew. Ignorance, that too. Life was surrender, the letting go to one thing or another, and to death. But long before he was sentenced to die, he learned that he was wrong. In Bhavaja, Val touched the light that ran through everything. He learned to give life.

One day, Val went to the bedside of a patient moments before visited by Dr. Sandor. Val was only waiting to catch Dr. Sandor at the end of rounds, as they had agreed this worked better than Dr. Sandor stopping his work to travel to the research offices. Sometimes, the doctor wished to have his teaching rounds recorded, stored. Val facilitated this. Dr. Sandor’s research assistants, colleagues, and residents were a few steps ahead. Val, always silent, moved to the child’s bed. The boy, reduced by disease and experimental therapies, blinked at him above a breathing tube. The boy appeared to be struggling, though the machines with their beeping and printouts did not agree. Val touched the boy’s little hand. Easy, easy, he thought. Breathe slower, slower. You’re all right.

The boy tilted his tiny skull and batted his bruised eyes as though in acknowledgment.

Val looked at the boy’s nameplate.

The next day he saw in Dr. Sandor’s notes the boy’s condition had improved. Respiratory assistance was discontinued. Val went upstairs, and then waited while the boy’s parents read stories. Finally, the parents went away for lunch and Val approached the child.

The boy’s eyes lit up. “Are you real?” he rasped. The boy could not have been more than eight or nine.

“I am very real,” Val said.

“Your skin lights up. Do it again.”

Perplexed, Val queried the boy’s mind. With his shield down, he saw the boy’s inner life lying close above the boy’s fragile shell, blurred and opaque. Val probed. And he found himself, or the memory of himself, as he had seemed to the boy when he transferred his energy through the boy’s skin. There had been a glimmer. Perhaps it was an effect of his abilities on the boy’s senses, like overload.

Val said, “I’m glad to,” and passed his fingertips over the boy’s arm. He pushed outward with his own inner life, observing distractedly the crystalline tendrils of his power moving through the boy. “Did you see it that time?”

“Oh wow,” the boy said.

Val said, “My pleasure.”

“You have a nosebleed.”

“Do I?” Val tapped his upper lip. A little blood had spilled from his nose. “So I do. It’s all right.” He nearly added, “We should probably not talk about this,” but he would never ask a child to keep a secret. Would hospital administration believe the fantastic tale of a child on medication?

No one did, ever.

He never counted the children because he did not want to claim them like ticks on a scorecard. Besides, he was skewing Dr. Sandor’s research, rendering the doctor’s data useless, and he could not fix that or stop what he was doing. The children he touched lived. It became an effort not to choose, but to allow himself to be chosen. He did not quite understand this, but he was confident he never looked at a child and turned away. He would bleed when he gave the boys and girls his power. When he tried to help two in the same day, and when he served them one day after another he had to leave the wards for a while. Also, he slept a little every night after he healed a child, two or three hours, and that needed getting used to. Occasionally, leaving a child’s bedside, he could walk around with his mental shield down and not sense anything. This scared him, even after several years, although he learned to expect it. Like the stit he used to drive directly into his veins, the ability to give life overwhelmed.

And love, love too proved electrifying.

He found Maria as he found the children, quite by accident and nearly at the same time. Her lotion and perfume were part of a custom line of scents called Zephyra, prepared exclusively for her by a spa in Karsbrasova Square. He asked once, casually, how much the custom treatment cost. Maria told him. The amount violated judgment. In truth, he could see his mother easily commissioning the services of such a place if she had wanted to. Like Maria, he had grown up wealthy.

It was Maria he saw leaving the hospital the day he found his third home. She was thirty-four, a bit of a survivor. In her short life she had tried on numerous lifestyles, relationships, and ideologies. Which was not to say she was flighty. On the contrary. Her will was very strong, and in spite of evidence to the contrary she was sturdy and courageous.

Annually, Dr. Sandor and staff were summoned to the administrative floor lugging volumes of printed data for the health inspector. These sessions consumed an hour, perhaps a bit more, but demanded a season of meticulous preparation. Val had introduced trending tools that streamlined the presentation. Although he was very new, Dr. Sandor insisted Val call up the charts and graphs if necessary and explain to the inspector how the data was prepared. Previously, the presentation consisted purely of text, which frustrated the inspector and lengthened the interview.

The conference room in which this difficult meeting took place was gorgeous with wood paneling and a cream carpet. An executive secretary rolled in café and tea. There were smiles all around, the staff anxious to please the inspector, who possessed the power to close most, if not all, of Dr. Sandor’s research.

Val noticed right away Maria’s perfume. She sat near the head of the conference table in a pants suit, wearing very little cosmetics, and small white earrings. A black blouse set off her pale complexion and fine, blond hair. The blouse was buttoned up tightly around the fragile stalk of her neck, almost too tightly, as though she wished to convey rigidity, invulnerability. She conversed with the quality and assurance people, or they spoke around her and every now and again she agreed with something. Val sensed she had already imposed her iron logic on the group. From her perspective, there was no need for talk. Her identification card said she was a hospital employee in the QA department. This explained why he had yet to meet her. Oddly enough, she worked on the same floor, but at the opposite end in a wing of sterile offices Dr. Sandor’s people had labeled the land of the enemy.

Maria rarely left her office.

Val stared. He was new to instant attraction and did not quite know what to do with himself. Maria told him, later, that his eyes had shifted to her and widened. She thought something awkward was occurring near her and turned away to see what it was. When her gaze returned to Val, she was unsettled. Clearly, the man was staring at her. At work this never happened. She revised her statement, admitting it never happened, period. She connected with men of course, but not this way. All sorts of things went through her mind.

Val replied, “I know.”

She was not conventionally pretty and reminded Val of no one he had ever seen before. Her eyes opened into a quiet but shifting mind and an inner life that contended with a myriad of issues. She came from the clan that owned the communications titan Northwestern Technologies. The Zakarij house had splintered but no ties were broken. Maria was independent but she lived on an endowment, not her salary working as a department analyst. Her place, for which she paid outright, was a penthouse in Temming Gardens. It was furnished sparely, and with a sense of incompleteness. She owned a luxury motor car but rarely used it. Her boyfriends tended to be younger men attracted to wealth and independence. She never really seemed to get excited. Val suspected that younger men perceived her as a challenge. Even without special faculties, it was possible to sense her aloneness. Val wanted to fill somehow the uninhabited space.

At the meeting’s conclusion, she stood up and gave him a full look. “Nice work, Mr. Kessler. Dr. Sandor is notoriously awkward with information systems. You have done his office and this hospital a great service. Where did you study?”

He told her.

“That’s impressive.” She thought, He is impressive. “With a mind trained at Harespar, what are your intentions?” She thought, You could be anything you wanted to be.

Dr. Sandor had gone. The inspector had been hustled away to a gourmet lunch with hospital executives. The QA people were also leaving. There was nothing interesting in Maria interrogating Dr. Sandor’s new hire. A few felt pity but no desire to rescue Val. One man, as he departed, said, wryly, “Good luck.”

“I have poor social skills,” Val said, when they were alone. “And I’m not sure I like being around people.”

Maria responded to this by flexing her intuition and gently folding her arms over her chest. He was on the verge of overwhelming her. “Recognition of limitations does not mean doors are permanently closed. For example, here you are.”

“They aren’t limitations,” he said. “They are my preferences.”

She thought, You’re like me but look at me. You don’t want to end up like me.

“Loneliness is an affliction,” she said, “not a life goal, and it’s generally”-- here she began very slowly to smile --“corrected by behavior modification medication, or sex.” At this, she grinned, which he would learn she did not often do. As he stayed with her thoughts, she rode his, though not in the same manner. She was interested. He had only to cross the line.

“It’s awkward here. Isn’t there a better place?”

“A better place for what?” Maria exclaimed.

“To talk.”

“Oh.”

He said, “I love the way you smell.”

It was summer. The evening shadows found them on her king-sized bed, as Maria took Val inside her. He was a virgin, which he would later confess. The sex, however, was not the sex of a beginner. She felt nothing unusual at first. He was constructed well (wide-shouldered, athletic, tall) to capture the feminine imagination and there was plenty to hold onto. Generally, if she knew her partner only a little, she let her mind wander. She only returned if he seemed to go too fast. Otherwise, the appeal and comfort of straight sex was like fine wine and full of its own flavor. After a while she noticed the electrical pulses along her skin and in her bones, the intensity of them. She fixed her eyes on the face of the man above her. His eyes were closed, his skin was damp and shiny. His expression was serene, yet almost immediately (under her scrutiny) his features tightened. Tension seized her belly, the result of deep and well-timed motion. She flattened her spine and licked her lips. He repeated the stroke, but did not go as deep. If he had, she would have climaxed and she knew it. But she did not want to climax. Her knees went up, gripping, sliding. She stared now, not believing what her senses were telling her. She wished for his mouth to brush hers. He did so, his tongue flicking inside exactly as she liked it. She wished for him to take her over to the other side before too much thinking spoiled the sex. He deepened his strokes, and that was when he left her, which was as it should be. After she orgasmed, he took care of himself, holding on, holding on, and then slipped to her side.

He never needed her to describe what she experienced. He experienced it with her.

She grasped his hand, held it up, and drew it across her tummy. “You could do that for a living, my friend, and retire in a year.”

Nothing he needed to hear, for he had heard it, when his inner life merged with hers and his mind went completely, blissfully white, yet it pleased him to know her words and her mind were in sync.

She got up to make drinks and wash up, and then they made love, and finally he let her sleep.

Every day after work for the first month he walked with her the five city blocks to the Gardens. They had sex and he rode the El trains to his flat by the waterfront. After a month, he went from work to his flat directly, showered and changed, and then called to see if Maria wanted him. Sometimes she said, Let’s talk. They did not talk much at her penthouse. They could not keep their bodies apart. Through the video they talked, using the hands-free. He watched her on the screen as she prepared salad, fish, a wine sauce. They talked about the way the world sometimes cycled from all right to awful. They talked about wormholes, why a superpower like the UKSB, the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa, and a matchbook country like Volodya were the only nations in the world that televised executions. They spoke of mathematical theory, the Holland-Tchey aliens and what the humanoid species might be doing in their high orbit spacecraft drifting silently through the night sky.

“They aren’t drifting, we are.” This was Maria’s correction, and Val laughed.

He had anticipated it. They constructed stories and, less frequently, poems.

The calls would last the evening. Sometimes he became aroused. Their conversations included remedy, which pleased them both and sharpened his hunger. Never would three days pass without a meeting. She made him warm in his skin, breathless sometimes, and when he thought of her he could not always think properly of anything else.

When he was with her, he took her to bed, and only when he knew he could not make love with her anymore did he leave. She liked to make them light meals. He picked at these dishes, having little need for food.

Her dreams drifted to him and they were like little hugs and kisses, the dessert of sex. He stayed at home when the long sleep was due. This she never learned. By the end of their time together, he could say that he kept from her nothing else.

She wanted so little, it was true. There was damage to the psyche, shadows and perhaps the hint of mental disorder. Once in a while, she was taken by morose thoughts, a swell of them. Bundled up in these periods were feelings of helplessness, and the desire to die. She supposed he would leave her one day, and considered ending her life shortly thereafter. He was only aware of these thoughts through his abilities. Except in general terms and as it related to others, they did not discuss suicide. In this matter, he was an inept guide. Certainly, he understood perfectly that he was what she wanted. If she had longed for more, if she had wanted him to love her in a different way, he would have given as she asked. When he asked himself if he wanted her with him in the future, he answered that he wanted what Maria wanted, and when her mind changed he would know it. There would be no distress, no hinting, no frustration. Her needs were open to him. In turn, he spoke openly when queried. Meant what he said. Knew that he was understood and appreciated. Sometimes with her private voice Maria wondered why a man of his years and assets chose a woman like her. He answered with his body. It pleased her, his response. It was good. He was happy, as he conveyed to Maria’s aunt, Western Technologies television journalist Rada Bronya.

Rada Bronya was something of a TV celebrity, more like a sister than an aunt really, and quite close to Maria in age. She phoned after Maria begged off a family celebration during the Independence holiday. It was autumn. Maria had gone backpacking with Val. The family was aggrieved.

Maria agreed to have her aunt for dinner. Rada, the youngest of four siblings, was married to a Prokopian nationalist novelist whose pleasant works of fiction sold globally. Their country home in Kodopovec was rather comfortable, but there were no children in it. Rada was infertile. Rada slept several days a hand in a flat in Uptown Bhavaja near her Western Technologies studio. She came alone to Maria’s penthouse.

Val had purchased a suit and had it tailored for the evening. Maria stipulated black, her favorite color. He rather liked the suit.

After waiting at the door for Rada’s elevator, Val put on his warmest smile and clasped the journalist’s little hand. Maria was in the back of the penthouse and missed her aunt’s arrival. Rada, a thin, hard-looking forty-something with a decisive face and piercing eyes, was taken aback by Val’s looks. She maintained a stoic façade, although she had dressed softly in a sleek top with a scooped neck and flowing slacks. Her earrings were diamonds with gold settings.

At his side, Rada surrendered her dinner gift, a rare white wine import, saying, “Kessler, Kessler. My, what a difficult time you must have had coming up, what with the terrible nature of children these days. Did they poke at you for your name?”

“Stephen Kessler’s plight is amusing only to adults,” Val answered, evenly.

He and Rada had just strolled into the sitting room with its wide, unimpeded view of Uptown Bhavaja. When it rained the distant lights were like baubles, emerald, ruby, and amber, twinkling and flowing against the velvet night. Rada stopped near the floor-to-ceiling window to scrutinize Val. He had responded at just the right pitch, yet he had intended for her to know that he found her question a bit cruel.

Maria entered the room making an “ah” sound, her arms wide. The women greeted with warmth.

“We’ll be ready in a short moment,” Maria announced, pulling apart. “Will you have a drink, Aunt Rada?”

Rada said she would. “What’s this about you and your young man hiking to the old cathedral?”

Maria stood at the bar, busy with glasses, the ice bowl, and decanter. “There is an old church of Our Lady in Seskia. Val is an Amarite. I’d never seen it and it’s not like you can drive there, you know. He took me to see the ruins, the ones dedicated to Affaraon. Historically, we Volods must have prayed to her, I don’t know, about a thousand years ago.”

“Of course we did but that’s done now.” Rada tilted her head apologetically. “Of course, I mean that figuratively. You couldn’t find an Amarite temple in southern Volodya today, I’m sure.”

“You can,” Val said, gesturing Rada to a chair. “I am her temple. I carry her temple inside, so it’s considered redundant these days to build more. The lives of her subjects celebrate the god every day.”

Rada looked at him curiously.

Maria said, over her shoulder, “He has the simplest concepts, Aunt Rada. You can talk to him anytime about religion, you won’t find him dull at all. Tell her the prayer, Stephen. Aunt Rada’s a journalist and her husband writes volumes of love stories. She adores his work, don’t you, Aunt Rada? Stephen, say it for her. It’s a beautiful prayer.”

Val said, “The prayer is ‘Through your grace, my Lady of the Blessed Waters, receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen.’ ” He added, softly, “It is a prayer for passing.”

“Who owns the copyright?” A faint and gentle chuckle. “Maria’s right, it’s adorable.” After she settled into an armchair, she opted to say more. “It’s quite powerful, actually. You Amarites tend to be passionate, as I remember, although I have never met a young one. Usually one turns from atheism later in life.”

Maria carried over a tray. “I haven’t converted, Auntie. Stephen’s goddess frowns on doing away with oneself and I simply cannot understand why a god should have an opinion about it one way or the other.”

Rada laughed but Val felt, not from Maria but within himself, a spike of pain. How could she talk this way?

He turned to her and took the tray. He said to Rada, “We didn’t intend to offend anyone by going away for the holiday.” He handed out drinks and sat on the sofa. Unconsciously, he and Maria had settled some distance apart. Rada was forced to turn her head, not much but enough, to look from one to the other. “We had not had time off together before.”

“You work at the hospital, Stephen.”

This was a statement but he nodded. “Yes, it’s very satisfying there.” He felt like he was being interviewed.

“What do you do?”

Maria rushed in. “He is a bit of a genius. He established a secure local area network in a research department and has archived everything. The head of that department is very much against technology except as it relates to laboratory specimens and tools he can use to test and treat his patients. Stephen has put everything in a searchable database that produces results with a simple query, as it should. You can’t imagine the work he’s saved us.”

“You must be very appreciative,” Rada said.

Maria looked at Val. Her responding thought caused him to blush. He sipped his drink, which did not help.

Rada frowned interrogatively. Her mind had picked up this strain: Maria’s smitten, but why is this fellow with her? She can’t be his type.

Val lowered his gaze.

When the silence had gone on an uncomfortable length, Rada cleared her throat. “My dear, not to change the subject, but I just did a piece on Donat Heach and I wondered if I could interest you in it.”

“On the telie?” wondered Maria.

Val stiffened, although no one noticed.

“Yes, they’re executing him tonight. They’ll put the features up front. You’re a subscriber, aren’t you?”

“No,” Maria said, frowning. “I really don’t think watching a man die is good for me.”

“Nor do I,” Val chimed in. “Good for me, I mean. Maria’s spoken for herself.”

“I thought everyone, especially men, watched the hangings.”

“Of humans?” Later, Val was not sure why he included this query. “How is it done? He’s dangled or dropped?”

“He and she. Women bring in higher ratings, incidentally. It’s a drop.”

“There’s that,” he murmured.

Maria, sensing something, slid up to Val on the sofa and abruptly took his hand.

Rada said, “It’s reality, I suppose. An indulgence. If you studied sociology, you would know society needs release from time to time. These barbaric displays are the antidote to civilization. Otherwise, the beast inside devours us. One day we are polite, restrained beings and the next we’re bludgeoning our neighbors.”

Val looked away. “I think I remember receiving that lesson when I was a child.”

Maria’s hand tightened. Her psyche communicated alarm. He was too intense.

Rada noticed as well. “I have set a program to record it, please, at home. I’ll watch when I return. I wouldn’t want to disrupt this evening. If you were going to watch it, that was different.”

“I’m not a subscriber, Auntie. If it’s important to you, we can watch your feature and switch off.”

Rada found that an excellent compromise.

Maria used her remote to signal a debit to her pay account and flicked on the wall. The screen was immediately busy with journalists, legal analysts, and political personalities chattering on a panel. These minds debated Heach’s case from the perspective of their disciplines. It was hours before Heach was to die. After a moment, the network presented a re-enactment using well-known television actors of Heach’s crime, the murder of his business partner. Maria muted the device.

“Let’s dine, then see where we are. I’m sure if we watch too much I’ll lose my appetite.”

Rada said, without seeming patronizing, “Dear, is there no unpleasantness in your life?”

Maria laughed, suddenly at ease. The joke was that Rada, growing up with Maria, knew the answer.

Val slipped his arm over Maria’s shoulder, something he never did unless they were alone. “How long have you interviewed the nation’s notorious criminals?”

“I’ve been at it seven years, more or less.”

“And before then, what did you do?”

“I investigated criminal cases for my predecessor.”

“I am interested in what you know about a family, the Manegolds, from Goraneg. Have you heard of them?”

“Well,” she sighed as they entered the dining room, “they killed themselves in an explosion in their castle some while ago when a task force tried to execute a search warrant. I think their story would be interesting if another family just like it hadn’t taken up in their place. The Goraneg is riddled with old clans, families still very much rooted in the last century. They believe in the old Volker way of life, aggressively acquiring what they want without so much as a by your leave. They hold to the old caste system and resisting government. They’re a lawless, dangerous sort, which is why Parliament enacted the segregation laws in the last century. To keep them out of public schools and public office. Very hard people, very difficult. I wouldn’t want to meet one of them on a dark street. What is your interest in Goraneg history?”

Maria slipped away to set up their dishes. “The segregation laws are what caused the trouble, Aunt Rada, not the other way around. You should read your history better.”

“My dear, the segregation laws keep them where they are and they keep you safe from them. Anyone with a family name on the segregation list has to register with the Authority before entering a restricted prefecture, how can that be bad for us? You haven’t any idea what we’re being protected from.”

Maria turned around with a platter of hot buttered bread and sighed heavily. “Treat someone like filth long enough and filth is what they become.”

Rada’s eyes widened. “Stephen, help me here.”

Val had turned them outside his mind and outside his hearing. He stood looking from one to the other, though, with an expression of intense distraction. “I’m sorry?”

“I said, help me! Maria’s sensitive nature has put her on the side of tearing down our segregation laws. Maria, I had no idea you were an anti.”

“Well, I am.” She went back for the salad.

Val followed her to the counter and put on pot gloves. “The laws are meaningless.” His voice, he noticed, was without emotion. In contrast, his inner life vibrated emotionally, though why that would be he was not immediately certain. He’d been on the fringe of similar debates at Harespar University. When people generalized, he tuned out. Ignorance was not something he usually indulged, nor did he expect the truth to make any difference to the extent that he was prepared to divulge it. He was just profoundly sorry he started the dialogue tonight. “They really don’t mean anything because the world below the Goraneg is, to the people living upland, full of the victims of an inferior race. There isn’t any interest in leaving the Goraneg except to make money. No, I’m sorry, I said that wrong. The laws are not meaningless. They show that the people of the lower lands are frightened of the Goranegi. That in and of itself serves some purpose. It makes the upland clan patriarchs feel powerful.”

Maria brushed by him as he brought grilled filets in wine sauce on a heated iron tray to the rack on the table. She made a sound of satisfaction deep in her throat. “To assimilate them into Volod culture, that is the answer but it can’t be conceived of while policy demonstrates they must stay there or society here as we know it will collapse in tatters. Stephen, since you know geography, what major city is closest to the Goraneg? Is it Skaja-Volz or Ulka?”

“It depends on what way you’re headed.”

“Well, say a child runs away and tries to get work in Ulka. What happens when she presents her papers for a municipal identification card?”

“She’s arrested and returned to the foothills,” he said. “Which she knows, so she doesn’t run away. Unless her life is in danger there’s nothing in the lower lands for a daughter of Goraneg.”

“How does that resolve the crisis up there? We’ve condemned generations of children to live one way, no matter what they think or who they are. What about exposure to new ideas, to progress, health programs, and advanced education?”

Val needed very badly for Maria to shut up.

Maria said, “Thank you, Stephen, for proving my point. Stephen and I discuss everything, Aunt Rada.”

“Not politics so much,” Val said, absently. “The Goranegi are not impoverished, Maria.”

“You’re a man and you don’t like politics either,” Rada exclaimed. “Maria, you must keep him. He seems delightful, just the right blend of this and not too much of that.”

Maria’s thought made Val blush again. Talk turned to the recently publicized prediction of a harsh winter.

When the evening ended, Val gave Rada a peck on the cheek. She squeezed his hand. He had recovered his equilibrium and wondered how she had gotten such hard hands-- he knew how she’d acquired her hard heart --and realized she liked to lift weights. Later, he and Maria had sex. When they finished Maria talked about Rada, and said she wished Rada would conceive soon, her aunt wanted a child so. Val said there was a shadow in her womb, said it before he realized he would. Maria paid the comment no particular attention, but named the condition, which had caused enlargement of Rada’s uterus and irregular menstrual cycles.

Val thought he could clear up the shadow, wondered if he should without discussing it with Maria or Rada. Then he wondered how he would do that, how he would discuss it, and gave up the idea.

In the center of Karsbrasova Square, surrounded by upscale shops, diplomatic missions, and the commerce of Volodya, towered a wonderful bit of architecture called the Needle. Inside its curving, climbing mass of steel and stone were museums, theaters, banks, government offices, boutiques, and art galleries. Three years after Val took his job at the children’s hospital, three years after he met Maria, at about 1000 hours in Y751 on a summer weekday, the bulwark and belly of the Needle detonated. The blast superheated its remaining support and sent the tower crashing. The detonation exploded the tower outward, which caused the Needle to fall instead of collapse. It was devastating. Nine uptown city blocks were affected. From Maria’s sitting room, the night after the explosion, Val and Maria saw ashen darkness vivdly, luridly streaked by the strobes of emergency vehicles. Of course the rest of the city, off the impaired grid, was without power. Maria wept inconsolably. Val, less frightened than she was, was still frightened enough. The depravity of the mind that conceived and executed the act, making the Needle betray its architectural design and tumble rather than collapse, was sickeningly familiar. As he had told Rada, “I think I remember receiving that lesson when I was a child.”

The subsequent investigation, joined by allied nations, determined only point laser weapons could cause such a powerful blast without Quiranium, and Quiranium would have been detected by building security systems. On GateKeeper Global, a group calling itself Holbek took responsibility. There was only one reference in archives compiled by ITAN, members of the Intercontinental Treaty of Allied Nations, to a terrorist group called Holbek. The group, which had until then no activity, was trained and funded in Moukib. The question loomed: why would West Ussurian terrorists attack Bhavaja. Within days, the task force encountered encrypted communication between Moukib and a company identified as a front for Burgolt Manegold.

Val was with Maria when the call came to his hand-held. He was given a word. The single-word message was a code. When he received it, according to his Federal Authority agreement, he had to head immediately to the street. Electricity was still spotty that night. Some regions, like downtown and the city center, where the hospitals were, had restored power. Uptown was a maw, a wound that bled darkness. Maria had taken to closing the blinds against the view.

He peered through the blinds. There was no traffic below. Still he had to do what he was told or face revocation of his immunity agreement.

He made some excuse about returning to the hospital and did as ordered, went to the street.

He was picked up in a government sedan, ferried to a government airstrip, and flown to Asthrinasipal, the principal city of Misenos and ITAN headquarters. Prime Minister Barta, who allowed him to live all those years ago, had passed away. The present Prime Minister of Volodya, Arpiar Hovsep, was a sixty-year-old former Special Security superintendent. He wanted Val hanged under a National Security provision called the Conspiracy and Abetting Act, which punished violators with execution. It did not matter that the investigators could not identify a single member of Holbek. It did not matter that the Manegolds had no contact whatsoever with Val.

In Asthrinasipal, Val was delivered to a holding cell beneath the ITAN building. He met one after another the members of the investigation team.

“You are the only thing in Volodya that connects Holbek and the Manegolds. Why would the Manegolds strike Volodya?”

Prime Minister Hovsep’s desire notwithstanding, Val assumed he had been brought to Asthrinasipal to assist the task force. He asked to look at the evidence. Val, reviewing the technical data, remembered how to be afraid. The flimsy algorithm guarding the encrypted transmission had begged to be decoded. Therefore, the link to the Manegolds was intended for discovery. And Holbek was the name of a brigade of horsemen used in Amorium to protect the high priestess called the Lady of the Blessed Waters. This meant nothing to many investigators, who were Reformist atheists, but to agents from the UKSB and Aiglentina the priestess in Amorium was the head of their religion. And to an Amarite polytheist, like Val, she was a demigod, directly under the goddess Affaraon, whom Amarites believed had created the universe.

The Manegolds might, therefore, name a terrorist group, if they had founded one, after warriors of the goddess.

The laser technology left no trace detectable by human technology. Obligingly, the Holland-Tchey aliens on their ship in high orbit confirmed the Needle bombs employed laser weapons. Val reviewed with his interrogators how his family purchased weapons, laser weapons included. This data was already part of the John Manegold file but the new investigators insisted he go over it again.

ITAN did not engage in torture and summary executions. Its agents thanked Val and released him. The Volod Federal Authority, without bothering much to take care, gave Val a coach ticket on a public air carrier and ordered him to return to Bhavaja. Val supposed the agents would follow him, monitor him, but then, in his mind, they always had. He flew home.

When he contacted Dr. Sandor, Val explained the Needle’s collapse had taken a close family friend and he was sorry to have disappeared four days. Inundated with tales of tragedy, Dr. Sandor overlooked the inconsistencies in Val’s story and allowed Val to return to work. Maria, who had kept her relationship with Val outside of work, proved more difficult.

She refused his calls from the airport. She blocked his personal line, once she saw he was trying to reach her. So he left the hospital early his first day back and walked alone the five blocks to the Gardens. The doorman greeted him, curiously, with a nod from behind the gilt glass doors. Val waited outside on the bench at the park fringe. He stared into the air, into uncertainty, his heart moving laboriously against his ribs.

He saw her first. When she glimpsed him getting to his feet in the walkway she burned with emotion. He knew right away the trouble. She had supposed he was leaving her. Then, she supposed, he changed his mind, called to patch things up. She believed this. And she wasn’t having any. Now that he had tried to leave her she supposed he would try again. She preferred to be done with it.

He gathered this from her mind, and reacted to it, his response automatic, unfiltered, and plain before her eyes.

“Ah, no, don’t do this,” he begged. “Don’t send me away. I have an explanation. I’ll tell you everything, I swear I will.”

She let him in. Her mind lurched between desperate hope to anguish. She resented his power to bring her to pain. She was wary of giving such power to others.

They were just outside her penthouse.

As she let them in, “I’m sorry, Stephen. You don’t know how familiar this is, how hopeless.”

“You have never had this before, what we have, ever.”

She strolled toward the sitting room, turned slowly, and gave him a cold look. “Things end. They always do. I’m willing to let it end.”

“So you can do away with yourself.” It was a fragment in her emotional mind, what he hurled at her. It would have been kinder to deal with it later.

“How dare you,” she replied. He was not welcome to assume she would do something like that because of him, though he was right.

He said, “I know everything about you.”

“Are you reading my mind?” Rhetoric, gibberish. She wasn’t able to deal with that.

“Are you reading mine?” he countered.

She huffed and padded into the kitchen. “What do you have to tell me, Stephen?”

“You have heard”-- he turned to follow, it was so natural, so like their routine, her moving toward the kitchen, him following --“on the satellite the government is blaming a group called Holbek for the Needle.” A spike of psychic distress at mention of the incident. “And this group is linked somehow to a family called the Manegolds.”

“An international criminal organization of some sort.” The connection was only recently made public. It was fresh to Maria. She was well versed on the important parts and capable of regurgitating the bites, which played on satellite and GateKeeper Global all day. “The Manegolds killed eighty people five years ago but they didn’t die as some supposed.”

“My name is John Manegold, John Valten Manegold.”

Maria had ducked beneath the counter for her steamer and her crock. She straightened with empty hands, looked across the island counter at him, voiceless.

Her mind, too, did not speak. It was empty air, shock. He felt sadness creep into him, a sensation like weakness. His legs began to feel numb.

He said, “I am not a fugitive or a criminal. Do you remember the first evening we spent with your aunt? You suggested a hypothetical involving a runaway child in Ulka. And I said it would never happen.”

“Unless her life was in danger.”

“Yes, exactly. My life was in danger. I was to be killed, in fact. It happened when I was about seventeen.”

Her fingers lifted over the counter and seized the edge, perhaps for support. “I don’t understand.”

“You do, you do understand. The Federal Authority didn’t send me back, they protected me. They gave me a new identity. They made me Stephen Kessler. I am John Manegold but I am also Stephen Kessler. The Manegolds have announced war with our government and I do not know why. Four days ago, the Federal Authority flew me to Misenos to meet with ITAN officials to discuss the Needle. I could not call you, Maria. It was not permitted. They were not accommodating, I am lucky I was allowed to return at all.” He sighed. “Is it too much? Should I go while you think? I will if you want but if I go, please realize you cannot talk about what I have said. Maybe I have already brought you too much interest, maybe not, but if you talk about this everyone will notice you and not everyone is nice in this world, Maria.”

“I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay right here. I want you to tell me everything.”

In her mind, he saw words and thoughts in sync. He wanted to hold her but he went away into the sitting room. His chest hurt and his bones trembled. She could have easily turned him out. She could have. His eyes were hot and unfocused, and he felt unbalanced. What if she did? But she did not.

He made some rules. She could not call him Val-- he told her he preferred to be called Val --on the telephone or on the vid or in any communication, wired or wireless. When they had sex, she could call him his heart name, his gift name but only then. They stayed in more often. They had no real friends anyway. Besides her mother, her aunt, and the office, no one called Maria. No one called Val.

The second Holbek attack damaged the federal courthouse in the city center. The third, in Kodopovec Prefecture, brought about curfews. Maria and Val, observing the first casualty estimate on satellite in their respective offices, were frozen silent. It was a hard day, evoking remembrance of the large section of uptown still uninhabitable. At the end of the day, Val went to his flat. Maria waited near the vid for his call. They talked softly, thinly.

-- Are you okay?

-- Yes, are you?

-- I’m not sure.

-- Neither am I.

They assumed their communication solutions were monitored directly now. Val went to the big bay window in the dark and stared out. Maria could not see him, because the cam was not on him. “I miss you,” he said.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Watching my world drift away.”

“I’m holding onto you. You’re not drifting anywhere. I have my hand on yours.”

He blinked into the night at the blackened shapes of derelict apartment buildings and warehouses. Steel climbed overhead, the elevated train rails. Sometimes he welcomed their company in the dark.

Night rolled into morning, and the cold, changing light. Val abandoned GateKeeper, although he found it impossible to avoid stories coworkers told, an oil flow-station sabotaged in Sofiyko Prefecture, a military convoy attacked by rocket-powered grenades on Highway 41 in bucolic Kodopovec Prefecture, the bombing of a university auditorium in Ligia. The flow-station was close to Sofiyko’s principal city of Skaja-Volz, which suffered two explosions, one in its subtrain tunnels. ITAN had declared the violence the result of internal unrest involving fugitive Volod insurgents.

Val adjusted, as Maria said he would, to a world slipping dangerously out of focus. There were bombs found in Alstana Station. The federals diffused them. Floodlights winked over the wound that was once Karsbrasova Square. Roads were repaired around the leveled wasteland. At night the uptown skyline flickered in the old manner, except in the haphazard, non-geometrical pit where security lights crossed milky white beams.

Nearly two years after the fall of the Needle, West Ussurian assault teams aided by ITAN soldiers raided an estate outside Moukib. It was spring in Bhavaja. The public statement admitted to seizure of two billion International Union Credits (IUCs) in bullion and diamonds, an arsenal of rifles and explosives, and the parts to build two laser point weapons large enough to penetrate an aircraft carrier. Twenty-three men and women were arrested.

Val’s sister was there among them.

Katherin Manegold and a small boy named Joseph, whom Katherin said was her brother, were flown by ITAN transport to a support facility. What became of his sister Katherin and the little boy Joseph, Val learned shortly after his hand-held chimed and the caller spoke the code word.

He was at work. He used his office terminal to call Maria’s line. “Hello, Miss Zakarij, this is Mr. Kessler in Dr. Sandor’s office. Your files will be delayed. Please accept my apology. We’ll do our best to send the upgraded data as soon as possible.” It was against the rules for him to say good-bye, to say anything. He was supposed to get up, walk briskly to the nearest exit, wait for the government sedan. In spite of protocol, he and Maria had worked out a script. The hospital knew nothing about their relationship. He knew when he called her line that she was there. She wouldn’t pick up when she saw his caller ID. She had her ways, her habits. She said she it was difficult to speak to him as though he were a stranger on the phone. But at work, regardless of appearances, they weren’t alone. Phone lines were recorded. She did not want her private life to become public. Nor did he. Of course the Federal Authority knew about them. Val thought, Screw it.

He wrote a note to Dr. Sandor’s electronic mail, stating he was going to the side of an ailing sister. Dr. Sandor would be put out, maybe furious. There was an audit due in thirty days. The doctor was anxious. Val added, “I’m very sorry but I’ll keep you informed.” The e-mail was his second violation.

He put on his jacket. It was windy in spring. The weather was fickle. In the Goraneg, if one complained about spring temperature swings, the old women of the hills would say, “This is Volodya,” and laugh.

He rode the elevator hoping to glimpse Maria and was rewarded. She had received his message, gone with haste to the lobby, probably through the stairway. She waited at the kiosk, her face thin and pale with anxiety. He tried to smile, tried not to let her see what her expression did to him. At least she didn’t approach, didn’t try to stop him.

He went to the street, turned south, always south, and walked. A sedan paced him, then slid over. The back door opened. Val recognized Caspar Libing, sighed, and joined Libing in the backseat.

Libing held out his hand, regarded him with thought. Val felt, suddenly, the eight years since his last meeting with Libing. He had been school-age. Now his features were heavier. He was taller. He no longer peered curiously at people on the street, at the sky, at everything.

He grasped Libing’s hand. “You told me I’d never see you again.”

Libing put his head back. “You don’t see me now. I am an illusion. Remember that. Have you ever wanted to travel to the UKSB?”

“No, never.”

“We’ll go by airjet. It’s a long flight.”

“Why must I go?”

“Ah. Your sister Katherin is there. The ITAN special attaché to the multinational task force, you’ll meet him, interesting fellow, asked the UKSB to sponsor a security site for her welfare.”

“The UKSB? Haven’t their military installations a tendency to collapse in non-existent rifts?”

“Yes, old business, nasty. Did you hear about it as a boy? Three bases just fell into the ground. They’ve had fourteen years to investigate and they’re still putting forth it was an earthquake. Yes, well, we know they were experimenting with prohibited technology.”

“And ITAN sends my sister there.”

“Let’s not forget the UKSB remains the world’s superpower. As to why you are here, Prime Minister Barta, you may recall, blacked out aspects of your capsule, the notation on your, eh, abilities.” Libing curled his fingers in a fist, rubbed his knee. “The capsule was opened by Prime Minister Hovsep. It was to be expected. There was reaction but you have survived it. In fact, you never knew how close you came to going under the wheels of the machine.”

“I am sure I could have gone on nicely not knowing at all.”

“The Security Council and the FA went to closed doors about you.”

“Did they.”

“The surveillance continues, they agreed to that. Prime Minister Hovsep yielded to the Special Security Superintendent. We’re better with you than without you.”

“I’ve agreed to the surveillance. I’m all right with it. Maria is …” Val lost the words. He wondered what he was going to say.

“Interesting choice in partners, the niece of a telecomm giant executive. You’ve told her?”

“I’m sleeping with her, of course I’ve told her. After you pulled me off the street in seven fifty-one and held me four days, what was I supposed to do? It was tell her or lose her.”

“She’s very tight-lipped, the private sort. As far as we can tell, she’s never slipped, not once.”

“You needn’t worry. I’ll know it if she does.”

“And do what?”

Val gazed out the window. The sedan with its sports vehicle escort had ramped onto the highway. The skyline had opened. They pulled away from the city. “Leave her, I suppose.” As though leaving Maria was possible.

“Yes, well, the ITAN fellow, Bromley is his name, reviewing your capsule suggested we allow a meeting with your sister Katherin.”

Val had worried it was something like this. “I don’t want to, if you’re interested. Tell me it will help.”

Libing offered a look of fellow feeling. “It will help. You’re one of us, so don’t go getting your head turned around. See what is going on with her. John, we know too little.”

“What about the boy?”

“The little boy? We think your father remarried.”

“Unbelievable.” But Val believed it.

Of course he did. And he thought how little he really knew about them, about Katherin, about his father. The bits and pieces he gathered up through childhood wouldn’t knit together in memory the same way, if he were exposed to those pieces today. “Sir,” he murmured, gazing toward the sky. Why did they call the man Sir? The title, like the aristocracy, was defunct. Modern Volodya held such remnants of upland history in contempt. Next to Libing in the racing car, Val shifted uncomfortably and stretched his neck. His mother, he reflected, had known her predecessor was killed and by whom, yet she had wanted Manegold, she had married him. Val tried to remember how long ago he knew the mothers of his half-brothers died at his father’s hands. He had always known, and so had his siblings. It was never concealed, was it? Val closed his eyes, exhaling. Business was discussed freely at Petronille. She never minded. What did his siblings discuss now, and where were they, who was alive, how had they survived?

The flight over the ocean was terribly long. Val was restless, could not settle in. Libing made conversation, or attempted to. Occasionally, Val was engaged. They were like colleagues rather than father and son. Val enjoyed Libing’s pleasure in the man that he had become.

The airjet landed after midnight. Bromley, with ITAN, the special attaché, shook his hand on the ramp into the security facility. Rayburn Finlay, the UKSB attorney general, Lee Kenelm with the UKSB department of homeland affairs, and Kier Tomalsi, head of the multinational task force, met Val in the carpeted vestibule. The ITAN official, looking at Val with interest, gave Val alarm. He wondered if he should say something to Libing but remembered Libing asking, “Have you ever wanted to travel to the UKSB?” Of course Libing knew. Why would the Federal Authority reassign Libing if not to ensure the inevitable overtures by politically minded entities were rebuffed?

He passed, presently, through a gauntlet of frontline task force agents. The hostility that dominated his last expense-paid excursion was replaced by something nebulous, anticipation, possibly excitement. The UKSB interagency communications director, a dour-faced man, called him John and offered to take him to his quarters.

The security facility was well lit with broad passages and spotlighted doorways. The place recalled a shopping mall. Val was escorted to his quarters, allowed to rest and shower, he supposed, so the ITAN scientists, whose presence he detected, could observe him. Energy fluctuations in the chamber indicated frequent bio scans. Libing was pissed when he told him, but Libing would not officially protest. A human capable to picking up active scans might be worth abducting and Libing was no fool.

There were several meetings to talk over interview strategy. Val was required to attend. He was less anxious during these sessions than at any other time, for the conference was charged with purpose. Only agents attended. Bromley and his group had better things to do. Val felt the energy of the agents, the rightness of it. He was questioned infrequently but always with respect. In the briefing rooms he was called John.

They gave him satellite images of the Moukib site, thermals and sketches, an inventory of what was seized, image files of the living quarters. There were documents, manifests mainly, and some personal letters by Arnulf addressed to Katherin. Arnulf was married, Katherin single. The letters suggested intimacy. Val confirmed. He had grown up with knowledge of it. The relationship had not seemed unusual when he was younger. It just was.

The question was how did the Moukib seizure fit as a piece to the puzzle of Burgolt Manegold’s objective.

Val rested his power and his body. It was one time he welcomed the long sleep. He woke and ate a small meal. Food brought his faculties to the surface and made it difficult to dial back his sensory package. He prepared by going to the observation room outside the interview chamber and looking through the shielded glass at his sister.

This first step proved easy. She was dressed in custodial overalls. She wore no cosmetics. Her blond hair, still long, was banded into a lank tail. Aware that she would be interviewed, she sat deep in a plastic chair with hands flat on her knees. Her breathing was forced but even, and her mind was essentially blank. Val suspected she had been trained to face interrogation and wondered when his siblings were given this training. Capture had not been a concern when he was growing up. No one worried about the law.

She will hate me, he realized. I’ll have to face that. I changed everything.

He turned to Libing. “She is playing a nursery tune, like background noise, over and over in her head. There’s no contemplation of events, outcome, or who will walk through the door. My guess is she knows it will be me.”

“Are you ready?” Libing asked.

Val said, “Yes, how do I go in?”

The next part, too, was easier than he expected. He wondered, later, why he hardly thought of his brothers and his sister. Their absence in his everyday thoughts was the other end of a range, in which he was vividly and startlingly present in theirs. He did not understand until he sat with Katherin how desperately his brothers and father wanted to kill him. Certainly, he was no longer, to them, a threat. Their need to kill him burned inside their emotional lives, which required reparation.

These were the people who took down the Needle and sent surface-to-air missiles at military jets doing fly-overs in the Goraneg.

They will find me, he thought.

The world became unsettlingly small when he considered the hunt, like a sandbox in a town yard around which grown-ups chatted and drank lemon tea.

The higher-ups will miss their queue and something bad will happen while they chatter on and on, blissfully ignorant.

They would find him.

He had been hiding in plain sight, so some part of him had supposed only his family’s lack of effort accounted for the FA program’s success. In truth, the family had flexed a lot of muscle and spent a lot of money to find him. Their failure was due an overestimation of Val’s worth to the Federal Authority. They were looking for a government safe house, a high-security installation, a code name, as though Val had continued a pawn for the Federal Authority. If they had instead recognized what their well-bought information was telling them, they might have pieced together Val was a no-name man living a no-name life in a big city. Such an existence, while perfection to him, was anathema to them.

As for Katherin, she regarded him with wide-mouthed speculation the way a visitor might take in a curiosity at a zoo. A wry and perhaps bitter smile touched her lips. “I’m going to die before you,” she said. “You have to love it.”

He realized he did not care she was going to die. She was on track to be executed, yes, as soon as the task force finished with her. Val cared that she had come to this place, but she was not here alone. He was with her. The thousands who died when the Needle fell, they were present too.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said.

“You still believe that Amarite crap?” she countered, sassy. “The end is the beginning, all that? Well, you and Sir can take it to hell with you and burn it when you get there. I’ll be ashes, but you believe what you want. Make the world over in fire? Oh Val, you poor bastard. Do you think when the world is on fire anyone will give a shit about beginning again? Begin with what? There’s nothing left, baby brother, when there’s nothing left.”

Not with her mind, but with words she confessed. Val looked over his shoulder at the shielded window. Do you understand now? his expression asked.

He turned his head to look at her. “Where is Sir now?”

“Nowhere I’ll know. He wouldn’t trust any of us, after you, to protect him. He was in Saracisia last I knew. He likes the cold.”

“Where is Arnulf?”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“The little boy, who is his mother?”

From her mind, he got this, Who do you think? She said, “You wouldn’t know her. She’d spit in your face if she could. That’s who she is, someone who would spit in your face.”

The little boy was Katherin’s, and Arnulf was the boy’s father. The boy was, of course, innocent.

“What can I do for you, Kath?”

“Guess.”

“Will you let me touch you?”

“Yes, Val, reach over here. Come closer.”

“I’m going to, Kath. And after I do, I want you to tell me about the laser weapons, how you got them and why. I need to understand where they were going. I want you to tell me about the financing. How is the money getting into Sir’s hands? And how big is the network, now, Kath? I need to know that too.”

Her eyes insisted, Get as close as you wish. Meanwhile, her fingers tightened in her lap. Her teeth showed behind thinning lips.

He leaned in his chair, the plastic creaking. He reached over her knees, covered one of her raw-knuckled hands. She latched onto his forearm with fingernails sharp as penknives. She was not as strong as she imagined but she was strong enough. Her breath grew rough. If she wanted, she could catch his jugular with her teeth. He was cognizant of that. Her skin was growing cool and damp, pale. She considered the taste of his blood, the feeling of it on her tongue. He leaned closer, pushing with his mind as he locked his gaze on her.

Her inner life, he had seen, was flat, its discarnate tendrils at her side and on the ground like ethereal rope. There was unbearable density. It was opaque, curdling near her face, from which her stare sharpened.

He let his power burn upward through his center. The heat of it was akin to a blast furnace but he knew, despite the immediate discomfort, his flesh would contain it. His own inner life launched, a winged thing slipping its leash. It divided, as so often it would, from his body, widening as it mounted the air. He pushed harder. She must see it before she felt it. He must show her how to see it, the way the children that he healed saw. He smoothed carefully the ridges and gray smudges in her aura. He brushed her with his fire, felt the warmth take hold.

Her fingers loosened. Her eyes raised. Her lips parted.

“No, don’t let go,” he whispered.

She heeded him.

He took her, next, gently, into the tunnel, into darkness, to a bridge, the nature of which he did not guess, never had, and he stood with her, holding to her. The bridge went away, it always did. A field reached before them, soft and silent, unlike real fields, which were rough but alive. This was a construct, illusion. In the center of it was a girl, a child with silver hair.

Katherin gasped, the real Katherin, for in the illusion the child was suddenly before her, right in front of her. She looked up, the little girl, and in a moment was a tall, slender woman with black eyes and full red lips. Katherin gasped again, and Val let out a sigh of pleasure. Katherin heard him and echoed it. They were younger, suddenly, brother and sister, hand in hand in a silent field before a beautiful goddess.

“Hold me tighter,” Val said.

Katherin did.

The woman, the other, canted a face of galvanic loveliness. She seemed to be speaking, although Katherin could not hear her. Val spoke her words, whispered them into Katherin’s ear. They were private, these words. The speakers in the observation chamber caught none of them. Katherin began, inexplicably, to weep. Val slid his arms around her shoulders, eased her cheek against his neck. He felt, unexpectedly, his embrace deepen with emotion.

He folded his power within his flesh, paused to observe Katherin’s essence lifting about her, clean and clear, undulating, vital. Then he closed his eyes.

She sobbed, her torso nearly limp in his arms, “Is that god?”

“Yes.”

“You can speak to god?”

“Yes.”

“Have you always?”

He settled a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yes.”

“You left us, then, because you knew.”

“Love, you had all grown eager to shoot me. That’s why I left. But, yes, I felt the wrongness. I knew it for what it was.”

She straightened, smashing tears into her pale cheeks. “The dead, they pass. What did she mean by that?”

“We all pass. We are imperfect, we are only traveling. A gate opens at the end. The journey continues.”

“Even for me?”

“For all of us. You feel the wholeness of her now but her love for you was perfect before you looked on her face. She has always known you.”

“I could not bear it otherwise.”

He knew she meant the others, the ones she’d killed, not her imminent death. “We all bear it, Kath. Try not to be afraid.”

“You also,” she uttered, roughly. “Will you promise, my little one? When they find you, promise you won’t be afraid. They will want you to be. Disappoint them.”

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 3: Entrapment

2007-08-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Valten:

She told him an arms contractor in the UKSB sold laser weapons illegally off its parts inventory. She named the factory. It was owned by a company that built weapons for the government. She told them Sir’s money came from financiers, deconstructionists like himself, enemies of ITAN.

At the end of the day, Val and Libing sat with the task force agents and ITAN officials. Bromley was elated, his spirit mirrored by others in the room, many of whom organized seizures and arrests through hand-helds.

“We’ll get most of them on CAA,” the attorney general, Finlay, was telling Libing. “We won’t use a warrant. A jurisdictional transfer to homeland affairs will get everyone netted today.”

Libing nodded and asked about the contractor’s assets, how the UKSB handled seizures of that magnitude.

Val didn’t remember what a CAA was, but he knew how jurisdictional transfers worked. When the task force was satisfied she had no more information, it would transfer Katherin out of homeland affairs and into ITAN custody. Volodya wanted her but Volodya wanted ITAN membership more and had backed away from its extradition request. Katherin was charged under the international code against the procurement of weapons to further insurgency. ITAN would execute her as a terrorist and it would do so on UKSB soil. Libing said Katherin would receive a lethal injection in about fourteen days. Terror cases in just about all nations had limited access to the appellate courts, and Katherin had confessed.

There was one last meeting with Bromley and Tomalsi, the task force chief. Tomalsi produced a transcript of the interview and asked Val to flesh out those instances when the dialogue went on below the range of the microphones.

“For the record,” Tomalsi insisted.

As he went over the computer file, Val remembered the significance of the CAA, or Conspiracy and Abetting Act. Under the Conspiracy and Abetting Act talking to blacklisted individuals and entities was a federal violation. A sleeper agent required activation, orders, and so CAA made sense in theory. The UKSB attorney general had helped Volodya amend its National Security Act with the CAA, which met only token resistance in Parliament. Anyone making prohibited contact with a blacklisted risked execution. The amendment had never, in Volodya, been used. The UKSB used it all the time.

While Val and Tomalsi spoke in low voices over the file, Val became aware of Bromley’s scrutiny. The ITAN official beamed pleasantly.

Libing checked his watch, a distraction. The airjet was due to lift off in an hour.

Bromley stared across the conference table, a slim man with waves of silver hair.

… I hope I’m not wasting my time … I’m not … If you can’t understand me but you know what I’m doing move your water glass to the left side of your keypad.

Val said to Tomalsi, “Right here, this span, she was not speaking. I was telling her to be calm.”

Tomalsi frowned and made the notation to the file.

Libing checked his watch again.

… Do you hear me … Is hear the right word? … Either we are communicating perfectly or I am communicating with myself … If you can sort out my thoughts you are an extraordinary being and of great value to my organization … We will sponsor your defection for the sum of one million International Union Credits. Your defection will be to the UKSB but you will report to ITAN. Have I got your attention?

Tomalsi said, “Review my notation, please.”

Val said, “It’s correct.”

Bromley, staring, murmured softly some words to his colleague, seated on his right. It was a brief and meaningless exchange. As soon as he was able, Bromley reordered his thoughts.

… One million does not excite you, my friend? We are prepared to offer more. If this satisfies you, move your water glass to the other side of your keypad. Extraction would be after your return to Volodya. We wouldn’t create a fuss here, as we are very good hosts. Will you consider two million International Union Credits?

Tomalsi said, “I think that will do it.”

Val glanced at Libing. “Are we on schedule?”

Libing said, “We’re doing well.”

Bromley nodded in Val’s direction, his mouth pulling a smile that did not reach his eyes.

Val stroked his water glass, then got up, leaving it where it was.

When Val returned to Bhavaja, he called Dr. Sandor. The doctor clucked with relief and said he was glad Val had not stranded them indefinitely in such a time of need. Val felt genuinely sorry.

Maria met him in her penthouse, to which he possessed an access card. She kissed him without speaking, her body molded to his, her fingers on either side of his face. They made love right away, so that he grew quiet within himself, able to listen to his voice as well as hers.

Maria made a light dinner. From the window of Maria’s penthouse Val looked over uptown. The debris that used to be Karsbrasova Square had been cleared. A vast yard within a barricade fence represented the killing ground. People hung wreaths and lay flowers, left letters of remembrance.

The next day Val visited a girl on the wards but was prevented from touching her by the unexpected appearance of her mother. Charmed by Val’s smile, the girl’s mother offered her candy bar. He told the mother he was assigned to Dr. Sandor’s staff and wanted to wish the child his best thoughts as she faced her treatment. The girl was scheduled for the therapy called the Sandor Process about which Val knew nothing, and which, Val knew, did nothing. Yet the success ratio of the Sandor Process was phenomenal. The Bhavaja International Children’s Center had a waiting list for beds. Dr. Sandor was one of the most celebrated research physicians in children’s health.

Val met Maria a block from her building. They held hands, walked the rest of the way together.

Maria made a quick meal of roasted garlic chicken and salad and ate while Val showered. She put on a local situation comedy show and followed it start to finish on the kitchen television. She smiled once or twice at the inanity but it was television, what did one expect?

Val appeared in the kitchen in a tee, dark hair in his eyes, the way she liked it. He was familiar, so familiar. Her shoulders burned a little. Without speaking, he kneaded them. He picked at his plate, reaching around her waist, looking now and then at the telie. He really wasn’t interested in comedy, she knew. He ate a little more. He was patient but aroused, his breath soft. Twenty minutes went by. Since he left the shower they had not spoken. It was always this way, so quiet. Maria relaxed into his arms. Whatever she wanted touched, he touched. It was never a question of Val doing the wrong thing. Her eyes closed. She found the bedroom in the dark, as ever.

He got up, the way he always did, when she fell to sleep, and put on his clothes. The curfew kept him from leaving. He stood at the window, watched the city with its eastward traffic lights going from green to red. The boulevards passed their traffic to the highway, busses and emergency vehicles only, and the connected elite who could buy the curfew passes.

Around 0400, Val left. He had a hospital ID, which let him ride the city motor coach after 0400 in the morning. He got off a block early and walked the rest of the way home. The sun pinked the sky over the waterfront. It was spring. The days were getting longer. A breeze floated in with the salt of the sea.

He let himself into his flat. The phone was ringing. He tried to move quickly but he missed the call. It was Maria, he thought. Who else? She was strong, yes, in her way, but she was understandably sensitive to his movements after his trip to the UKSB.

The phone rang again. He saw right away that like the first call this one was only audio. There was nothing on the call prompter, no caller identification, but he did not know that until later, when he checked. His call prompter volume was off, its default setting, which he, never needing it, had not bothered to adjust. He pushed REL on the wall remote to open the line, slipped on the hands-free device, which he always left on the kitchenette counter, and bent down to undo his shoelaces. He said, smiling a little, “I didn’t mean to wake you. I always do that. I should have put the air up before I left. You would have rested better.”

“Val.”

His fingers on his shoelaces froze and his head turned sharply to one side. Curiously, there was no alarm, not really.

“Val,” the line repeated. “Where is Val? Where is he?”

It was a man’s voice and there was a Goraneg lilt. Val supposed the man would always have it, living among Goraneg adults.

“Val,” said the voice.

Val lifted up his gaze and caught the flush of pre-dawn light between the blinds. He blinked, and stood up. Went rather calmly to his computer terminal, sat down. He knew right away something was wrong and he knew what it was and he wondered if his computer could demonstrate the defect, demonstrate it well enough the first person he showed it to would recognize straightaway there was an anomaly.

“Who is this?” he said, somewhat indifferently. He knew that who did not matter. He just needed the line alive a bit longer.

“Arnulf,” the caller said.

That was easy. Val said, matter-of-factly, “Arnulf, it’s extremely absurd for you to call. Have I the privilege of a warning then? Tell me what you are going to do to me. Tell me the name of your mother, Arnulf. Tell me the name of your first pony.” He had already started a trace. His screen was returning unsatisfactory data. Shit. The call was routed through an encrypted server. “Arnulf, are you still there? I was expecting a dramatic abduction or a knifing on the street. What street am I on, Arnulf?” Val had begun to work on the encryption. It was high level work but not elaborate. Banking institutions used better.

“Happy Birthday, Val.” Amarite polytheists did not celebrate birthdays. It was a nice touch.

The line died.

Val looked at his screen. He did not have the software at his flat to probe further. If he had a few hours, he could do it, finish the trace, but then, he was sure, he’d be at the first of a platform of ghost servers. The caller was not much of a genius. There were probably only three or four ghost servers but without specialized software each ghost would take time.

He did not have time.

He sat still, his mind overtaken by a convergence of possibilities. Blown apart by logic, scenarios fell away one by one. When he could no longer keep still, he decided he ought to clean up. A difficult day lay ahead, a day that promised to change everything.

Somehow, he managed to get himself showered. The authorities had not yet come. His nerves got heavy, tight. He found a bottle of brandy and poured. Overcome by inertia, he froze in the window. By then he had begun to sob. It wasn’t as hard or strange to weep as he thought. He had never cried like this, with his whole body, with his soul. His nostrils clogged. Sounds broke in his throat. Across an ocean, in a prison, his sister Katherin felt as now he did, trapped while time ran out, while time ran down to nothing. He put aside the brandy and checked himself in the mirror. He wore the suit this time, the one he put on to meet Maria’s aunt.

He left his flat and climbed slowly, heavily to the train ramp. He waited among strangers, his face pale, his eyes bruised with grief. He rode the train to the hospital, greeted the security guard with his identification card, and took the elevator directly to the patient floors. He supposed he had just moments, maybe a half hour.

It was early, and the little girl was asleep. Her name was Leronia. He never wanted to forget the last one, the way he had forgotten the first. He touched her forehead and tossed her bangs. What would her mother have thought, finding him standing so early in the dark over her daughter? A bubble of blood in his right nostril, warm and stingy. A last light, his last life saved. He wished many daughters and sons for Leronia, and birthdays, a lot of birthdays, with a kind face beside her, some man’s, reverent with love. He went into the lavatory to clean up. He took the elevator to the third floor, started to walk to his office, but down the corridor, where the glass wall opened over the lobby several flights down, he saw police and federal agents. He squeezed his jaw with his fingertips, hoping to mold his features into some sort of composure. He could do this, he supposed. Others had. Katherin, too, had been forced to face censure and outrage. It was only one more thing and then he would know if it was to be sorted out.

Call Maria, he thought. But he couldn’t. Anyone he spoke to after the phone call at his flat would take on, publicly, the stain of suspicion. The spirit of the Conspiracy and Abetting Act was the exposition of sleeper cells, assuming such persons must be communicated with to receive orders. He could not call Maria.

He hoped Maria would be sensible.

He got into the elevator, and when the elevator opened the policemen and agents turned to look at him.

He lifted up his hands. He didn’t want to excite anyone.

They swarmed him, so he made his limbs loose, to minimize the damage. The handcuffs were heavy and tight. They manhandled him outside to a police van, and then sat beside him, their hands on his arms in the dark, wet heat. The van finished its journey down a concrete tunnel under Zoran Station, a detention facility adjacent the new federal courthouse. He was brought up through the prisoner elevator under heavy guard and pushed and pulled into the reception center.

They removed the handcuffs and surrounded him with stun batons while detention facility staff removed his clothes. They searched him everywhere and for a long time. He saw his clothes go into a plastic bag for evidence. He was given a white overall, no underthings or socks. He stepped into the uniform of a prisoner. There was a flap that lifted across the chest and adhered to the cloth for a snug fit. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was taken barefoot to a concrete room with recessed lights, a table, and two plastic chairs.

When they left him there he was not afraid. He was furious. He felt the imprint of hands all over his skin, the roughness of the prison uniform. The cloth smelled of industrial solvent. His blood began to move rather quickly, filling his ears.

When the door opened, he stood up.

The detention facility staff, two men in guard uniforms and a woman in a maroon medical technician outfit, surrounded a much older man with a knob of a head, moist lips, and large round eyes. He was well dressed, the older man. His skin was soft with good living, and his fingernails were manicured.

Val sampled this man’s mind and wondered, after, what it would feel like to smash the prune face with his fist.

“Sit down,” the guard ordered. Val’s anger was palpable. The guard was wary.

The older man stepped forward and said he was Val’s advocate, his counsel. He continued to the table, took out of his suit pocket a photograph and held it at eye level. “They want you to sit down,” the advocate said, conversationally. “The medic here wants to give you an injection of Endo-Vezdrin. You will let her. We will wait five or so minutes for you to recover your equilibrium.” The advocate slipped inside his tailored suit the photograph of Maria on her morning walk to the hospital. The image could have been taken that morning, or the morning before. She’d been holding a café purchased at the corner shop, a special blend. Val could taste the café now, as though he had just kissed her.

Val sat. The woman sidled up to him and pressed the med injector to his throat. He soon felt as though the chair was swept from beneath him. His shoulders slumped and relaxed. His brain was submerged in opaque liquid.

There was a five-minute interval. He overcame the nausea, picked up his shoulders, and glared at the advocate with unfiltered contempt.

The advocate dismissed the guards and the medic and slipped his hands into his slacks. “We should begin. You’re due across the street in court shortly.”

Val continued to stare, his face so compressed with rage he was hardly recognizable.

The advocate went on indifferently. “Note where you are. And where you are not. The Sarika facility is normally the first stop for National Security offenders. The drugs they give there are not so gentle as the one we use here. The drugs at Sarika are part of a comprehensive policy of torture, after which it is customary to shoot prisoners in the head. I mention this because you may feel disposed to discuss with the judge such inconveniences as immunity agreements and protection programs. I’d stay away from remembrances of liaisons with federal officials. Think of it this way. You have transferred your immunity protection to Miss Zakarij. I think we can wrap up a CAA offense against her in a half-hour, after which I guarantee she will go to Sarika. Do I have your attention?”

Val glared.

“Good. When we go across the street our plea will be not guilty. Since we are a National Security case and the charge falls under the CAA, the next step will be a find hearing. In a few days, probably by Friday, the procurator will present his case supporting the elements of the offense. The find will of course go against you. I will move for a trial. The judge will deny us. I will ask to be heard on mitigation. The judge will say we can only be heard on mitigation if we change our plea to guilty, which we will. My presentation will last forty or fifty seconds, after which the judge will hear us on sentencing. Have we any questions?”

Val said, “Are you a licensed advocate?”

“I meant, have you any questions you’re entitled to ask?”

“Am I permitted to call anyone?”

“No.”

“Oh that’s fine then. No, I’m perfectly settled. I’m great.”

“Good, you’re letting go. That’s smart, it’s easier for everyone. Oh, and twice a day a med tech will give you an injection. The prevailing belief is you’re a mindwalker. Frankly these days I expect Goraneg gypsies to sprout wings, a tail, a third leg, and breathe fire, so one of you bastards looking through my head doesn’t surprise me. We’ll be keeping you suppressed, I hope you don’t mind. Well, actually I hope you do.” The advocate signaled the camera and the door opened from outside. He left.

Within an hour, they had Val in an armor-reinforced van shuttling down the underground tunnel between the Zoran Station and the federal courthouse. The courthouse was closed to spectators. Only credentialed journalists were permitted.

Val stood behind the defendant’s table in shackles. A federal judge, a long-faced, black-haired man in robes, announced the charge, entering a single violation of the CAA.

The advocate shifted forward, addressed the judge. “Not guilty, your honor.”

The procurator, a tall man with gray wires of hair circling a shiny scalp, locked hands in front and thrust out his chin. “Your honor, the government wishes to present a find. We are confident we can save the court some time if we are allowed to do this.”

The judge lowered his gaze and then raised it. He was annoyed. “The defense has entered a plea of not guilty and therefore requests trial.”

“This is a National Security case,” the procurator reminded. “Adjudication by trial is not automatic.”

“In my court,” the judge elaborated, “individual rights are not swept aside for convenience.”

“Your honor,” the procurator said in a tone generally used by a parent on a child, “at the find the government intends to show the defendant Stephen Kessler was born John Manegold. This terrorist has lived in Bhavaja eight years.”

The judge was silent. Val had turned his head to look with curiosity at the procurator. He had not expected a total cleansing.

The judge pointed his nose at Val. “Have you presented this court a false identity, sir?”

Val looked at his advocate. “My options, please.”

The advocate: “Answer him.”

Not good enough. Val leaned back on his heels and spoke at a whisper. “I know the truth today if we hit upon it will be in short supply, so kindly inform which brand of shit I should be serving up. I confess I am out of my depth.”

“We’ll be serving the full dose of shit,” said his advocate, quietly, “beginning with your true name.”

Val turned his head to the judge. “My name is John Valten Manegold.”

The judge wrinkled his brow, perplexed. “I don’t like where this is going, not one bit. What is your connection to Burgolt Manegold?”

“Do I answer?” Val queried his advocate in a harsh, wretched voice.

“You’re doing very well. Please continue.”

“Burgolt Manegold is my sire.”

Several journalists, pushing and shoving at colleagues, hastened from the courtroom to file reports. The judge frowned at this impropriety, and he frowned at Val. “And you have been living with a manufactured identity in Bhavaja?”

“The address in my file is authentic. I am a Harespar graduate, I am employed, and have nothing whatsoever to do with Manegold enterprises.”

“Enterprises, is that what you call it? And you were among us eight years illegally and with an assumed identity?”

“Yes.”

“ ‘Yes, your honor,’ ” the advocate corrected.

“Yes, your honor,” Val repeated, stiffly.

The judge snapped backward in his chair as though disgusted. “The court will hear the government in a find two days from now. I expect both parties to be prepared to speak on sentencing. If the defense intends to present mitigation, be prepared to do that as well. We adjourn.”

In the intervening day, seeing no one but the medical technician, Val curled on a metal pallet in a cell the size of a closet. Shock had found him, penetrating pores, bones, and vessels. If he had his special senses, he might have attempted to connect with his inner strength. He felt unbalanced, violated, and helpless. Hunger visited him. His power was busy with the toxin, and so he slept too, about five hours in the night. He chose not to eat and woke with a light head, swollen eyes, and a sore stomach. He drank café when the morning tray came. He never saw the guard that brought it. The tray appeared through a slot.

Soon four guards took him to clean up and gave him a laundered uniform. For his feet he got canvas slip-ons. Then he was handcuffed and shackled and delivered to the van for transport.

The courthouse had quadrupled its contingent of journalists. He saw placards announcing representatives of international news agencies and Volod nationals from distant prefectures. He tried to imagine what was going on in televised news and on GateKeeper Global and supposed he had been thoroughly vilified. The fact that he had been living in Bhavaja when the Needle fell would be exposed and twisted. The detail of his employment would be hard to mist over since the authorities had started with the name of Stephen Kessler. Work at the hospital would be disrupted while the story was bandied about and municipal authorities, pursuing breadcrumbs conjured by deliberate omissions, snooped for evidence of participation in terror acts. His image likely accompanied every story. How many people outside of work had seen him with Maria? The various doormen at her building, her aunt, the counter people at the corner shop, the grocer. Shackled, he looked back over the courtroom gallery full of riveted faces, felt sick in his stomach, and settled into the defendant’s wooden box.

The procurator’s find took twenty minutes of the morning. The procurator concluded with a recording. The journalists gasped, some of them, when on the tape he spoke Arnulf’s name. They heard code in his attempt to authenticate the call and its author, not desperation and certainly they misunderstood his attempt to stall. Would it have gone differently if he had remained Stephen Kessler? Was the name Manegold like bane, to them, a signpost to mass hysteria? Val supposed it was. Even without his power the gathering hostility was detectable. He guessed that outside the courthouse the mood was a great deal more intense, less rational. At the end of the find, the judge retired to consider the government’s case. Val stayed put, distractedly studying the patched carpet, the scraped wooden paneling. He had gone past being afraid but understood that his fear was only around some corner of the psyche, waiting for him to discover the means to cope. By contrast, he was almost overwhelmed by anxiety about Maria. Where could she be but at home, since she had most assuredly been labeled publicly John Manegold’s mistress? The hospital would banish her. The public news agencies would without regard for her dignity ridicule and belittle her for sleeping with the enemy. How would she survive the crisis if she could not for a moment get away from it? Perhaps her family would rescue her, get her help that she needed, drug therapy first, and later someone to talk to. Wouldn’t she eventually tell someone her Val was a government informant? Wouldn’t she commit some effort to unraveling the mystery of his arrest and abandonment by the Federal Authority? What if she did? Would she get a visit from some smiling old man claiming to be an advocate? Would she be given a photograph of herself, an image taken when her world and her love were intact? How would she respond to such a threat, his Maria?

The judge, settling on his pedestal, calling his court to order, first addressed the procurator. “The court rules the find has satisfied the elements of the offense.” He rotated his head toward Val. “Young man, please stand.”

Val got up, his advocate, the bastard, rising beside him. Almost immediately Val lowered his head. He felt as though a hot, hard wind battered him. His balance was precarious, not at all guaranteed. He felt that the next moments should be experienced with as little engagement of his faculties as possible. Instead he concentrated on his legs, keeping them steady.

The judge said, “National Security defendants are not guaranteed right to trial and in few cases is trial granted. My ruling is the find has proven the case elements. If you wish to change your plea to guilty, son, I will hear your advocate on mitigation.”

“The defendant will change his plea, you honor,” the advocate said in a booming voice.

The judge waved this aside. “Young man, do you wish to plead guilty?”

Val felt his throat liquefy and burn. He had no idea what his voice would sound like if he tried to use it. He wondered why he should. If he did nothing, and said nothing, what matter?

“Son, I asked, do you plead guilty?”

The advocate said, a bit uneasily, “We wish to plead guilty, your honor.”

The judge grunted and sat back in his chair. “Very well. Present your items of mitigation, counselor.”

The advocate spoke for minute and, predictably, said nothing useful.

The judge gestured. “What does the government have to say about the sentence?”

“The government insists the court impose the compulsory penalty as stipulated by the Conspiracy and Abetting Act.”

“The defense?”

“The defense requests leniency, your honor.”

The judge said, “The court accepts the defendant’s plea of guilty and sentences John Valten Manegold to the mandatory penalty as stipulated by the Conspiracy and Abetting Act of seven fifty-one, death by hanging. Is the Zoran superintendent present?”

“I am, your honor,” answered a man from the officials’ table. The table with its suited men from various agencies and disciplines stood against the wall behind the procurator’s box.

“Give me a date, sir.”

“Friday next, your honor.”

The judge responded with a decisive shake of his head. “We’re not carrying on till Friday next. I want this over with. What’s wrong with Tuesday?”

“We’ve scheduled five executions for Tuesday, your honor. It’s hard on the men when we do more than five.”

“Move one you’re doing on Tuesday to Friday. And I want the first slot, top of the hour.”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Mr. Manegold?”

Val raised his head but not his gaze.

The judge sat forward. “Mr. Manegold.”

There was an interminable stillness, and then Val lifted his eyes, unfocused and glassy.

“You’re scheduled to die on three twenty-two at twenty-one hundred hours. With regard to appellate review, this court must have on file by seventeen hundred hours on three twenty-two a certification of intention to review by an authorized body or you are ineligible for a stay of execution. Mr. Manegold, do you understand what I have said?”

Val was silent.

“Mr. Manegold?”

“I ... understand ...”

“Mr. Manegold, I commend you to the Zoran superintendent’s custody. Session is closed.”

Val began the first hours under sentence of death on Cube 6, which was the prefecture’s holding facility for condemned National Security prisoners. He was struck right away by the utter silence of the place. The thick walls between cells and passages were proof against sound.

He saw no one but the med technician. An escort to the bathing facility occurred once in four days. He was due to visit the showers the day before his execution, which was typical. Otherwise, he lay on the metal pallet and instructed the lights to off, then on, depending on the stage of his derangement. His head pulsed mercilessly. The Endo-Vezdrin was designed to cause euphoria but he raged against its intended side effect, the submergence of his gift, and he existed, when awake, in constant agitation. The dosage, too, exceeded the medical safety standard. The medical doctor in charge of Val’s case, influenced by a phobia of mindwalkers and Val’s imminent death, ordered the larger dose, to make sure. Without his power Val felt weak and hungry but the drug interfered with his appetite and his internal war against its effects interfered with sleep. His thoughts became disorganized and highly emotional. By the weekend he was in constant pain, starving, and unkempt.

When the cell opened and men in the white shirt and bloused, black tactical trousers of the Federal Authority guards came through, Val supposed he had made it to Monday and it was time to have his last shower. He leveraged his torso off the pallet and sat swaying on the edge while the guards flanked him. They lifted him slightly, getting no help from him, to handcuff his wrists behind his back. Then they unlocked a plate in the cement floor and revealed a metal ring. The guards fed a length of chain through the ring and fixed the chain to shackles they put on Val’s ankles. They left without speaking.

Caspar Libing strolled in. The cell door shut.

Val identified Libing through unfocused eyes and then attempted to shift backward onto his pallet. Firmly, cruelly, the chain running through his shackles held him seated at the pallet edge, face forward. He stared down at the shackles and his bare feet as though astonished and wounded the restraints and his own flesh, his bones would conspire against him. It was one more indignity, this. Why should he face Libing when he did not want to? Why should he engage a man in whom he saw the stranger, the agenda of his enemy, and an executioner?

After licking his lips, frustrated, “Go back out and fuck yourself,” Val uttered. The words that dribbled from his mouth were out of character, uniquely so, but managed to convey perfectly, from Val’s perspective, the despair overtaking his senses. Also, from Val’s perspective, the cell had retained the dimensions of a closet but Libing, near the door, seemed at the end of an immense tunnel. Val considered the possibility he was lethally dosed, or toxic to the point of hallucination. The elder federal agent struck a chord similar to the note that had brought Val to do physical harm to his father. The comparison was perplexing and dangerous-- also ludicrous. Were Libing guilty of every scintilla of sin Val heaped upon the agent’s soul, even so Libing’s crimes would not cover the first page of the prologue of the book of Burgolt Manegold. So it was personal, in the way Sir’s murder of Val’s mother after so very many casual murders had felt. And how did one communicate the pain of breach, so intimate, to one who had by action demonstrated such profound indifference? The answer was plain. Val wanted his hands-- his mind had been disabled by drugs --tight around Libing’s throat. The flame of this desire (for violence) surged and ebbed, surged and ebbed in the steam and funk of anguish.

Libing began speaking. Val heard a series of stops and starts, broken, he thought at first, by his own diminished faculties. Only later did he realize Libing was speaking brokenly, and with emotion, struggling no less than he was. “ … And so I gather you knew your incriminating phone call was a digital compilation? It, uh, it came to us from a record of Arnulf Manegold’s voice on your sister’s, uh, on her flex computer, I don’t know if you … if you realized. From the Moukib raid, yes. She stored his calls, your brother’s … she saved his calls, some of … some of them. Probably out of affection.”

Libing and Val, gazing at each other, came briefly to silence. Val thought he heard noise, something improbable within the walls or just outside them, and this turned his head, for he was convinced the stillness of the place was absolute as death.

With difficulty, Libing lifted his arms over his chest, pushed on. “… You knew Arnulf was never really … wasn’t really, uh, there, am I right? Is that the trouble between us?”

“The trouble between us.” The words, taking on significance, struck at Val’s wounded psyche, and he sat straight.

“I said you knew, I told them that part, at least, was sham.”

Val was sure he misunderstood. His awareness of the forged call was both obvious and irrelevant. “Good for you,” he answered. “How wonderful to have everything I know and believe in betrayed like that.”

Libing’s face contorted with emotion, a shocking and hastily corrected display. “John, don’t talk to me like that, like I am your enemy.” He was more forthcoming now and anxious, it seemed, to change the tone of the conversation. Libing launched plaintively,into a narrative: One of ITAN’s priority two airjets-- the code priority one, priority two, Val had learned, had to do with the aircraft’s autonomy under diplomatic protocol --had landed at Tolna-Kraj International outside Bhavaja. Intelligence reports said the airjet brought a tactical team from the UKSB. The Federal Authority believed the team was within Volodyan borders to abduct Val. By the time the FA began tracking it the team had dispersed into the city.

Libing’s information failed to soften Val’s anger. The opposite occurred.

“Me part of someone else’s bag of tricks, you couldn’t have that, could you?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

Val wrenched his feet against the shackles and stiffened further. “Not from where I’m sitting.”

Libing mumbled something and nudged a small skeleton key from his pocket. He knelt at Val’s feet.

Val realized Libing intended to unlock the chain and clenched his muscles, not to kick the agent but to steady himself against the urge to kick him.

“I don’t agree with what’s been done, John, so I’m hardly the person to stand here and defend it. It’s not fair to make me out to be part of this.”

“It’s better I’m dead, do you disagree with that?” An unfair challenge, and at some level Val knew it. “Why like this? Explain it to me. Why do I have to die like this?”

Libing worked the key into the lock on the shackles and looked up. His eyes were the eyes of an old man, which they had never seemed before. When Libing looked at him, Val felt the stone of his anger shift as though it would slip from some precipice and be gone but for his holding on. And he knew he should let go but he was afraid the look in Libing’s eyes was a lie, like the lie that Val was a terrorist.

“-- Hold still, John.” Libing put his hand on the shackles to expose the lock, unlocked them, and removed the weighted bands.

Val lifted up his haunches, presented his wrists.

Libing uncuffed him.

Val sank back, drew his hands together. He pinched the reddened skin and inhaled roughly.

Libing passed a hand over Val’s shoulder. “You want to know how they came to it, the ones who came to it?”

“Yes!”

Libing gathered the chain, shackles, and handcuffs into his arms. “This was what Prime Minister Barta foresaw. The instant Prime Minister Hovsep opened your complete file, the special file, to the task force, that was the instant our government lost control of you.”

“Because I am a mindwalker.”

“How did you try to kill your father, John? Do you remember what you told me?” Libing asked, depositing the restraints with a clang near the door.

“With a thought, as I told you.”

“Yes, with a thought. I didn’t believe you, did you know that?”

“Of course I knew.”

“You are so very accustomed to knowing every bloody thing, how helpless you must feel now. I’m very, very sorry.”

“I’m not asking for pity. Am I going to die then? They mean to let it happen?”

“Oh yes.”

“ ‘Oh yes.’ ” Val attempted to reach backward in his mind to a place in the darkness where death was not something he feared especially. He failed, and laughed bitterly at himself. “It’s so easy to be sure when you’re sure.” He flopped his head back against the wall, listening idly to the clunk of his heart. “I’m having difficulty adjusting.”

Libing flattened a hand to the middle of his face, so his features’ sudden crinkling and trembling went largely unseen, although Val was now paying attention to these episodes. Val canted his head, watching as Libing pulled himself together.

“John, our government wants ITAN membership, it’s always wanted it. The UKSB is the world’s superpower. In the middle somewhere, there’s you and this ability of yours, and I think it goes way deeper than you know, what you’re capable of, what you have inside. I think the UKSB believes there’s more to you and they feel driven to find out what it is. The problem is, if they want you badly enough to kidnap you, after they do it, what do we do, how do we get you back? Shouldn’t we be worried if they want you that much? They can ask for you formally, you know. Simply say, Transfer the Manegold to our task force. Why the hell not? How do we refuse? It was not a risk some in government were willing to take. As soon as the reports crossed the desk of my superintendent, on the evening before your arrest, certain persons in our government became convinced they had to remove you as an asset and liability. This had to happen, of course, with ITAN concerned on a global scale, politically, that stepping in to demand you was, shall we say, unwise. You are Burgolt Manegold’s son. No one had to work at that. You were part of a criminal enterprise aimed at destabilizing the world’s economies. You did live in Bhavaja eight years under an untraceable assumed identity. Under the worst and best circumstances no one would believe you worked for the Federal Authority. They had to manufacture a reason for your arrest, and it was a simple construct, really. With a nudge here and there, my superiors let men outside the know do their jobs. They finished the circle, so to speak, while certain officials looked on and did nothing. That is how they came to it.”

“And you, my friend, where was your seat at the theater while the production of Kill John Manegold played without a hitch?”

“That’s got to wear off,” Libing interrupted, “very quickly. I am referring to your anger at me. You can’t sustain it, number one, in your situation, and you can’t get ready for what you have to do as long as you’re trying to. Would it help if I got your medication reduced?”

Val glared.

Libing said, “Oh come on. If you want to shout at me, have at it. But it’s me you’re talking to. I didn’t do this to you. Do you think I was there when they planned this? Do you think anyone would speak to me when I called up after I saw you’d been arrested? I am only here today because they want it done quickly and they want you to take it and be quiet. They think your … affection for me will serve their needs. How could you believe I’d support this, what was done, the way it was done?” When there was no response, Libing scratched his temple. “All right. I’m with you the next few days. I have direct influence over your guards, it will be all right. No one will trouble you. Will you allow me to purchase trousers and some other clothing items? I’ll need your size, of course.”

“For my funeral?”

“Not for that. But yes, if you like, I can manage clothing for the funeral too.”

Val set his teeth and hissed. “Don’t bother.”

“I will bother, though, because we’re here days and hours before you’re ready, and I don’t know if I can make the purchases after you’ve settled down. Which means I’ll buy clothes for you to wear on Tuesday even if you won’t help me …” Libing’s voice caught. He coughed softly to clear it. “But perhaps the clothes won’t fit. The clothes should fit, I think. You’ll need that, whatever dignity you can muster.”

Val, spine erect, face knotted, returned to silence, in which he seemed to find some sort of shelter. Libing lowered his hands. He looked off at the walls, at Val, frequently at Val. The minutes crawled. Val watched Libing only in those instances Libing’s glances touched him. He endured the silence.

“This is what it’s like to be you,” Val said in a moment, “always doubting, always unsure of everyone, even the ones close to you, always on edge.”

Libing nodded and shrugged. “We get by.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, we get by. So will you. I’ll make them stop issuing the drugs, I can do that.”

“How can you?”

“We’ll say we’re giving them to you but we won’t. The captain of Cube Six, he’s a good fellow. I know him. Why do you think his guards have all been fair? I’ll stop the injections.”

“I suppose I should be grateful.”

“I’ll take what I can get. Now tell me your sizes, so I can do well by you.”

Val gave Libing what he asked for and added that he had lost weight in confinement.

Libing asked his shoe size.

Val told him.

“You haven’t mentioned Maria.”

“I am afraid to.”

“We’re watching her, that’s all …” Libing paused. “What is it?”

“She knows what the government is trying to sweep under the house.”

“She’ll be a good girl, it will be all right.”

“The agency sent someone to her. They upset her.”

“It’s all right, John, I give my word. May I confer with her for funeral details?”

“If they’ll let you speak to her, please do so but don’t bring up funeral arrangements. She’s not going to do well on that subject. Will you tell her to go to her mother’s? If you could drive her there--”

“Of course I would.”

“Caspar, that would mean the world to me.”

“Is there a message?”

“Ah, yes, yes, tell her when you saw me I was all right, only I worried for her, and I was worried she might harm herself or do something irrational but she mustn’t, tell her, because I couldn’t bear it. Tell her that.”

“Of course.”

“It isn’t love, tell her that also, what I feel for her, it’s deeper than love, it’s like we’re one person. So I’m not leaving her, not really. I can’t while she lives.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Make sure she doesn’t watch the television. Perhaps you could stay with her next Tuesday night.”

“I rather thought I’d be here with you.”

“She’s the one who has to go on, she’s got the harder road.”

“I’ll take care of her, John.”

“John is my formal name but in the Goraneg we have something called a gift name, which we offer to ones we trust. I have never trusted blindly. I have always known my way. I am giving you my Maria, you may call me Val.”

--- Next Chapter

Chapter 4: Judicial Execution

2007-08-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Valten:

Libing left after holding Val in his arms, and several hours later the evening meal came.

The time for the evening Endo-Vezdrin injection had passed. Val wasn’t too nauseous to eat, therefore, and forced down the processed protein strip and vegetable side.

He lay back after he ate. Anxiety receded, and he drifted somehow to sleep. He did not dream, he usually did not, and woke warm.

The comfortable temperature came from within and it was the first intimation his faculties were returning. He stretched his limbs, willing his muscles to loosen. Through his garment and at his feet he glimpsed the limpid emanation of his inner life. He rolled to his side, studied his hands. There it was. His chest expanded with gentle, deepening heat. The internal vigor cocooned his mind and tenderly buoyed his senses.

The last night, after the day’s executions, they gathered him up for the shower. Normally there was no soap, the lead guard told him, but Libing had provided a tube of shampoo, so Val was showered with that.

They took him straightaway to the Holding Unit, and though he never saw another prisoner he knew there were four men on the unit with him, closed, as he was, in stone, concrete, pacified with meals and books and a chaperone guard until, in a little under twenty-four hours, they all went down to the Short Room, and from there to the gallows.

The Holding Room was larger than the cell he’d left. There was a blanket now, which was why the guard had to look in through the window, to make sure he didn’t have his hanging too soon. Val lasted the night alert and aware, his power full inside him.

He craved the stir of city air, wished through the endless hours of compressed darkness to feel the oily, metallic pre-dawn eddies thrown by gargantuan black-glossed motor coaches and the ancient trains that whispered across the baleful waterfront sky on sleek but archaic elevated rails. He missed the slick southeastern wind roughened by exhaust from the truck park that abutted the shipyards behind his flat. In the morning, walking up his street after being at Maria’s, he would smell the wind, take it within himself, and use it to prepare for his day. He was rarely tired, he hardly needed more than a breath to get going. Over the hush imposed by the concrete and steel of Zoran Station, Val would have welcomed even the grind of mammoth cranes, belching their funnels of toxic smoke. Nothing lasted forever. And with this thought he clenched his fists, drew his knees far up into his chest, and whispered, “Maria, please.”

It was in the morning, with breakfast, they asked him if he wanted a reporter with him in the Short Room. Many journalists had petitioned. Evidently, the government received a steep fee for certain interviews, the interviews that would boost ratings and bring in advertisement credits. He could have said no. The Short Room, it was explained, lay downstairs and adjacent to the gallows. Prisoners went below at precisely a quarter to the designated hour. The gallery was seated after the Short Room took its charge, and once the gallery was seated, it was usually a few moments before the event. The cameras would go live. Adjustments could be made. Then when the studios were ready, a door opened on a very brief passage, the passage linking the Short Room and the gallows, and that was that.

Val said no, he wouldn’t be granting any fifteen-minute interviews, but then it occurred to him to look at the list. Her name was fourth from the top, behind the names of well-known reporters from Global, Worldwide, and United Technologies. He said he would see Rada Bronya of Western Technologies, and the guard went off, stepping lightly at the prospect of having a televsion celebrity on board.

Around seven or so, the civilian clothes brought in by Libing came to the Holding Unit. Val could feel his mortal heart beginning to stretch and strain. He spoke to it calmly but there was no getting away from the fear, so he let the fear come, took it by the hand, and sat down with it. What had Libing said? We get by. One does what one must.

Val dressed slowly, careful not to miss a button, putting on black trousers and a black crew neck shirt with long sleeves. The clothes carried a faintly fresh and expensive scent. Maria had touched the garments. With hands softened by Zephyra lotion, she had removed the shop tags. He pictured her tenderly folding the clothes ready for wear into the bag for Libing. Possibly she had picked them out. He thought she had.

Val tucked the shirt into his trousers. They allowed him to wear a belt, which somehow seemed a relief. Underwear and socks were, too, special comfort. When the technicians came up, he was in his stocking feet, sitting on the edge of the bed, his cell full of guards. The technicians put down on the floor a black box only slightly larger than two flatdrives side by side. He got up to stand on it.

“With your shoes, please,” insisted the senior technician.

Val looked at the man, who was not as old as he expected, nor as physically endowed. This was the executioner, the one who would set the noose and operate the control panel. Val stepped into his shoes, set a knee on the ground, and did up his laces. They watched, the guards and the technicians, aware that his fingers trembled but hesitating to assist. He was not that bad off, apparently.

When he got on the scale, the technicians entered the display data into flex hand-helds. They needed his weight and to look at his neck to calculate the appropriate drop. They wanted to break his neck without decapitating him.

The procession downstairs went quietly. Val had been cuffed, hands in front, and marched away with a guard on each arm. In the Short Room the guards steered Val to a pair of heavy metal chairs placed at the corner of a square table and he sat down. He turned his head to look at the woman standing a little distance away. She carried her flexible mobile access in one palm, nothing else. She wore a slacks suit with sensible shoes. Her features conveyed purpose, and some degree of comfort with the proximity of soldiers, places of execution, and condemned prisoners. Val recalled she had conducted similar interviews before.

She got a signal from his guard team captain and planted herself at the corner of the table facing him. They were close enough that when she leaned forward their knees touched. Val, too, sat up straight. He was having a time getting through her thoughts, as those most salient, concerning his betrayal of Maria and of his country, challenged his defenses. He was cognizant of the briefness of their time, relieved that Rada had no intention of presenting questions relevant to public interest-- she had enough, he realized, from their first evening at Maria’s penthouse if information from his perspective was what got advertisement credits these days. Her motivation and objective was Maria. They shared that, though she did not know it.

She said, “Do I call you Mr. Kessler or Mr. Manegold?”

“As it pleases you,” Val said. He was in distress, regarding her thoughts. “I never cheered the loss of those lives, I never celebrated the Needle falling.”

“How did I get it wrong? You were close enough to us, to the Square to do whatever you wanted. What did you do when eight thousand of your enemies perished in a single moment?”

He could not engage her at this level. She made his stomach knot. “Will you carry a message to Maria?”

“Absolutely not.”

But she’d come for that purpose, to get on her flex for Maria something she could use as evidence of Val’s fraud. It was critical from Rada’s perspective to open Maria’s mind and heart to Val’s manipulations.

She said, “I’m here to try and bring Maria some peace. I think she deserves that much, don’t you?”

“Her peace was the reason I allowed this meeting.”

“May I be candid?” Rada said.

“It would be a novelty.”

Rada sighed. “Maria is connected to a lot of money or she would have been arrested by now. Do you feel bad you used her? Some rich woman, lonely, not very pretty, she’s just going along with her dull life and here you come--”

“Shut -- up.”

“Did I hit a nerve?”

“Did you hit a nerve?” Val shifted long legs under the table. “The sound of your voice plays like distant static.” He curled his hands inside the cuffs suddenly and as abruptly straightened the long fingers. “Now let’s see if you can speak what you mean instead of the words you put in front of you so I won’t hurt you.” For emphasis, he shook the handcuffs. “I won’t hurt you.”

Rada opened and closed her mouth, at a loss.

“ ‘He’s insane,’ ” he said.

He saw her throat tighten, squeezing her vocal chords.

“ ‘What is he saying,’ ” Val said. “ ‘Oh my God he is insane. My poor Maria.’ ”

Her jaw fell. And she thought, Don’t stare at me. Stop staring. Your eyes burn.

Val sighed and pulled his eyes from her face.

He felt Rada’s heart take up a loud, hurtful thud. “Are you reading my mind with an implant? Nobody told me you had an implant.”

“That technology, I think, is a myth.”

“The Holbek Organization has been experimenting for years with implants.”

“So you say. No to the implant, Rada. The Federal Authority would have lasered it by now. I was born this way.”

“You expect me to believe you’re a mindwalker. That you’re a demian.”

“Demian.” Val rolled his eyes. “As a people, we are so superstitious. My mother believed in demians. I am named after one. No, Rada, go to my home village one day when the world is safer, calmer. Go to my village and they will tell you John Manegold has always been a mindwalker.”

-- What am I thinking now?

He said, “ ‘What am I thinking now.’ ”

“It is that pure.”

“That pure.”

“The military would have drafted you if they knew. No one must know. I am right? Who knows?”

“Everyone knows but Maria. I’ve done nothing for myself telling you. If you make anyone believe you, they’ll cast it in the worst possible light, as you seem determined to do.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Why am I telling you?” He looked away. “In something around ten minutes I’m going to die. Maybe I want you to know that here”-- he brushed his chest --“inside, here, your true voice lives. The one the gods gave you. I’d like to listen to your voice, Rada. If you’re going to talk, try not to be at odds with your soul’s voice. It grates. And to explain about Maria, you were going to tell me she isn’t beautiful but if you believe that you have never really seen Maria. You certainly don’t see her the way I do. You can’t hear her. The way I hear you now, when you’re saying nothing. Have you any idea what it is like to make love to a woman when you can’t tell where you end and she begins? I haven’t words. I could feel us both, and from the first time, like I was passing through her. In all the time we were together, I never told her this. Now I’m telling you.”

“Why does Maria call you Val?”

“A short while after the Needle fell, I told her who I was.”

“Do you do that with every woman you sleep with?”

He tilted his head. “How many women do you think I sleep with? I was with Maria always. I was always with her.”

“Oh I am so … I am so … angry with you. Why did you choose her? What did you hope for with her, with someone like her? Why did you start this horrible, horrible love affair?”

He had winced not once but three times while she carried on. He found it difficult not to look away, and he did, momentarily, swing his face toward the wall. Was it to end horribly? Yes, yes, of course it was. But he had got through, finally, the hard layers of Rada Bronya, and he had found the soft core of her reason. He could see that Maria’s behavior frightened Rada, frightened everyone. Maria had gone with Caspar Libing to her mother’s estate in the suburbs and then fled, apparently without telling anyone, to the city center, to places she and Val visited together, and to stand outside Zoran on the crowded street where, once, she was accosted by a television cameraman. On many levels she was, to Rada, damaged. Maria defended Val to the chattering television, to anyone who would stand by and listen, to her aunt who had learned to let her niece alone.

Rada sucked in a raspy breath, tightened her fingers around her flex, which she switched to stand-by. “So you love her then, really love her.”

Val turned his head to look at Rada’s lean, hard face. He didn’t need to answer.

“There’s no easy way out of this,” Rada uttered to herself, “is there? How are you doing?”

“We won’t ask that again, will we?”

“But you’re not afraid.”

His eyes swept shut. And he breathed slowly, deliberately for fifteen, thirty seconds. “I’m afraid to feel the rope around my neck. I’m afraid to be made a spectacle of. I am not afraid to die.”

“You’re a believer of reincarnation.”

“If you’ve studied Amarites, you know I’m not. We weren’t taught to fear death especially. There are worse things, things to do with violating the temple--”

“The temple being?” she interrupted.

“We haven’t a lot of time. How much do you know?”

“I know Amarite followers worship a pantheon of gods and your mother god is called Affaraon. Your chief priestess is called the Lady of Waters. She is flesh and blood and holds court in Amorium. Once in your life you’re to make a pilgrimage to Amorium and meet your high priestess. Have you gone?”

“I haven’t. But it is all right if someone makes the pilgrimage for me. Perhaps someone will.”

“Another regret. What if it’s a hoax, and when you die you stay dead like the rest of us?”

“The question,” Val said, looking at her, “cannot be answered satisfactorily under the circumstances. What an Amarite priest will say, when he or she hasn’t hours to ramble, the priest will say that the sky isn’t blue because you believe the sky is blue. The sky is blue because it is.”

“And this, this is all a mistake, a contrivance. You’re innocent.”

“I am not innocent, not in the context of real world events. For instance, I was complicit in crimes punished by execution before I was old enough to know the meaning of the words crime and execution. Cooperation and assistance in the family’s criminal enterprise was essential to survival, but such does not grant the shield of innocence. Put me on trial for any one of those crimes, and I will tell the world what I just told you. However, I did not do the thing that I am here for. If I was still one of them, I would not have destroyed the Needle, or detonated the facilities and conveyances of your world. I would not have come out of the Goraneg to unsettle your existence, Rada, or take from you the lives of your loved ones. Even if it meant I had to die. Know that about me, if you know nothing else.”

-- Maria said, “If he was still with them, Aunt Rada, he would have given his life to stop it. If he was still with them, the Needle might not have fallen. Rada’s thoughts.

Val said, “Maria knows me.”

“She knows what you’ve told her.”

He sighed and turned to her. “Hold out your hand.”

She was alarmed. “Why? When? Right now?”

“The executioner just signaled his assistant to open the door. When they open the door, we’re done, we’re out of time. I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t tell me you’re still worried about me hurting you because I know you’re not.”

Rada waved to catch the attention of the guard captain, thinking foolishly that the captain would be looking anywhere else. “I’d like to do a prayer ritual with the prisoner. It requires holding hands. Is this permitted?”

“Quickly,” warned the captain.

She extended her hand.

Val leaned forward, whispering, “Go home tonight, don’t stay in the city.” He wrapped his warm, dry fingers around her palm. “Fly out tonight, have sex with your husband, and conceive a child for me. I would find it an extremely kind gesture if somehow you were able to remember me the way we were that night in Maria’s apartment.”

She stood up, and he rose with her. He still held her hand.

“I’ll try to remember you. As for the rest, it’s not possible.”

“Thinking of me in a better light?”

-- It’s personal, and no, I can think of you in a better light. It’s not hard to do. But I can’t have a child, and that’s that.

“But you want a child.”

“My husband and I have always wanted a child.”

“The sky, today, is blue, Rada. The rest is up to you.” He lifted his voice a little. “Mother of all life, a child who hears your call beseeches you to show this world a new revelation of love and power. Blessed Lady, it is asked that where there is pain, the light of pure and perfect love grant peace and mercy. Lady of the Blessed Waters, receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen.”

Looking up into his eyes, Rada breathed, “Amen.”

The door opened behind them. Val let go of Rada and used a knuckle to touch a bead of blood that had appeared under his nostril. Three guards drew up and so Rada stepped back. Someone was pointing, showing the way to the press box in the gallery, insisting she only had a few seconds to reach it. There was now a lot of activity and anxiety surrounding Val. The guard with his key in the handcuffs had a nervous stomach. The flanking guards worried what Val might do once his hands were released. It appeared they always worried for this moment, which generally passed without complication. Rada was gone. Val shifted his hands behind his back for the cable cuffs. The guards appreciated cooperation, didn’t pull the cable too tight.

“We’re going to turn around now.” This was a disembodied voice.

As Val drifted away, physically and in other ways, he no longer saw faces. He turned the way he was guided, and understood, as soon as he did, why three men were holding onto him.

His legs wanted to melt, they nearly did, and that perfectly anticipated dip, that second of weakness, was so common to the guards’ experience, that they paused in unison.

A voice from the closing shadows spoke to him: “A little while longer. Just walk forward.”

He was looking at a platform on which stood two technicians, and over which dangled the noose.

“Steady now.”

He thought, I am steady.

The noose got bigger, and the rail in front of it. There was a glare beyond the rail but once he realize it was the partition on the gallery and that there were people sitting in chairs looking up at him, he stopped staring at the gallery and saw only the man beside the noose.

The technician said, “Put your heels together.”

He was never conscious of complying but felt shortly the strap drawing tight around his calves. The noose shifted toward him, seemingly of its own volition, then disappeared entirely.

When he lowered his head he felt the rope graze his skin.

The technician moved behind him, and then Val felt the noose like a half-circle tightening under his chin.

He resented it right away. As he flinched, the guards at his arms stepped back. There is darkness at my feet, Val thought, and with a flutter of panic.

The goddess answered, for she was, he had long since learned, usually present at these moments: “There is light, and it is everywhere.”

He had that, in the end, and what the spectators saw were his eyes closing and his features softening, and his chest filling with breath. He fell, and died, and waited in light, but also in darkness, to begin again.

--- Exile continues with the Book of Hephaestion

Chapter 5: Death's Angel

2007-08-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

From the Book of Hephaestion, on the events of Year 07.04.753 of the Vision of the Lady of Holy Waters:
~ ~ ~

It began with a dream.

The interim habitat supervisor, a dry, taciturn intensivist named Josefa Zinn, promised subject 237 that he would not dream. Could not dream. Zinn and her predecessor, Marea-Siris Interlandi, had added Vezdripam to his Endopental therapy, suppressing with toxins most of the electrical activity in subject 237's brain. The result: widespread brain dysfunction.

Interlandi was not convinced drug therapy would prevent the dream state. There wasn't enough science to understand the problem. Interlandi said as much to her patient right before therapy commenced.

Shortly after treatment, subject 237 had no sleep-wake function, no awareness, and on the coma composite scale measured deeply unconscious.

He did not like to dream. Interlandi and Zinn understood this.

With a dream, then, it began.

In the dream subject 237 climbed an escalator, long legs taking two and three steps at a time. Catching something out of place, something he did not understand, 237 gazed distractedly through an immense dome into a gray expanse of sky. He was in an airport. The glowing, metallic framework of intercontinental airbuses lumbered upward. What country was this? Should he know? How many airports had he seen, really? Tangalore's, once. He had flown out of Prejli's capital, too. So, two airports. A pathetic record. It was Prejli International that had the giant dome and the unending escalator in the center of its international departure terminal.

He carried an overnight bag. The bag slipped from his shoulder, annoying him. He wanted to leave the bag in a waste bin but it was unseemly to discard it. He shouldn't draw attention.

The dome darkened, and quickly. Not quite as quickly as a light switch pressed off but almost.

The first sign, his only warning. Shit.

He has since attempted to imagine the way it played out in the critical care unit at the Kinder Complex in Dournay Province, Brianovia.

He imagines that as the sky in his dream darkened, as he dreamed the sky dark, right about then the illumination panels, the actual ones on the critical care unit, where he lay unconscious, began to flicker. His racing heart and increased respiration would have matched the energy pulse scrambling the monitor in the observation chamber. Probably station power failed. The unit on which he was the only subject did okay in the half-second of blackness before the antique fossil-fuel generator kicked in. No sense hooking the critical care unit into the uninterruptible power circuit, because he could fry that, and the habitat's UPS rang in at a million, a million and a half International Credit Units. The ventilator failed but he didn't need the ventilator per se, and the IV was a relic, the old sort that did not have a pump. After the half-second of darkness, Zinn would have pressed the fat red button on the wall, the one under the small white sign with reflective lettering announcing emergency. The alarm would summon the former habitat supervisor, Marea-Siris Interlandi, who would be ordered by the project medical director to take over. He pictured Interlandi's young, stern face turning sharply to Zinn as Interlandi snapped: "How long has he been dreaming?"

With scattered energy fluctuations and his brain activity heating up the resonant imaging scan, Zinn would not argue.

But Interlandi was wrong.

Dreaming is bad. Remembering is worse.

With a dream it began. Now, he was remembering.

The airport in Prejli's capital of Damia. He'd been there in the middle of the night, actually. It was fourteen years ago, although the years, to subject 237, mattered little. Time was an inconvenient contrivance. Why remember Prejli's airport at all? Better to ask how could he forget.

The mission director had said he had to travel at night. A different class of people flew the skies of the new continents at night. Economy flyers. Busy people, in a hurry. As a whole, the passengers were exasperated, unimpressed. The airport was brusque with them, cut back services. Rates were easier but the airport's night staff was thin and overburdened.

He moved along uncared for and uncaring, showed his bag to the distracted security agent, marched up the tiled incline to the departure gates. Every time one of the big airbuses took off the dome vibrated. They were getting old now, the airbuses. Some of them had been in use fifteen, twenty years. He remembered when they were state of the art with their new-age fuel management systems, the big TEC-HRING engines, and their cockpits seven stories above the wheels. He had read that they only crashed at night. It was true. When the seats were full, and under the red mother moon Vahera. The moon wasn't always full but she was up, as in over the horizon, every single instance one of the behemoths went down. There was a red moon that night, fourteen years ago, brushing the sky with soft cerise tones. He was looking at a full-on mother moon when he sat in a bank of chairs beside the boarding gate. Ubel, the little sister moon, was a blue crescent in the east quadrant, giving her mother the sky. Even the diamond north star stood back. Many babies were conceived that night.

He became aware that someone was staring. He should not have been surprised but he was. He was early for the 1:00 AM to the capital of Solona, Simeria City, in the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa. The lounge was almost empty. He slid the overnight bag to the floor between his feet, lightly touched a pair of heavy shades, and returned the gaze of a child in the chair diagonally across from his. She was alone.

She was too young at nine years to travel without a chaperone, had been transferred into the care of the airline until a guardian claimed her at the end of her flight. She played a flex game rather seriously on a pink hand-held while listening to music on a jump-jo clipped to her hip. Her hair was drawn from her face in a dark pony's tail, showing off large green eyes that presently were fixed on him.

She stared not just at him but all over him. Her eyes flickered. He felt a jolt, which of course was fear. And then it became something he would not identify for fourteen years. With a nudge at the mental barrier-- held expertly through sheer will between his hyped sensory package and the world --he pricked the girl's small skull. He saw what she saw: his long legs in denim, the unpolished black boots, the faded dark T-shirt stretched over broad shoulders but loose at the waist, the long leather coat with its turned-up collar. Over his shoulders but behind his ears flowed black waves of hair. Some of it billowed above his brow before winging backward. He possessed a long mouth that had only recently recovered some of the softness it had owned in youth. His hands were long-fingered, strong, and sinewy. They said nothing about his vocation, although the alignment of his features suggested a career in front of a camera. The girl reminded him of this. Strangers wanted to remember his face. This had always been so.

The nine-year-old girl with the pink flex and jump-jo also saw illuminated foils undulating from points all over his body. These appendages shot through his garments strong and bright, wending outward and upward like feathers of enormous wings. He saw what she saw on the stage of her mind, and she saw that he saw but never ceased staring, until he spoke.

She switched off the jump-jo and plucked out the ear buds. "What did you say?" She was whispering.

"I said there's nothing to be afraid of. I've flown a hundred times." Over the centuries he had lost his species' abhorrence to lying. "It will be all right."

The girl said, "Will you sit next to me, just in case?"

He was traveling in the executive section. The desk and table ensemble next to his recliner folded into an extra seat. "If the flight crew allows it, yes."

The girl plugged in her ear buds and powered on the jump-jo. She said nothing more but stared a lot, making sure he didn't take off.

The flight crew was pleased to have its charge in the executive section, where attendants were in abundance, so he spent several hours looking after the girl, one in the terminal and two in the air. The child slept without trouble, and she ate from a snack in her travel bag. These were things, snacking and sleeping, his kind did not do casually or deeply. Maybe he had, when he was her age. He had forgotten his childhood, or misplaced it. Misplaced it, most likely. The people who at times believed he was their subject were unwavering in their belief that he possessed total recall. They liked to think that he was by their feeble estimate nearly-- nearly --perfect. He supposed he shouldn't dwell on it, although occasionally their assertions annoyed him. The question, however, was did he snack when he was nine years old. Best not to go there. When he looked at the little girl through his power he saw the life force of a young human. The child's dreams were simple, colorful, and harmless. He tasted them inside, enjoyed them, and let them go as he must, eventually, let her go. If he looked harder at her ability, what good was served? And if she was like him, there were years and years to learn of it. His species hid poorly, though it had been seven hundred years since he encountered one of his own. There had been a revolution among the more common races, the disinclination among certain groups to share the world with his kind. It was called the Purge. For the most part, his species had not survived. Of course, some human children possessed modest but peculiar powers that they grew out of. Maybe that explained the child's ability to track the aura of a shielded affarite.

At the end of the flight an elderly woman collected the girl.

He continued on.

He was in Simeria now. Simeria stank. It was a garbage city of chrome, steel, and brick. He took a public motor coach through the city, over a steel bridge, into a country abundant with factories and waste management plants the size of small cities. He had to go another day to escape a landscape of concrete walls, chemical silos, and recyclers with their rusting hulls and circling metal staircases ten stories high. The United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa, the UKSB, had come some distance from its past as an agriculture giant and haven of free thought. It was one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, next to the Aiglentine Empire. All that freethinking had advanced the UKSB in technology and helped the kingdom shake its dependency on agricultural exports. It was the leading exporter, now, of weapons and warriors and there was always wealth to make more of each, and to make them better. The UKSB imported everything else, almost everything else, including technology, paid top wages for innovation and let its labor classes struggle in service industries that were only an economy shift from disappearing. The government was notoriously brutal. It was the only Intercontinental Treaty (ITAN) nation still televising judicial executions. The country was presently in alert, a condition to which its leaders frequently exposed its fractious populace.

In the town of Folsom he took a room in a country motel using forged credentials provided by the Kinder Group. There were twin beds on a clean carpet, a small plastic table with a chair, and a bathroom with a shower. A television, one of the older models, connected to cable service. The bureau had a mirror. In the mirror he saw a tall man shrugging off a leather coat, rolling his back muscles, the long lean kind, and looking over his shoulder at a young symmetrical face. He flicked off his shades. A Kinder Group engineer had crafted the shades with specialized filters. Without the shades, when he was relaxed, he saw the supernal light that emanated from his pores. His reflection melted in a blur of radiating color. He was used to this and turned away. He was beginning to feel lethargic, hungry.

A knock on the door. He let in a woman soldier, dark-haired, brown-eyed, medium height, wiry. She was a Brianov; her name was Brega Grazdoz. She wore casual slacks, a knit sweater. It was just after the storm season, twenty days before the winter solstice. She carried a long wool coat and wore flat but attractive leather boots. Grazdoz had taken a separate flight from a different country. UKSB security was costly, but not imaginative. A war-team infiltration from different countries had a high probability of success.

Grazdoz had purchased food stuff favored by subject 237. Lean meat, cooked well and without spices and preservatives. Garden vegetables. Spring water. He ate without speaking to her, sampling her thoughts. She was thinking about being alone with him, this sleeping business, which confounded her. She had a gun and was supposed to watch over him while he slept. She considered him formidable with and without his abilities. He was fast, good with his hands, an expert with projectile weapons, and no one, nothing, could sneak up on him. She did not get the sleeping thing at all, why she had to stand guard. She wondered if he wanted her to sleep with him. He never explained the former, never considered the latter. Her concept of intercourse was as inadequate as her understanding of his sleeping habits, which was not her fault. Kinder was selective with information. As for sex, he didn't bother to wonder why she'd want him on the downward spiral of his cycle.

He slept on the floor against the wall. He liked carpets better than he liked beds, and he didn't need covering. She thought he was gallant, found it amusing. When he woke eighteen hours later there were three soldiers in the room and four men outside dressed as civilians and armed with concealed semi-automatic pistols and mini-assault rifles. When he got up to use the toilet and shower the team leader told him everyone was present. The motel room was quiet otherwise. While he dressed no one spoke. The soldiers kept out of his path and their eyes down; they were reverent, even the woman Grazdoz who had wondered if he would take her in his arms. Soldiers in the field were less apt to use the Stoic Mind. While on a mission adrenaline amped the senses and drove different and difficult priorities. He didn't care. The soldiers served the council of seven countries named after the project founder, Dr. Antoni Kinder. The Kinder Group had trained him to work with the international corps. Some of the soldiers he had worked with before. They believed in his ability to finish the mission. As for the mission, he knew what was next.

Grazdoz drove him in a sedan out to H-45, then to RR-8. The others followed in various vehicles, coordinating a loose surveillance. The rural route passed three towns. A stretch of open land followed. 237 thought the land seemed barren and offended. The UKSB military had cut back the wood forty kilometers from the most prominent research base. Hill County Road broke off RR-8 about ten kilometers from the military research installation. Grazdoz stopped the sedan. Ten kilometers. Kinder intelligence said the base's surveillance cams did not go out this far but there was still satellite. Grazdoz put on shades. Subject 237 took his off, showing eyes that looked like liquid metal. He had been alive a long time. In his eyes one saw a hint of this.

He got out of the sedan, leaving the shades on the dashboard. He was told to expect cars to pass now and then, and he had said it wouldn't matter, he would look like he was kneeling at the roadside. He put one knee on the pavement, put his hand next to it. He said, "Your ears are going to burn. Go lean on something."

Grazdoz went to the other side of the car, put her hands on the hood.

He started. The trick was to get nature to perform and not backfire. He had tasted the whiplash of nature before and possessed, as a result, limited faculty for grief and regret. Which was why he liked the dark, and to have his dream function disabled by medication. On the Kinder Complex habitat ring, in critical care, he preferred something just this side of a near vegetative state, and he liked to live that way six or seven calendar months. He resented time but the long lightless months blunted the sharp bitterness somewhat. Could not clean him up, no. Not on the inside. What could? But the months of dreamless sleep let him escape memory, the missions, his past, and his sins. And here was one, a sin of his.

He felt, in a little while, the answering gasp of the underground complaining. Its seal was broken. Into its widening lips he poured himself. He filled the cracks with power, pushing outward and away. He tried at first to guide the fissures, but after a while the effort became tremendous. Heavy liquid scalded his cheeks, ran into the corner of his mouth. With his mind he pushed harder. The sawing of the underground was palpable. The stone and soil, violated, gave with a shudder, and somewhere things were collapsing, structures were failing, a research facility, a cantina, barracks, falling an undetermined depth, their people falling too.

It was over quickly, though never quickly enough.

Time to get into the sedan. He was unsteady and his face was wet. He wept blood. If he touched himself he'd make a clown's mask of his face and soil his clothes. He had to wash with something wet, and put ice on the bridge of his nose for as long as he could stand it, which was until he passed out.

He was in the sedan when he fainted, settled into the passenger seat. He was out about an hour. When he came to, Grazdoz had him back out on H-45. She had hard bread ready, and a liter of spring water. He needed to recharge his power. His head ached. He gathered more ice from a cooler, crushed the ice into a handkerchief, pressed the handkerchief to his temple.

"Are you all right?" the woman asked.

He said nothing. He had four bases today-- three more --to sink into wounds he made in the world.

* * *

Charles Cotas, medical director and project coordinator in charge of subject 237, approached the breakfast pastry window in the executive dining room of level three in the Admin Pavilion, a cup of steaming cafe in his hand. He was looking at the pastries when the habitat critical care silent alarm flashed. The alarm was an azure bulb mounted near the ceiling. There was an alarm in every corner of the meal room.

A second later, his flex vibrated.

The cafe in its paper cup sloshed. Across the dining room, men and women leaped from chars, fleeing like soldiers ordered to stations for battle.

Charles, a tall thin man of fifty years, felt a similar, frantic charge of adrenaline. The cafe had spilled over his tray, splashing him. His hand and shirt were wet.

He tapped the flex, moistened his lips. "Yes."

It was Dr. Josefa Zinn, interim habitat supervisor until the Kinder Group found a permanent replacement for Dr. Marea-Siris Interlandi.

Zinn said, "Subject 237 is causing power fluctuations in the critical unit and the condition has spread to the residence."

Charles, said, immediately, "Increase the Endopental to seven cc's."

Zinn interrupted, "We are at twelve cc's. It's aggravated, not mitigated the event."

Charles opened his mouth, closed it. He knew of course that increasing the dosage could never aggravate the event. What Zinn meant was the medication was having no effect. If Zinn had more experience as habitat supervisor she would have gone all the way to 20 cc's before pushing the alarm.

Zinn said, "My staff is quite concerned. We're becoming diaphoretic, experiencing vertigo."

Charles frowned. This was his fault. Not the problem with subject 237, but the alarm. He had replaced Dr. Interlandi without the standard transition protocol. Siris would have kept her team calm.

"All right, Josefa. You must increase the medication to twenty cc's--"

"That is a fatal dose."

"Not for 237. I am going to send Dr. Interlandi into the habitat. She is compromised, I know," he cut off Zinn's protest. "She can make an assessment very quickly. If we have to take 237 terminal, she has the experience to handle the procedure."

Josefa was silent.

Charles said, "Can you assist her?"

Zinn said, "Tell Interlandi to move her ass."

* * *

Marea-Siris Interlandi was running. She had been in the Science Lab when the alarm went off. The routine of supervising 237's habitat had propelled her to her feet, sent her racing down the hall. She was at the lift, now, blond hair gathered in a knot, ready to flash a prox card for access. She froze. The alarm above the lift whipped azure beams over the back of her hand. If she were any closer to the card reader, she would have seen the red glow of rejection.

She was no longer cleared into 237's habitat.

She had been replaced. She was no longer required personnel.

The air rushed out of her, and she stepped back, gray eyes unfocused.

What was going on below?

Her flex vibrated.

She tapped it urgently.

"Siris," Charles said, "are you at your desk?"

No need to tell him she was in the corridor, desperate to go to the unit. "Yes, Charles."

"Go to the lift. I've cleared your entry into the habitat. Zinn is facing a crisis. It's too soon for her to perform adequately at the present level of crisis. You are to assist her by analyzing 237 for revival or termination. Do you understand?"

Siris understood that subject 237 was dreaming. Or, more accurately, the subject was throwing its psychic energy around. Careless and unauthorized projections of its power were a recent and dangerous complication. Revival or termination-- yes, she was the most qualified person on site to take the lead. After what the subject had done to her, she was overqualified.

She waved her prox card. The lift began its ascent to the science ring. "I'll help, Charles. Where will you be?"

Charles Cotas said, "Watching from a secure distance."

* * *

Siris Interlandi found the critical care unit in disarray. Equipment disconnected and shoved aside, tubing and wiring crossing the pale tiles, some with frayed ends. A storm of electromagnetic activity had occurred. The atmosphere was charged but there was, Siris noted, no edge. The additional medication had blunted the subject's exertions.

The source of the energy lay in the center of the storm, an inoffensive young patient, benignly handsome, eyes closed, arms at his side, hair smoothed back and in order. The subject's brain function so severely inhibited it ought to have been dead but she could feel 237 in the air like a love song about remembrance. Except 237's presence in the ether was real.

She could taste it.

A pasty medical assistant and Josefa Zinn staffed the unit. The rest of Zinn's staff had evacuated, presumably on Zinn's command.

Siris sighed. A poor solution to an obvious problem.

Unlike Siris, Zinn knew enough to be afraid of the subject but not enough to understand fear was useless.

If 237 decided to rampage, he would.

Siris tapped her flex bracelet. "Charles."

Cotas answered immediately. "How is it?"

"Dr. Zinn has already increased the Endopental. It's not working."

There was hesitation.

Siris felt she should spell it out. "There is real risk here. What do you want to do?"

"Can't we bring 237 out of it? Go the other way?"

"It would mean giving 237 greater access to power without any certainty he'd have self-control."

"I'll have to make a report."

Bugger your reports, Siris thought. Cotas was such an officious prick. "Charles, do I have your authorization?"

"Yes, all right."

She waved her hand at Zinn. The syringes had been prepared. Zinn, dismayed by fluctuations in light levels and the sizzling in the air, rushed the syringes to Siris.

Siris bared the subject's forearm. Ordinary flesh, healthy, roped with muscle. The subject maintained an ideal physique. An IV lock, orphaned by its tubing, remained. Siris pushed the first syringe as quickly as possible. Vezdrin at 50 cc's. The dose would take down a gorilla and kill a strong man in thirty seconds. She gathered her breath and waited. The monitors were meters away. No doubt they had stopped working a while ago. She measured the subject's vitals manually.

Siris knew that 237 was aware of her presence. It would, she'd come to understand, notice a change in the room's electromagnetic field as easily as she noticed a sudden breeze. It didn't matter that 237 had been on a steady intravenous Endopental-Vezdripam drip.

Zinn sighed and grew quiet

The medical assistant, however, appeared stricken.

Siris looked at the young man. "It won't feel pain. It's all right."

Critical care staff lasted three, four years tops. The staff grew attached, lost perspective. Dr. Mozun, a Kinder psychologist, once told her that one day he was looking at a demian subject, the last of its kind. The next day he looked at the subject and saw all the ages of the world. He saw rapture.

"First," Mozun had said, "you fall to the power of its physical beauty, then to its otherness. Even if you resist, it wins. Because it knows. It always knows what you want. Then it performs some feat of wonder, and you kneel to it, call it god."

Siris raised the second syringe, potassium chloride, and the medical assistant gasped.

"It's getting better now," Zinn said about the air static.

Siris supposed this was true. But for the subject there had to be a reset. 237 called it a trip to the gates. Termination of life function, for the subject, was merely disconnection from the corporeal. Its power stayed with its flesh. It didn't matter that its consciousness was free to roam. When 237 was discarnate, it was helpless. It couldn't hurt anyone.

Siris emptied the second syringe into the IV lock, then reached slowly and purposefully for the subject's hand. She was always surprised by the size of 237's hand, by the subject's intense masculinity. It looked like a twenty-five-year-old human male but was in fact a singular species of unfathomable age.

"This is its forty-seventh death," Siris breathed, mainly to the medical assistant. Zinn would know this. "Its first death was by hanging. A lift, not a drop, with its hands tied behind its back. It was sixteen years."

The assistant nodded, regarding Siris with wide, moist eyes.

Siris wanted to smile but did not. Tears for subject 237? Oh, yes, let the whole world weep. And cower. The subject had torn a chunk from the world for that first death, and there had been blood.

She added, "It knows when it's dying, so we don't leave it alone."

The assistant wondered, "How does he know?"

"That's a good question, isn't it?" Siris supposed the answer was simple. Its consciousness flared like a struck match when the body was threatened. But how did she know that? 237 never told her. "When we understand that ..." A common Kinder saying. When we understand that, we'll be a lot closer to understanding the subject. But they never were, were they?

The subject had been the core and soul of the Kinder Group seventy-seven years. Prior to that, it was a guest in a Currani tomb excavated by Antoni Kinder in the Northern Nations on the Wolf Islands. The tomb was constructed around two thousand years ago. Subject 237 had been placed above a Currani king's casket on what was called a funeral altar somewhere around four hundred years before Antoni Kinder unsealed the door-stone. The Currani of the age were typically fair-haired. Subject 237 was dark-haired. It had ten fingers, ten toes. Its blood was red. The most sought after blood on the planet. Powerful stuff. Well-connected members of Kinder Group governments received health and vigor through 237's blood. The subject's anathema was fire, nothing else.

Siris lay two fingers along 237's carotid artery. "Travel lightly, Hephaestion."

237 called itself Hephaestion. There was a Hephaestion on the Old Continent circa Y150 who crusaded in the name of the Lady of the Holy Waters. The historical Hephaestion would have carried a sword and shield. His hands would have been as strong and sinewy as the hand Siris raised now. He would have spoken a defunct language, worn a pleated linen cloak and leather boots that buckled over the knee. He would have been one of the most proficient hand-to-hand killers of the era.

Siris sighed.

The subject was without pulse, without respiration. Clinically dead. Which was as dead as Hephaestion got.

"Let's clean up 237 and move our patient to recovery," Siris said. The hand in hers had become cool. She settled it on 237's breast. "Spontaneous rhythm will be in forty-eight hours." She flexed an eyebrow-- it wasn't science. It was more a prediction. In spite of Kinder's assertion to the contrary, there was nothing scientific about any of this.

"When will it know what's happened to it?" the assistant wondered.

Siris said, low-voiced, "I remember my first code. Don't worry, it probably already knows what happened and why. Never confuse dormancy for 237's species with death as we understand it for a human. It's told us about conversations that took place in other areas of the complex hours after it went dormant. Its consciousness stays active. Amazing, but hardly new. You can read Mozun, Kalister, or Treppin if you like demian theory. Mozun has an especially good piece in the archives on affarites." Abruptly, "I want no lines," she told Zinn. "No chemical aid. Let it come out of this on its own."

Zinn looked cooperative.

Siris turned away. "And turn up the scanners, please. Let's see if 237 is staying with us or leaving the complex. My bet is on the latter. Something distressed it. It will seek the source and come back when it's found it."

The handlers were coming.

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 6: Encounters

2007-08-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

There had been a ripple, a sundering. Also, a taste of power. The memory of power was different, yet not so different. The fracture started him dreaming, made him remember the last time he was with a being and sampled otherness.

So many dead, but the deaths were not what hit him while he was under.

During his time with the Kinder Group, the Great War that eventually led to the birth of ITAN began and ended. Kinder was established before ITAN, and not all Kinder nations became members of ITAN.

The first true test of ITAN occurred when a UKSB traitor reported to the International Commission on Weapons and Defense that Solona had developed research bases to reverse engineer a canon harvested from a downed alien spacecraft. The UKSB kept the existence of the craft a national secret. The canon, it turned out, employed particle-antiparticle technology, which was unheard of among the advanced science and research centers of the world.

Confronted by a delegation of ITAN nations, the UKSB admitted recovering a craft of unknown, possible extraterrestrial origin but denied finding weaponry.

Brianovia, home to Kinder headquarters and an ITAN nation, proposed a mission to the Kinder member governments, but said nothing to the Commission. ITAN, the Brianovs suggested, was ineffective against the UKSB, its most stalwart member. The situation, Brianovia put forth, was intolerable. The UKSB and Brianovia shared a border.

Hephaestion was roused from a drug-induced slumber. The habitat supervisor at the time was a man named Himich. He had Hephaestion brought to the atrium on the main floor of the habitat. Himich and Hephaestion sat together looking at data, and at the sky. Spring came late that year, and summer didn't last. The sky, visible through broad panes of glass, was washed out. Himich settled on a bench next to Hephaestion, who turned to look at the doctor and mouthed, "Why was I wakened?"

Himich's thoughts began to drift, random yet relevant, as Himich sighed and handed over satellite images and photos of UKSB scientists and notables.

"Locate the research facilities and key personnel," Himich said. "Tell us what we are dealing with."

"How?"

"A walk has been authorized."

When Hephaestion's consciousness was within his body his awareness of others was limited to his surroundings. The life forms he touched had to be local, but if they were local he could find them even when they were merely discarnate energy sequences, astral projections.

When he disconnected from his body, when his heart stopped, he lacked recourse to his physical endowments but his sensory net became infinite. Without limitations imposed by flesh and blood, he could sense a life signature on the other side of the globe and reach out to it in the span of a single human heartbeat.

"You want me to die."

"You'll have to die to get the information we need. If we play video, can you be certain to identify the life force signature of these ministers?"

"That's not usually a problem."

"Do you anticipate problems?"

"If the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa has dealt ever with my kind, a scan with modified technology will detect a breach, and that may start the war you are trying to prevent."

"The UKSB has no understanding of you, your ability, or scans we use at Kinder to know when you are discarnate but present."

So you say. "Very well."

Himich said, "Do you want to know what it is the UKSB is developing that has put so many Kinder nations in jeopardy?"

"Do you want to tell me?"

"Ah, you have already mined the information from my conscious."

"More or less."

Hephaestion accepted a Vezdrin-potassium chloride cocktail and liberated his sensory apparatus. He located the UKSB research facilities. There were four. He spied on their security. He sought the leaders of the project.

He reported back to Kinder.

Brianovia laid its findings before the Commission.

The UKSB went to defense condition alpha, its pre-war posture.

Kinder and its multi-national administrators turned to Hephaestion: make the bases disappear.

Shortly after the incident, four Holland-Tchey carrier-class ships entered high orbit. The aliens announced their presence. Learning that their decades-old scout craft had suffered damage, crashed, and was looted, the aliens warned ITAN against pursuing their weapon technology. A treaty was proposed, and accepted. On the surface the treaty appeared useful. The Holland-Tchey provided technology in exchange for a base on the planet, so long as ITAN enforced a planet-wide ban on particle-antiparticle research and other home-grown weapons of mass destruction.

Among the Kinder nation administrators, it did not escape notice that Hephaestion was a weapon of mass destruction.

* * *

If the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa has dealt ever with my kind ...

The little girl from the airport, he was thinking about the little girl who flew from Prejli to Solona.

She would be twenty-four now.

Hadn't he resolved to wait, to watch for her? If she was like him, she would come into her power eventually, and when she did, he was sure that he would know it. Reasonably sure, anyway. Well, he'd met no one with the ability to see his aura in seven hundred years.

When Hephaestion touched humans with his power, after their minds and emotional centers came physical details, deficiencies, enhancements, anomalies.

Kinder claimed that two hundred and thirty-six affarites had existed since the beginning of recorded history. Hephaestion made two hundred and thirty-seven. There were other beings, other versions of spectacularly endowed life, but Kinder tended to the gilded.

A child's aural pattern might confound Hephaestion, but a man with the gilding-- no, never.

It wasn't, he realized, a girl's aura that had penetrated his sleep-state, causing the ruckus on the critical care unit. His memory of her, yes. But there was something before that, like a finger that grazed the toy blocks and made them all tumble.

It wasn't a woman's aura, either. Too bad. Hephaestion figured he wouldn't mind meeting that girl again, in spite of the fact that he had gone on to murder eight hundred of her countrymen.

The consciousness that leveraged wide his psyche bore the telepathic stamp of an affarite male, and it had died.

Hundreds of years had passed since the last affarite fell to ashes.

Did that matter? Certainly, but still ...

This one, the male, was not in ashes. In his case, the bonfire would have been relief, and release. Rather, the discarnate entity was in torment, its anguish engaging, raw and futile.

Its suffering couldn't be allowed to continue. There would be no peace otherwise. Hephaestion went to find him, reaching toward the note of anguish, seizing it like a cord and letting the cord draw him to a song of sorrow deeper and infinitely more wrenching than anything his half-human heart could withstand.

* * *

He expected the note to exist outside the corporeal world and it did. The note rang within the center of a spirit, and it was not doing well.

Hephaestion breached its shelter. The longer a spirit existed outside its flesh, the greater its need to construct the corporeal past. This spirit had made a sky, and part of a building in which to take shelter. Entering the spirit's construct was easy. The spirit did not know how to keep him out. Hephaestion stepped out of nothing, presumably the air, drawing around him an acceptable version of his physical form. He assessed.

White tile, metal walls, metal removable ceiling panels. Hephaestion looked about but did not try to understand. There had been trauma, physical and psychological. An arc of severe light hid the core of a young affarite, which had, typically, the appearance it maintained while it lived.

The other spoke first: "You can see me."

Hephaestion paused, and noticed the male was ashen, and naked. He cursed. Why was there never someone to speak adequately of what had occurred?

"Why do you keep yourself in distress? Get up."

The spirit stared up at him in puzzlement.

"I'm not going to do it for you," Hephaestion said.

"Are you sent by Our Lady?"

"Only a human would take me for an angel. Tell me, did she seem at all interested in helping you debase yourself last time you spoke to her?"

A perfectly reasonable question. "No."

"Are you going to get up?"

"I can't move."

Hephaestion glanced off, silent. The exchange had an echo of the distant past. He didn't like it. He extended his hand, or what the spirit would perceive as his hand, until there was a mingling of essence. Hephaestion stretched his power and leaped with the spirit into a corner of the planet that was not illusion.

"I see."

He had located the young man's corpse, which occupied a vault in a room much like the one the spirit had created within its soul.

A morgue.

"There I am," the spirit said, unnecessarily.

Hephaestion observed the cadaver of a young man, tall, fit, with a dusting of fine blond hair. The body was frozen. A cooler would have sufficed, but in this case a freezer had been used. Laboratories froze corpses marked for experimentation.

There was no apparent mechanism of death. Which was to be expected. There had been two deaths here, not one. Within days after the terminus the first death would have reversed itself. However, the modern world, more so than the older one, presented barriers to reanimation in its handling of dead people. The young man, healing, had died again in the cold. The freezer had trapped it. The spirit, which did not understand its freedom from the physical, wove its second death into its essence.

Hephaestion connected to the spirit, assisting the illusion of garments, body heat. The spirit accepted his help without showing interest in how he gave it. A bad sign. Hephaestion left the spirit, moving outside the morgue, tracing corridors, searching behind closed doors, even observing the security station. He moved eventually to the facility's exterior, turned around, and read the name of the building.

The Bhavaja Ministry of Science.

Bhavaja, he knew, was in Volodya on the Old Continent.

Hephaestion returned to the spirit's vicinity. "What is your name?"

"I have no name."

Gods. "You have a name. Do you want to wake up?"

"I am in a dream."

"Actually, you are in a nightmare. Do you want to be present as they open your chest, extract your organs, and place your parts in jars? Your eyes, your tongue, suspended in fluid while they try to understand why your flesh will not rot?"

The spirit prickled.

"What were you called, when you were alive?"

"I was called John Valten Manegold."

"Your surname is familiar to me. Why is--"

The spirit of John Valten Manegold showed alarm. At first, Hephaestion did not know why. Manegold focused beyond him, alert. And so Hephaestion turned. But he did not really turn. His senses repositioned.

She wasn't real. That was his first thought. Manegold had constructed her.

Of course that wasn't true. Her essence emanated a unique signature, a kind of warped but engaging whistle that struck through him with the efficacy of a blade.

Hephaestion registered her appearance, even though her appearance of all things mattered least, since she, too, was a spirit.

She was a brilliant echo stamped onto the pattern of a female, a floating luminous thing with tendrils as softly iridescent as sunlight on satin. Her features were for the most part indiscernible, but her form evinced the valleys and hills of breasts, hips, and thighs.

She lingered at the edge of the chamber until Hephaestion made the chamber, the morgue, and the world go away. The female thing held on, buoyed in the filament by what he knew not, facing what Hephaestion revealed of himself-- his essence without illusion.

She advanced, and burned through him. At some point before her essence sparated from his, she vanished.

Hephaestion gave the metaphysical equivalent of a shiver.

When he turned to seek Manegold, he was once again in the morgue construct, and the spirit of Manegold was slumped on the floor. "Who was that?"

"Who was what?"

"The woman?"

"What woman?"

Hephaestion sighed. "Listen to my thoughts. Listen."

Manegold was not listening.

Hephaestion hardened his will. "Listen to me."

Manegold’s spirit shifted toward him.

"I am going to leave this place, but you can follow me. Follow me. I will show you how. When next I come to this place, I will be in my flesh and have people with me who can move your body to a better place. Have you listened?"

Manegold indicated that he had.

"Do you understand?"

Manegold indicated that he did not.

Hephaestion cursed, softly. "Have you never wondered why you of all the children of the world carried the voice of the goddess? Have you never wondered why you could mindwalk, and heal, and run on ten days straight with no sleep? How old were you when you died?"

"Twenty-four."

"Did they kill you?"

"Yes."

"Was it because they found out what you were?"

"They were afraid of me."

Hephaestion scoffed. "They should have been. Have you read the Book of Kings?"

"Yes."

"That is what you are. You're not able to pass the gate, because you cannot be reborn. Your biology requires an additional step to make you dead enough to be dead. Otherwise, our kind heals of death. If you think that's wonderful, think again. The flesh heals, but the mind remembers everything. We die but do not rest. Such is the way of the gilded."

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 7: Memories

2007-08-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

Marea-Siris Interlandi spent the first day of subject 237's dormant state in Research, above ground, in a building teeming with archivists and historians. Her new assignment. Research was where retired habitat supervisors were pensioned, even thirty-five-year-old supervisors with two advanced degrees and three years field experience on the most classified project in the country.

She'd won the habitat supervisor position because Dr. Mozun handpicked her. But she was young and knew it. No one lasted forever in the habitat.

At least, Research wanted her. This wasn't always the case. The head of Research, an ancient archivist named Wayne Vadas, after all these years still turned cartwheels at the chance to crack 237's memories. Siris Interlandi had what he wanted.

When Antoni Kinder dug up Hephaestion, Dr. Vadas was a young anthropologist. The subject said it remembered only a fraction of its life, and no one, not even Vadas, believed a word of it.

Research hadn't changed much in seven decades.

Well, it had changed a little. Seventeen days ago, when 237 telepathically dumped its memories on Siris, Research had gone into gleeful overdrive.

Siris had work to do. There was a team of archivists literally tapping its collective foot, waiting for her to return to her work station and get to it.

Sleep? Who needs sleep? A common Kinder saying. Siris was living the saying, but okay, from an early age she knew what a position in the compound was going to be like. Nothing new here, not when one's father, a Kinder Group facilities manager, had wooed and won one's historian mother in a dining hall of the complex. Siris' parents had lived and worked in the complex all their lives.

When she was a girl, Siris' mother, the late Dr. Interlandi, used to speak in hushed tones about the thing that lived in the habitat.

Siris' father criticized her mother's fear. "If it wants to leave, it'll leave," her father would say with a wave of his arm. Her father, who had infrequent contact with Kinder administrators, liked to have a laugh at the administrators' expense whenever he worked on habitat systems. "They're all on egg shells down there, like little mice circling a lion. Why waste effort being afraid of it? It can kill us all with a thought."

"Papa!" Siris had thought he was joking until she spied her mother's white face.

"What?" her father had protested. "Secrets, secrets, Marea," her father had gone on to add. "I'm telling secrets again. Daughter, these things can't be spoken of."

Siris never spoke of them. But she listened. Of course she did. Her parents told stories of an exotic life form, a beast. Her parents' stories were better than anything she saw in a book.

"It sleeps half a year," her father told her. "It wakes and does a job"-- what kind of job? Siris would wonder --"that takes two or three days. It goes to meetings to listen to the faces talk, talk, talk. Then it goes back to sleep."

"Have you ever seen it?" Siris asked once, when she was too little to know better. She supposed the monster lived in the domed building in the middle of the complex, and she was right.

"It's a horrible thing," her father had confessed. "Skin like sand, eyes like coal, hair like seaweed. It has an odor, too!"

In terror, Siris the child clapped a hand to her mouth.

Her mother's tinkle of laughter slowed her racing heart, and after that her father smiled somewhat.

"We call it an it so that we don't forget what it can do. But it's a man, my sea shell. It looks and acts and talks like a man."

"A very frightening man," her mother insisted.

"Yes, all those hours watching it sleep is quite disturbing." Her father, who went to his office every day like an official, in a suit but with no tie, made a face. He was a designer, mainly. An engineer. He drew plans, told others what to do. He was the one who built the scanner that could see the creature's consciousness-- her mother called the disembodied thing that could be scanned a soul --while it moved here and there about the complex. Her mother said the monster's soul was so old and so strong that it-- the soul --could be traced like a sea wave moving against the shore.

"If it has a big soul, then that means it knows right from wrong," Siris supposed.

"Some souls, big or small, do not, my dear," was her mother's answer.

"It doesn't really do anything here," her father added. "We keep it like a car or a horse. When it's to do something frightening, we send it out. That's why we say it's an it. So we can stay in a proper frame of mind, and be always aware that it's ours, and not the other way around."

A notion her mother had scoffed at. It's not ours, it's not anybody's, her mother always said. Something like it. Her mother's job was to collect fragments of world history, and to dedicate endless hours looking for 237's fingerprints in ancient and not so ancient events. Small wonder her mother was unashamedly and deeply afraid of Hephaestion. She'd indexed three periods from Old Continent works wherein a man matching Hephaestion's description and wielding sorcery had impacted multiple kingdoms. 237's age was uncertain, so her mother had gone back to the beginning of recorded history. The items, her mother said, were neither heroic nor particularly legal. Murders were involved. In one case, raids, battles, massacres.

Her father said it was the times, and dismissed her mother's fear with this: it is what it is. Why waste breath being afraid of it, when fear of it is irrelevant?

Siris took on her father's mindset, but never properly set aside her mom's.

When she chose to work for Kinder, she told her parents what she wanted. "It's dangerous," her mother said. Her father hadn't said anything at all, not at first. And when he did speak, it was days after Siris' first meeting with the subject.

"I understand now why everyone is afraid," Siris told him. "It's because the subject isn't frightening at all. Nor is it charming. It's a blank slate, but wonderful to look at and be around. Without the Stoic Mind, you would want to write upon it all your hopes and dreams--"

Her father interrupted: "And your fears, those too."

"Yes, those, too."

"So be careful," he warned.

Siris had. She was careful. Three years of work, and two research papers. She brought with her to work her father's fearlessness, her mother's caution. And one day she was discussing with Hephaestion an adjustment in its drug therapy. A normal day. She spoke to it often when it was awake. That day was no different than another, except the subject had reached out its hand, touching her. She felt curious, but she was not shaken, not at all. Then it said, "Siris," a first. It never spoke her familiar name. Her technician observed with wide eyes. The subject asked, "Siris, how old am I?"

At the time, Kinder's best guess was seven or eight hundred years old. Ah, but no.

Siris said, "I think I know the answer, but I'm confused."

"Can you recall the name of my sister?"

"Tisiphone."

237 sighed, and its mouth, slightly tensed, went soft. "If you can recall her, then you've got it all. I'll miss you."

Siris, her heart chugging along, stared in alarm. I'll miss you. Of course 237 was aware of the reason Kinder rotated staff through the habitat. But why did it give her its memories? Why had it chosen now to come clean? Why did it choose her?

* * *

The second day of 237's dormant state, Siris sat with Vadas mapping 237's earliest encounter with Constantine Parnasus, the first Amarite high priest to hold court in Amorium. Vadas tired easily, so Siris was able to grab a little sleep.

She was achy and groggy when Charles woke her through the flex. "Go to the habitat."

Three days had passed since Hephaestion went terminal. The usual amount of time, as long as the mechanism of death didn't involve perforations and the like.

Bypassing critical care, Siris reported to the residence. Experience told her 237 was awake. There was a sizzle in the air, tension among the staffers, and an incautious number of security personnel in the control center.

Zinn, again. Too much fear, like Siris' mother. Zinn wasn't going to last.

Siris found Zinn standing rigidly near the two-way mirror that overlooked the residence. She joined Zinn there, saw Hephaestion in its blue pajamas pacing that brief tract of carpet alongside its cot.

"Don't tell me you've magnetically sealed it in," Siris snapped. She was pissed.

"Well, yes," Zinn blurted. "It woke after hours of nightmares. I ordered an evaluation, which I've explained to it--"

Siris said, tightly, "You are an idiot."

Zinn, taking only mild offense, seized her brow and moaned. "Well, then, you tell me what I should do."

Siris turned sharply to the gawking staffers and security people. "First, unseal that damned door. Now, listen to me, all of you. The lock function was never intended to keep 237 in. It wakes up in a vulnerable state, but be aware its vulnerability lasts three, four hours tops. In four hours, he comes through the door, sealed or not sealed, so we in habitat management like to keep what we call perspective. The lock is to keep intruders out, not to keep 237 in. Oh, and second, the subject spent most of the first two decades of its life in a condition known as institutionalized slavery. It has a proportioned response to captivity, that, at the end of the day, I don't think we'll like very much. Has every one got it?"

No one answered, and no matter. Siris saw that they were looking past her and through the mirror. She turned to see what they saw.

237 had stopped pacing. The subject stared up at what was, from its side of the mirror, a darkened screen. Its metallic irises were fixed on Siris.

Siris realized she was not surprised. She opened the intercom. "Hello, Hephaestion. My apologies for the door. You're free to stretch your legs."

Hephaestion's voice: "Hello, Siris. I've brought someone back."

Siris nodded as though she understood when of course she did not. "What?"

"You should contact your superiors. There's a problem."

* * *

"What are we dealing with?" Anselm Gakhal, Brianovia's project liaison to Premiere Sekerak, leaned over his desk in the semi-darkness of his private office. He was a slim, meticulous administrator with a background in the BCI, Brianovia's intelligence community. His political career had followed a brief but intense stint in the special forces. His polished mannerisms came from an unexpected and appreciated internship with the chief of Premiere Sekerak's staff. Connections forged in the palace had led to an appointment to the Kinder Project, a function Gakhal approached with mixed feelings.

Gakhal blinked at the computer, its wafer-thin crystal display colored by an image that, frankly, scared him to the bone. The electronic file had been forwarded by Kinder's project director, Peter Weihing, from the Kinder complex in Dournay.

The arrogance of government, he was thinking. He thought it a lot. The first time was when he entered professional life within the Kinder sphere and Sekerak, a former Kinder administrator, told him about 237.

On a secure line in Dournay, Peter Weihing's dry voice poured out of a speaker. "You're looking at a computer-aided sketch. If you recall, our work in this area identified some discrepancies in 237's ability to define physical characteristics by the life force signature alone."

Gakhal heard noise. Gakhal had no tools with which to form a contingency for this. The Holland-Tchey aliens cared about technology. Their work with ITAN turned on the axis of technology, who had it, who did not, who got it and who didn't.

A metaphysical breach by the Holland-Tchey? The aliens had recently built intercontinental shuttlecraft relying solely on organic materials. The extraordinary vehicles were living machines, leaving ITAN scientists to wonder about the monstrous craft in high orbit. Could the Holland-Tchey accomplish astral projection? Why would they bother? And who should have thought it?

They'll say I should have, Gakhal thought.

He folded his hands nervously and stared at his monitor. "This is female."

Weihing, on the speaker, agreed.

Female, male, what did it matter? Any Holland-Tchey alien posted on the planet was capable of bringing worldwide pressure to bear on Kinder. If the aliens ever learned that Kinder existed, 237 was theirs. They'd take 237, and most likely impose sanctions against the governments that harbored it.

Maybe the alien wasn't on post. She could have been the family member of an ambassadorial official. The aliens never staffed their embassy year round and sometimes abandoned the planet for seasons. When an ambassador took up residence he or she tended to bring along staff and family.

Is this what had occurred? A family member on holiday experimenting with astral travel, playing around? The Holland-Tchey were telepathic, were they not?

"Your scans were negative?" Gakhal confirmed

"Negative for a metaphysical breach, not negative all in all."

Gakhal sucked his teeth. "I don't have time to do a word puzzle."

Weihing quickly explained, "The scan detected an energy pattern consistent with what we call discarnate activity in the habitat level. We're being told by 237 that this pattern is John Valten Manegold."

Gakhal possessed no vocabulary to challenge this. Premiere Sekerak would have enjoyed a briefing from Peter Weihing; references to ghosts and ghosts describing beautiful young aliens based on-- based on what? A few moments in the ether of some in-between hole that Gakhal did not believe in?

Gakhal pinched his nose, at a loss. This was like listening to his grandfather discuss a tremona, a shapeshifting ghoul, a soul-eater. The world had swung past such terrors. Humanity had entered an era of enlightenment. This was post-Purge, but the Purge had forgotten one last fiend, this 237. And now the fiend, as a member of an endangered species, was Gakhal's responsibility.

How could he, Gakhal, compose a report to Kinder's international board when he did not understand what had happened?

"Peter, you're saying that while 237 was in a near-vegetative state, the psyche of a dispossessed being tapped into its consciousness, and startled it."

"Startle isn't the right word, I'd--"

Gakhal went on as though Weihing hadn't spoken. "Investigating this anomaly, 237 found a new affarite, potentially subject 238, made contact with it, and wants us, now, to rescue it."

"Recover it."

"Rescue, recover, what is the difference?"

"The difference is if we can't rescue it, we must find and annihilate it. Otherwise, it's Volodya's subject once those imbeciles realize what they have, and, well, you've seen what our subject can do. The Volods are wild cards."

"What does this Manegold know about the alien?"

"Manegold has suffered psychological trauma and does not respond reliably when asked about her."

Gakhal could sympathize. "We are talking about a consciousness that has no physical form."

"Not exactly, sir."

No, Manegold's physical form was in a morgue in Volodya, frozen solid but reclaimable.

Gakhal reached across the monitor, not touching it, just to feel the charge of energy.

On the screen, in the image file sent by Weihing, the head and shoulders of a woman.

The woman possessed a slender, sculpted neck, which 237 had given a bronze cast. The remarkable shade lay evenly across a boldly cut jaw line, high cheeks, and a single-ridged nose. Some Holland-Tchey had a second layer of cartilage that caused a fluting sound when the aliens spoke. The female in 237's composite had no eyes. Black sockets, vacant and unknown. 237 had not been able to describe her eyes. The omission took the image somewhere between the surreal and macabre. In contrast, a swath of lovely raven hair lifted from the alien's brow and flowed backward, behind the shoulders.

All in all, a beautiful young woman.

The Holland-Tchey considered ebon skin a mark of post-adolescence, which their species took on in the second hundred years of life.

An immature Holland-Tchey was cream or beige.

The elderly were pewter gray.

Gakhal supposed he was looking at a female member of the ambassador's staff somewhere between a hundred and two hundred years old.

Probably a treaty enforcer or spy.

Something.

"Here is what I want to know. If we sanction the mission, and she is encountered on mission in Volodya, what do we do? Specifically, if she attempts to obstruct the mission."

Weihing said, "Kinder is built on the affirmation that 237 and presumably 238 should be controlled by an organization incapable of and immune to excess. Our very existence demands one of two responses to interference by the Holland-Tchey."

Quite unexpectedly Gakhal sensed a kindred spirit. "Go on."

"In the face of interference we will fold the Kinder Project completely and manage 237 and 238 so that they are unavailable as assets." Peter's voice rushed out of the speaker. "I must inform you Dr. Interlandi--"

"Was compromised, yes, I saw the message."

"It happened just before 237 was last placed in stasis. Typically, reckless interchange with 237 leads to the euphoric and distracted state Dr. Mozun called rapture."

"I'm familiar with Dr. Mozun's analyses."

Peter's voice continued crisply. "In habitat staff suffering prolonged exposure to 237 we see this post-contact disorder. Elevated dopamine levels, a false sense of well being, even hallucination. Dr. Interlandi is experiencing the symptoms, but she has exerted an acceptable level of self-control. Are you aware that the creature telepathically vested her with hundreds of years of its memories?"

"I appreciated being copied on that, thank you. I haven't read the file."

"It's fascinating. For years, the creature's resisted debriefing of its past, and now we have it all. For instance, we now know he was born in Misenos to a household with a mother and father. The father bore scars, the mother did not, so we're guessing the genetic anomaly was handed down by his mother. He was a twin. The family raised horses. The slave rebellion of ancient Misenos killed his parents and saw the burning of his estate. Ironically, the estate had no slaves. The children were assimilated into the slave army and forced to walk the spent battlefields of their time scavenging weapons and identifying enemy combatants playing dead. Nasty work. They were five or six years old, the pair of them. When Trunos Maltican defeated the slave army, the children were spared. Imagine a culture in which slavery was a natural condition. The laws said children under a certain age had to be sold at private auction, and so the siblings were separated.

"237 went to a merchant family, where he was groomed as a companion for the family children and a clerk. His twin, a female, was sold to a brothel. Within five years, 237 was a well adjusted scribe and his twin was a suicide. The Misenians burned their dead, so whether she was endowed or not is immaterial. She perished. 237's fortune ended when the merchant, accused of treason, lost all his goods, as well as his life, to the state. 237 was fifteen years. It was public auction for our subject, which, if you look at the era, and you look at 237, was tantamount to a sentence to nightly rape and degradation. 237 murdered its master within one year, suffered execution by hanging, and was to remain a public spectacle until its corpse rotted."

"Which," Gakhal opined, "it never did."

"A local sorcerer, seeing the signs, stole 237's body. Once the rope released its pressure on 237's neck, the body began doing what it does, and 237 reanimated. The being that woke, however, was not the congenial, well adjusted slave that had grown up in a merchant's household. Nor was it the thing we see now. I wonder, Anselm, do you recall the names, historically, Kral and Tithonus?"

"My middle-era Old Continent history is rusty."

"Look them up when you get the chance. Or read the file. It's not light reading, by the way. The only one of us who wasn't shaken was Dr. Interlandi, and she said it was because she'd always suspected our subject of historic atrocities."

Gakhal frowned. "That could be a bad thing. How do we know she is not being manipulated? In fact, are not our contamination protocols based on the likelihood that the euphoric state caused by prolonged exposure leads to increased dependence on contact with the creature? She's making excuses for it?"

"I wouldn't accuse her of excusing its past just yet. Constantine Parnasus, does that name ring a bell? Of course it does. If we are to credit Dr. Interlandi's account, our 237 defeated Parnasus in hand-to-hand combat for the right to bodyguard the Lady of the Blessed Waters. The Lady rejected 237 and sent it on a pilgrimage, a labor 237 apparently took to heart. That was seven hundred years ago. Less than three centuries later, 237 was beset by a group of vettoi in the Northern Kingdom, killed, and put in a tomb. The vettoi made sure the tomb was airtight, so after he healed of his wounds, he died again from asphyxiation. As you know, its body stayed in the tomb some four hundred years, until Antoni Kinder freed it. It is Dr. Interlandi's opinion that the execution and subsequent confinement meets 237's definition of rehabilitation and the being who ravaged the Old Continent and butchered Constantine Parnasus is, for all intent and purpose, dead."

"So, what are you saying?"

"Dr. Interlandi's dependency issues are not preeminent at this stage. The acquisition of 238 is the mission. The mission will be over in seven days. We only need seven days. Dr. Interlandi has had an unprecedented effect on 237."

"Oh, now -- I don't-- "

"I want to use this, sir, to ensure 237 does not interfere with the extraction of 238."

Gakhal was so still that he forgot to breathe. A moment passed in silence.

Weihing waited.

"There could be inappropriate contact," Gakhal said, presently. "I mean between the doctor-- She's attractive, you know. A bright woman. An inappropriate liaison could be the creature's purpose. Dr. Mozun suggested this in his work. We really must be on guard for this sort of thing. As far as we know, 237 has never procreated."

The Kinder Project had found no scientific reason 237 could not mate with humans and produce offspring.

"I'll manage it at my level."

And take responsibility for the consequences, Gakhal did not need to assert. "I wish the mission fair fortune, Peter."

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 8: Mission Prep

2007-08-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

The creature had eternity and craved blackness, the disconnection of the shoreless dark. It craved oblivion.

Siris met 237 in the atrium. When a mission was proposed, the habitat supervisor spoke to 237. For this mission, Charles gave the task to Siris.

After briefing, she'd hung out in the conferral room to talk about the assignment. "Will Dr. Zinn be with me?" She wasn't sure she'd understood the function grid.

"No, but along with our security specialists, she'll be watching and listening."

Daft, Charles had gone absolutely daft on this one. "I'm not asking because I'm worried it will harm me." A ludicrous concept-- not that 237 would do harm, but that someone could stop it if harm was 237's intention. "I'm all for doing what's needed, but why am I tapped for the meeting? I'm no longer the HS. I've been reassigned to Research. You're having me do a residence manager's function for a reason."

Charles Cotas regarded her steadily as a faint flush crept into his cheeks.

Siris experienced the tingle of alarm. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?"

"Your presence has had an unprecedented effect on the subject."

"It's not me," she hurried to say. Charles, however, looked at her with a flared eyebrow. "It's not me that's affecting him," she emphasized. "It's the other one, subject two hundred and thirty-eight. You should read my reports, Charles."

Thirty minutes later, she watched 237 on the running track. She used the track herself for exercise and to imagine 237's footfalls on the blacktop. 237 ran like a machine, or a god of the arena, like one of those UKSB-genetically enhanced athletes that captivated the mobs of the world. Unlike arena warriors, 237 never broke sweat. It was not winded or damp now, and it never had an odor.

Why do you crave oblivion? Why do you want the long dark, no dreams, no warmth, nothing good to remember?

It came to the table and sat down, long mouth set, not looking at her. Her mental query was perhaps imprudent, like whispering in a quiet room about someone who was present to overhear. 237 could hear her. With a sigh, she structured her thoughts, gave them order in accordance with the principles of StoMi.

"Should we begin with the weather?" she asked. She wore a lab coat, tan slacks, and a thin blue sweater. Her straightened hair was caught in a knot at the back of her neck. Siris consulted the sky through the atrium panel. Meanwhile, she settled on the bench next to 237.

Lifting its head, 237 curved its mouth into a faint smile. "The weather is the weather."

Siris leaned back in her chair, glanced down. She had prepared her question in the dead language of Shashal, a culture that existed before the second rise of the Misenian Empire. Wayne Vadas had taught her the words. The language, Vadas had told her, disappeared in all forms but the written around three thousand years ago.

Nevertheless, 237 answered her in it.

She said, "Go on."

"What would you like to hear? A"-- unknown word --"on the"-- 237 lost her for a while but finished with --"for you."

She switched to the Brianov state language, Ollano. "No one has spoken that tongue in thousands of years."

"You just did."

"I should not be amazed."

"No, you should not be."

She smiled to herself. "I've been in Research since ... Anyway, the present theory is your species was telepathically linked at one point in your evolution, and your ability to recall every language spoken to you is a trait called genetic memory, which would explain why you cannot name all the languages that you know. And why we have never spoken to you in a language you did not immediately and completely possess."

"Whose idea was that?" 237 asked, after a while.

-- Dr. Wayne Vadas.

"In your new work section, do you report to Dr. Vadas?"

"Yes."

"A pity."

237 disliked Vadas almost as much as it disliked Charles Cotas and Anselm Gakhal. It had a thing for officials, but also it was aware when people feared it.

All right. "Here," she said. She held out her hand.

237 took a sheet-sized photograph from her, looked briefly at it. It had no discernible reaction, but asked, "What is this?"

Siris looked hard into 237's face for a sign. "Do you recognize this woman?"

The image was twenty-five or so years old. The woman in it was young, attractive, and blond. She wore a white dress and pumps. She stood, smiling, on a balcony.

"Not really, no."

Siris hesitated. "She is Salmey Vasold Manegold. This was taken on her pilgrimage to Amorium. Like you, she was an Amarite Polytheist. She was at the time married to a man named Burgold Manegold, who was head of a crime syndicate that once based its operation in the Goraneg Mounatins of Volodya-- I know this seems meaningless, but I am going somewhere with it."

"I did not father him, this John Valten Manegold. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned it sooner." 237 glanced away.

"Are you sure?"

237 turned its head to look at her.

She handed him two additional photos. A file photo of a young man in custody, and another image, when the young man was bound and standing on a platform.

237 glanced at the photos and sighed. "It's hard to say from the stills, but there is some emanation. He may be his seeming age. He may only be a young man."

"Affarites tend to change identities. Makes it hard for Research to pin down an age. He could have assumed the life of John Mangegold, we don't know. We're still trying to verify."

The subject gingerly separated the photos, returning all but the first to Siris. "We must get to him. He can't be left as he is."

She kept her hands folded in her lap. "By and large, the world believes this young man, John Manegold, coordinated a spectacular act of terrorism."

"The destruction of the Needle in Bhavaja, now I remember." Kinder ensured 237's grasp of world affairs was current. "Did he?"

"Possibly. Probably."

"I'll have to ask him."

"Interestingly enough, our intelligence says the Volods were using him as an informant up to the instant they accused him of conspiracy."

"A terrorist." 237 looked into a brooding sky. "I would have said he was a builder, not a destroyer. Well, whatever. Get him anyway. Destroy him, if you wish. But do not leave him as he is. His condition ... grates on ... us both."

"They took him to the Ministry of Science because they already know he is more than he seems. He died of a broken neck. Would you like to see?"

"Not particularly. Show me anyway."

She pulled her flex hand-held from her pocket, showed him the screen. "I find it difficult to watch, but the UKSB and Volods stream executions, and the high profile ones always end up on GateKeeper Global. It's a short vid. Here."

He took the flex from her, and watched without any discernible reaction. He gave back the flex. "At the last moment, he released his shield. You know the shield of which I speak?"

Siris nodded.

"The goddess always speaks to us as we are dying. She tries to take away the doubt."

"She tells you that you are going to come back?"

"She would not concern herself with something as trivial as that. She tells us ... other things. His aura is not much more without his shield than with it, which means he is a very young being."

"Would the C-spine fracture have corrected itself by now?"

"You can be sure. That's not a difficult mechanism of death to reverse. And he isn't dead. He's dormant. We have to get him-- save him or destroy him, I don't care. He does not care. But we must do something." 237 studied the Varvins blue pines landscaped outside the atrium along a road that disappeared into the distant hills. "I believe he is just an infant, this one, no older than a quarter century."

* * *

Siris stood in the back of the mission preparation room. When the Kinder Group member nations approved a mission, the project employed a military team of mixed nationality and skill. Siris used to observe the mission preparation from a monitoring station located in another building of the compound. Her habitat supervisor duties did not require her presence at the actual briefing. She only needed to observe 237.

Dr. Mozun, her predecessor, told her there was nothing really to observe. During the transitional phase, she and the doctor observed a mission prep. They sat together in a long, narrow station under overly bright light panels and drank tea. Wishing badly that she was somewhere else, doing anything, something useful, Siris had squinted at the monitors. But nothing in her experience prepared her to understand what she was seeing.

The mission prep room was near the gymnasium, on the secure side. The preparation coordinator was Grazdoz, a figure whose presence at Kinder was somewhat controversial. Siris recalled Mozun's wince as he explained.

"How did Grazdoz come to be at Kinder?" he repeated her query. "Retired military commander, tactical and technical expertise." Then Mozun said, "She's not much of a conversationalist."

Most importantly, Grazdoz may have been a sort of intense personality but she had never heard of, much less practiced StoMi-- the Stoic Mind. The project leaders did not care. They were glad to have Grazdoz. Minimal was the term to describe Grazdoz's contact with 237. Untrue, but on paper it looked good.

Predictably, Grazdoz perceived 237 as a comrade in arms.

Mozun alerted her to this. "Oh, yes, you can tell. The most incautious interchanges. Look, she will even stand at the table next to our 237 when showing off mission equipment."

The mission, Siris recalled, was something awful and necessary, something she was raised to believe occurred only when national security was at risk. Brianovia, once a socialist state, now a model of reformism, did a better job with its interests than its neighbors, Borazjis and the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa. Stability was a mandate of the Holland-Tchey aliens. Not only national stability but world order. And this of course was the new purpose of ITAN. The treaty nations were powerful, resourceful, and above all plugged into the conveyor belt of alien technology. Brianovia was a model ITAN member.

Mozun had insisted that Siris read the report of 237's missions, including notes from the soldiers, who protected 237-- Hephaestion --and routinely effected 237's extraction. The reports were above her clearance level and should not have been available in hardcopy in the habitat supervisor's office. However, the reports had become part of the transition process, handed from one supervisor to the next, to orient the relief supervisor to the power 237 was capable of wielding.

"I could talk to you about it all day long," Mozun said. "Instead, read this."

Siris read. There were satellite images to glance at. Heady stuff. She was breathless.

"The military arm of Kinder is disconnected from our armed forces in every way," Mozun went on. "Look at Grazdoz, retired and now here. See the reason. No matter what you do, when there is a mission, Hephaestion is with the soldiers in reckless intimacy. Life and death. Too much adrenaline. Our soldiers are true believers. Hephaestion took away the planet-killer-- do you remember when we called the alien canon a planet-killer? He took that from our enemy."

Presently, Grazdoz called to Hephaestion and the four-member military unit, flicked a glance at Siris in the back, and shot a hand in the air.

Yanked out of the past, a moment passed before Siris realized Grazdoz's gesture was a summons.

The soldiers turned to look at her, two of them rotating only their heads, the others, on their feet, ambling around to gaze at her.

The room was large, with a small stage and lectern at the front, rows of chairs, and a workspace with an enormous table.

Siris strode down the aisle, her arms folded over her chest. When she stopped she was a meter closer to the soldiers than she ever wanted to be.

The captain extended a narrow but big-knuckled hand. "I'm Skocz."

She took him in, the long, proportioned legs first, his lean upper body packed with muscle. He wore a conservative haircut, enough on the side to help him pass for a Volod businessman if he wore the right clothes. She knew he used to be air force special services. He could fly helicopters and maybe build one if he had to.

She gripped his hand, thinking she might as well shake hands with wood. "Good evening, Captain."

"Don't call him that." The scolding woman was about thirty years. She hovered two finger spans shorter than Siris and wore a sleek cap of dark hair cropped in an androgynous style rumored trendy among professional Volod women. Her rank insignia said she was a warrant officer. Her boots, Siris noticed, were highly polished and very small. The rest of her was covered in a utility uniform that showed off a tiny waist.

"We don't use rank," another volunteered. "I'm Zedric. You can call me Rock."

He didn't look like a rock. Except for the basic utility uniform, he looked like an ordinary guy in his forties. He had fair eyes in weather-bronzed skin. He was Galanian.

"I'm sorry," she said, although she was not. She was not one of them. Why should she know their rules? She had no business in the prep room talking to them or going on a mission with them. Her presence was Charles's idea of a joke or his deeply misguided impression that she, Siris, mattered to Hephaestion. "But why can't I use rank?"

The woman clucked, angled away, and sought a chair as though creating distance from Siris was the only appropriate response to so stupid a question.

The fourth soldier winked at Siris. "Out there, you'll remember. I'm Wastagh. Call me Edge."

Siris looked at Hephaestion.

He sat near the front. Mission preparation began on a number of levels. Hephaestion spent the morning going over tactics with the four soldiers. They did drills, scenarios. He still wore the combat boots and a utility uniform, without insignia, appropriate for the training. Last night, Grazdoz had altered Hephaestion's hairstyle. The long locks had been clipped to effect the popular fashion of international executives. (They were going to cut short her, Siris' hair, too, since she was going with the soldiers and Hephaestion to Volodya.) She saw Hephaestion's ears, the strong column of his neck. Look at the ancient frosted irises set against such crisp, youthful white. Nothing they could do about his eyes, their color, the contrast. Volod security used iris scans. They'd stop him if he wore contact lenses to blend in, make him take the contacts out before they passed him through checkpoints. Except for the odd eyes, Hephaestion looked like a law school graduate. The pretty face saved by a rigid, masculine mouth.

"What do they call you?" Siris asked him.

Captain Skocz said, "Lifeline."

Warrant Officer Jetta Phanuff, the scolding woman, said with confidence, "The end-all."

Sergeant Wastagh drifted to a vacant chair. "That's the Duke."

Suddenly Phanuff found all this amusing. "Hephaestion, I meant to ask you, how was Empress Joanna?"

"Who is Empress Joanna?" Skocz interjected.

Zedric settled in a chair and tipped his head back to eye the captain. "Go back a few. She screwed a lot of kings, tried to fight off the Aiglentines by giving her daughter to a barbarian prince."

Hephaestion held open his mission package. Without looking up, "She was before my time," he said, quietly.

As soon as he spoke, Siris knew where she would sit.

Phanuff continued. "How was Reagan Thaine?"

Hephaestion: "I never met him. We would not have got along."

Phanuff turned with a smile to Wastagh, who rewarded her bravado with a grin. On previous occasions, from the comfort of the control room with the audio low, Siris had observed the soldiers' banter. Phanuff, a veteran, violated Kinder practice, dipping her fingers into the pool of Hephaestion's past. Even in jest, Kinder prohibited unauthorized forays. Phanuff no doubt enjoyed crossing the line as much as she delighted in Hephaestion's off-hand response. Like her comrades, she probably did not believe in monsters. At such times, the soldiers drew Hephaestion from the distant, sterile, and severe world of the habitat into something with a little more sensation in it. His was not an overly strong attachment. How could it be? Now and then, someone did not come back. And they grew old, these soldiers. Were replaced. That, too, Hephaestion took in stride.

Siris sat next to Hephaestion.

At the lectern, Grazdoz switched on the projector and began.

"The mission objective is to retrieve the remains of John Manegold, guard the remains for two to six days, and extract Manegold.

"The mission has two insertion points.

"Dr. Interlandi will enter Volodya at Tolna-Kraj International Airport. She will be on a chartered airjet carrying medical doctors who volunteer to assist International Relief in Vodikovo City. Our Lady of Service Medical Center in Vodikovo City coordinates the country's mass casualty trauma centers.

"The trauma centers are a hot coal, because nobody is allowed to report what they see. Everything bad coming out of Volodya is about the terrorists. Abductions, bombings, shootings." Grazdoz paused to glance at the projector images, hand-picked demonstrations of unnatural death. Some urban, some rural locations. A couple of ITAN headlines. She wanted to show the soldiers what they were getting into.

"State-run media controls the output," she went on. "The country doesn't want ITAN human rights teams telling GateKeeper about the government raids, the minefields, the death squads, the unofficial detention centers, summary executions."

Images smuggled out of infirmaries, emergency rooms. The clinics, the ERs seemed modern, well-provisioned. The patients were captured by a camera on a button or a pin at odd angles: amputations, burning victims, torture victims, gunshots. More shots of a pastel countryside, an ordinary paved highway littered with corpses.

"Soon as the hospital workers break silence," Grazdoz told them, "International Relief will get kicked out of the country. It's the same thing you saw ten years ago in Grete. They're still digging up mass graves over there and nobody said a word until ITAN backed the elections."

She called up a picture of the airport outside the capital city of Bhavaja.

"The relief effort works on a rotating schedule. Medical staff is cleared by the Volods in advance. Adding a name this close to departure will most certainly exclude the entire rotation and strand the doctors finishing up their tour. Dr. Interlandi will go as a flight attendant. Her long-term involvement with Kinder guarantees her peers will not recognize her.

"There is a one-week window as the new doctors are quarantined, screened, and in-serviced on Volod policy and security. The flight crew is quartered in the Holiday Hotel at Tolna-Kraj." Grazdoz showed more images of the Volodyan international airport, the hotel. "The flight crew is subjected to minimum screening, mainly because they don't have access to the Volod infrastructure. A card with identification data, photo, prints, birth certificate, travel logs and citizenship status is all Dr. Interlandi will need. The flight crew is allowed to shuttle into Bhavaja. Tourism is down but if they want to, the flight crew can sightsee, stay in the city, essentially do whatever they want except leave Vodikovo Province and miss the flight out.

"Dr. Interlandi will meet this man."

The man on the screen had gray hair and deep-set, sad little eyes.

"Fredric Karian is Kinder intelligence. He operates the safe house in the Palisad district in North Bhavaja." Images of a narrow two-story house behind a rampart of ancient-seeming trees. Neighborhood shots revealed a quaint sidewalk mall, a fuel station, and a firehouse. "Bhavaja University owns the property. The university wall starts right there." Grazdoz flicked a laser pointer at the screen. "The property is shielded by the trees, has an independent power source and water supply. University security can't see it, doesn't want to see it, isn't interested in it. And with the safe house security system on you can see whose coming up the street for a kilometer. The driveway and the surrounding grounds have motion, seismic, and heat sensors. The emergency escape route is through the basement into a utility tunnel under the university. Questions so far?"

Grazdoz nodded with approval at the silence.

"The rest of you. Volodya is a restricted fly zone. Without a flight plan, you are history. The Volod Air Force asks no questions. They will put two rockets up your ass, I don't care if you put sixty sisters of Our Lady singing up against the windows of an airbus.

"Volodya's borders are not for the faint-hearted. From the west, you have the ocean. Alina, Temor, and Volney share Volodya's inland borders. The best way in is this way.

"The first leg of your flight is by military cargo carrier to a private air strip in Alina. We control the airstrip. Then, my friends, you are on your way to a high altitude deployment, low altitude open-parachute insertion in Kodopovec Province in Volodya.

"If you are picked up by any of these groups"-- Grazdoz grabbed a finger --"government troops, Volodyan Intelligence, or the Federal Authority, you will be killed. The only question is whether you will be tortured first and how badly.

"The anti-government network is active in this province. You are set to meet this man, Szalay Crivosin, the head of a local criminal syndicate, at a point about a half-kilometer from your landing zone. Kinder agents developed this Crivosin as an asset, but this is his first field test, and you know what that means."

"Means it can go either way," Zone said.

"You got it. Crivosin is putting it on the line for some non-traceable credits and because he believes the Volod government staged the execution of John Manegold. Nobody's exchanging credentials in this enterprise, but he's been fed enough bullshit to think we're Moukibi-paid mercenaries sent in retaliation for the"-- Grazdoz held up the first two fingers of each hand and wagged them --"unlawful ITAN raid on Moukibi soil. You know, to stir up the pot. He and his bunch like the idea we might be able to prove the Federal Authority hanged a lookalike. According to Crivosin, the terrorist group Holbek wants Manegold as badly as we do.

"Don't turn your backs on Crivosin. If he's not active Holbek, he's with a Holbek-funded organization, intel we'll be happily passing on to ITAN soon as the mission is over.

"Don't joke with him or his people. Don't smile at them. You get their help because they believe you can show them John Manegold standing up and breathing. They can turn on you in a moment, and they're every bit as brutal as the Volod government. Yes, Dance."

Phanuff had her hand up. "Why is Manegold important to the Holbeks?"

Grazdoz shrugged. "It's Holbek, not Holbeks. Think ancient history, holy warriors looking after the sweet old lady in Amorium. Ring a bell with anyone?"

Hephaestion said, "Yes," and that was it.

"It's the name, now, of Burgolt Manegold's pet group of homicidal maniacs, and their leader, a wonderfully psychotic son of a bitch, is our Manegold's father."

Siris said, quietly, "They're all terrorists."

Hephaestion addressed the room. "Holbek and Burgolt Manegold are the same, yes, that is true. John Manegold is friend to neither. They want him so they can, how shall we say it, debrief him."

What would Josefa Zinn, observing on her monitor while safe across the complex, make of this? Probably she had no idea how different this briefing was. How much of Hephaestion's information came directly from Manegold, and how much was interpretation? Manegold wasn't in the room. The spectral scans showed him in the habitat, where he tended to stay.

Siris cleared her throat. "Our lives may depend on Manegold. What is the level of trust you have for this young man and what he tells you?"

"John has decided he is dead and I am an angel of Our Lady. Until he is with us again, and I mean in the flesh, he will do what I tell him when I tell him to do it. But he holds to the belief that he has nothing further to offer this world."

Grazdoz, unfazed, boomed in. "So, one hundred percent trust, I got it. Thank you, Angel." Angel was Hephaestion's code name.

Phanuff whistled, predictably.

Grazdoz fought a smile. "After the Kodopovec team meets up with its Holbek contact all of you will be given current travel papers to match your identification cards. In Volodya, travel papers are updated weekly at checkpoints designed to target citizens who travel outside the security net. You'll be a site approval team for a company called XTO Sun Energies that wants to build a hydroelectric power station in Kodopovec Province. Your cover is you're heading back to Bhavaja to meet the project's finance component. You've been out in the countryside, so if your papers are a little off the guards shouldn't shoot you without making a call first. Anyone piping cash into Volodya is getting a little moving room right now.

"When you take the body from the Ministry of Science, the city will raise the alert level and lock down. That's why we're not trying to bring Manegold out of Bhavaja right away. Dr. Interlandi, this corpse is frozen. Can you do your thing in six days?"

Siris felt the soldiers staring. "You're imagining that I will be working with someone who has to be brought from one state to another gradually. Yes, I am working with living tissue, but I do not have to restore Manegold's body in stages. I only need six hours with the equipment I asked for to relieve his current condition. I estimate forty-eight hours from then his power will provide a pulse and breathing and I'll be able to start an IV. Return to consciousness will be Manegold's call. Thirty-six hours, maybe a bit longer. What do think, Hephaestion, for his first time?"

"I think it could be never. He has no connection to this world beyond the violence that facilitated his leaving it, and the murder by his government of the woman he loved, a woman who was treated roughly by her peers. His last connection to life was a reporter who somehow managed to get out of Volodya before her arrest papers were drawn up. He wants nothing from us especially but to be allowed to pass the gate."

No one spoke.

A vent puffed warm air.

Grazdoz, staring at Hephaestion, got a little wide-eyed. "Then what are we going over there for, my friend?"

Siris said, "We would go anyway, to destroy the corpse, and to let John Manegold sleep."

"Death is not sleep," said Hephaestion, unexpectedly. Siris, especially, was surprised. On several occasions Hepaestion had referred to death-- and always as a form of release. "Every thing that ends begins again in the pure and perfect light of creation."

"Is that," Siris wondered, while the others looked inward in silence, "the light of one's own funeral pyre?"

Hephaestion leveled his crystal optics on her, and she shivered. "Close," he whispered, saying nothing more. Very faintly, he smiled.

* * *

One of the last things Siris did for Kinder was tell the truth.

"Charles, you're a fool."

Her compound prox card no longer allowed access to administrative facilities. The upper habitat facilities, too, were off limits. She had to find Charles Cotas outside Admin One, literally on the steps leading to the driveway as the medical director strolled to the dark sedan that would ferry him to a helicopter. It was almost 1700 hours and the brass sky was turbulent. Charles had finished meetings with Dr. Zinn and the the international board. His next stop was the capital with Peter Weihing, a long flight with complaining winds and a low sky.

Siris gazed up at Cotas anxiously. An assistant crowded his elbow, pointing at her.

Two Admin security staff stepped outside. They were quite capable of keeping her from Cotas. Meanwhile, Charles lowered his head, eyes narrowed. It was difficult to know what he made of her running to him for help.

Siris hurried to intercept him. "I have to talk to you."

"Of course you do."

The tone, she knew it. Resented it.

Charles gestured to security, waved them off. He spoke to his assistant, who got into the sedan and shut the door.

Siris and Dr. Cotas were alone on the walkway.

"The Volodya mission does not need me. Send a medic. We have several field medics trained to do everything I can do. I shouldn't be on this mission."

Charles looked over her head with the blank indifference.

It was because she was past tense, an anecdote. How many times did she, Siris, sit patiently through the ramblings of a compromised employee?

-- I thought that ...

-- I did not really ...

-- I'm thinking clearly, believe me ...

Kinder made plans without Siris, now. Though she might have a role in the mission, she no longer had a voice.

"Charles, don't send me to Volodya."

"You're due at the final mission conference, Siris."

"Oh, gods." The gods she did not believe in. She was a Reformist and committed to atheism. Why get squeamish now?

Charles noted her lapse with disapproval.

It was well known that Hephaestion considered the entity in Amorium, the Lady of the Blessed Waters, a demi-god. 237 had been an Amarite polytheist just about seven hundred years. If anyone knew that, she did.

Her government's official position about the Lady was that over the last six centuries her eminence was a succession of exceptionally kind women elevated to a revered clerical post. The Lady advocated peace without force of arms. On occasion, she was rumored to heal someone, maybe restore a missing limb. She was conspicuously mute on the topic of the Holland-Tchey aliens. And she never left the gilt worship chamber in her temple in Amorium.

She was not a threat.

She was not a subject.

Siris realized that she shouldn't be thinking about the Lady now. Or thinking about never knowing (before now) Hephaestion's mission code name was angel.

"My presence will precipitate a crisis. I am the ward of his memories."

"Wasn't it your doing, that 237 gave them to you in the first place?"

"Holy hell, Charles, is that what you think? That I asked for this?"

"What other reason would it have for choosing you?"

"I've not asked, but maybe you should. Charles, 237 has nearly perfect recall. Do you know what it is like to possess centuries of experience, to sift the ages for the one answer you cannot learn but have searched for all your life? He's kept up with the lives-- count them, plural, lives of a being he believes houses the spirit of his sister. All these years! He wants a connection. He needs a conection. He wants to see himself in Manegold. Let him go to Volodya and do his job without me to remind him that after fifteen hundred years he, too, is just an infant."

"You referred," Charles said, "to it, as he. He wants, he needs."

Siris all but laughed, and her tone kicked up a notch. "What if he wants to sleep with me?" She just threw that out. Made eye contact with Charles, who messed up and glanced her way. She put on her serious face, to show him she was asking because she thought it might happen.

Charles said nothing.

"Charles, no." She already knew what he was thinking. "I'm going to control a fifteen hundred-year-old affarite with a toss of my hair? May I say something?"

His look said, Say anything you want.

Somehow she had fallen beneath the waves with barely a nostril above the water. Her country had abandoned her for a piece of the greater good. Forced her into a war zone. She was without any rights. Her name was used in meetings about manipulation through sex. Ludicrous. Anticipating a sexual advance from Hephaestion was like looking forward to a romp with her older brother. Didn't they read the file? Hephaestion was not sexually aroused in inequitable partnerships. When there was an imbalance of power, he preferred celibacy.

"Typically," she said, "it-- he--will do what we ask because we ask. This may not be true now. He's just received confirmation he's not alone."

Again, Cotas was silent.

"Maybe I am not the one contaminated, Charles. Think about it." She walked away.

The last briefing was due, and they were waiting for her.

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 9: Acquisition

2007-08-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

There was a rain shower just before sunset. For twenty minutes the rain bounced off the city streets and sidewalks, the roofs of tenements and shops, the flat gray chrome of the massive Bhavaja buses that outnumbered private vehicles two to one. The bad wind that brought the storm rushed away before full dark, leaving behind a city gasping for air. It had been a warm day. The evening was now cool. The storm stole the warmth, which was usually the case in late spring.

Bhavaja's curfew was 2000 hours. In the Month of the Torens, this was thirty minutes after dark. Meanwhile, the city spent its final hour of relative freedom in painful restlessness.

Hephaestion observed the city from a bench about a kilometer outside the wound that was still Karsbrasova Square. During the day, urbane executives, local and foreign, making a living in the surrounding bulwark of glass towers, brought homemade lunches or purchased meals to consume in one of the stone parks that had cropped up outside the restricted zone.

The business district employed its own police force and boasted to the world that its measures kept the heart of the city inviolate.

Holbek loved it that the Kinder team intended to steal from the Ministry of Science.

Hephaestion sat facing the Ministry's stone facade, its columned and porticoed entry. A brace of glass doors, already locked and armed. There was a man in its marble lobby who did nothing but watch the doors.

Hephaestion felt the man breathing, held the man's breath inside his own consciousness as he began reaching toward the block-wide structure with his power.

Skocz, Wastagh, and Zedric-- Zone, Edge, and Rock --had been dropped off by a utility truck on Cholykur Street, adjacent to the Ministry. There was no parking along or inside the business district. If they saw a privately owned vehicle stop for more than a moment, the security staff called the police. The Ministry received its deliveries off Ruzo Street, which was controlled by gates. Phanuff-- Dance --took the truck into traffic after her drop, lazily drifting behind one of the behemoth municipal buses.

Zone, Edge, and Rock were waiting now for Angel to do his thing.

Recalling the plan of the building, Hephaestion located the room with the UPS-- uninterruptable power source --equipment. The room held a large unit capable of juicing the security system for ten seconds if the Ministry lost city power. Within ten seconds, the Ministry's massive generators would take over. A narrow and focused disruption was required to take out station power, the UPS, and the generator feeder.

First, the UPS.

A surge, but not much of one.

And there.

The command and control center was now seeing a UPS failure alert on its alarm system.

Hephaestion waited.

The breathing of the man in the lobby caught, then settled. A second man joined him. He would be the rover, a response man, sent to look into the UPS trouble. The equipment room was through the lobby and along a service corridor, behind access control.

The two men spoke.

Neither seemed alarmed.

Hephaestion waited.

The rover took off.

Hephaestion felt Zone reaching the Ruzo gate.

Now.

He located seven life forms within the block that comprised the Ministry. He did this carefully, because he did not want to kill anyone. Just float a charge along an invisible and intangible wire, connect to the people, each one at the same moment, and send them to sleep. It happened without warning, from their perspective. No time to use the duress switches or drop-dial comm lines to the police.

Next, he penetrated the command and control station, sending a surge through everything. Good-bye, station power. Hello, generator failure. Carefully, carefully. If there was smoke, the fire alarm would dial up a central monitoring station and alert the police. He wanted to stop the recorders, allow Zone and his team time to manually release the gate, pry open the shipping and receiving door, and make it to the morgue.

Again, Hephaestion waited.

He was on a bus bench, wearing a long black coat and expensive shoes. He made sure his features seemed relaxed, although no one passed by. The city streets used security monitoring systems. Anyone watching would see a well-dressed man waiting for the bus. Later, when they tried to watch the recordings, they would find that he was only a blur. Image recorders had difficulty capturing him when he did not want to be taped.

A kilometer away a bus heaved its bulk onto Karsbrasova Avenue. Hephaestion slowly stood. The expected response. He slipped his hand into his pocket, palmed the bus token.

Zone had now been in the Ministry of Science one and a half minutes.

From Cholykur emerged Dance and her truck. She glided past Hephaestion without looking at him, turned slowly onto Ruzo Street, and disappeared through the gate that Zone left open. To the casual eye, she was just another evening delivery. Only expected deliveries were received after hours.

The bus lumbered forward, surprisingly silent for so huge a thing.

Hephaestion saw now that a person was crossing the street from the Novo-Syrt side of the stone park. A late worker, bundled against the chill, making for the bus. The person held a rolled magazine and carried a small dark bag. A woman. Nothing to cause concern, yet Hephaestion reached toward her anyway, to taste her life and be sure of her place here in the night.

She halted, raised a head that had been lowered, and stared at him.

He startled. Were they everywhere, now, people who noticed his mental touch, his power? Maybe he was just jumpy, wanting to connect the woman's behavior to his touching her with his mind. Although certain adepts, psychics, and suitably trained humans sometimes sensed his probe, he realized soon enough that in this case it was not the reason for her stopping.

The bus reached the corner of Cholykur, already veering toward him.

The woman started forward, forcing him to stare. She was uncommonly tall, the long legs in their dark slacks negotiating the walkway with palpable grace. There was just the smallest sway in her hips, which were slender and full at the same time. The rest of her muted by the coat. There was her face. Black eyes, black skin, and a mouth curving faintly with amusement.

She was not shy about eye contact. She stared until the bus hissed to a halt. Then she was right in front of him.

"After you," she said.

A Ussurian accent, of course. She was a woman of the desert, a foreigner. Possibly a lawyer or banker. Meanwhile, she fetched a bus token from her bag. Buses were preferred in a city that roadblocked its thoroughfares and forced searches of all privately owned vehicles.

Hephaestion, astonishingly, was speechless.

"After you," she repeated. There was a deeper, knowing smile. Apparently, she was used to the effect she had on northern men.

Hephaestion woke within himself. She had stopped because he was handsome, and because he was alone. She was looking now for a sign that he was unmarried.

"Curfew is less than one hour," she said.

He glanced at his wristwatch and so caught a glimpse of Dance piloting the utility truck, her team, and Manegold's corpse onto Karsbrasova Avenue.

A simple operation. And it was over.

Hephaestion was aware, suddenly, of inexplicably intense sexual desire.

The woman, being a woman, was aware of it as well.

How easy to go with her, sleep with her.

He shook his head, apologizing with a shrug. Check-in was in a quarter hour and he had two buses to catch.

The woman flicked her hand, grinning now. "We will miss our bus, my dear, if we do not possess ourselves."

Get control, she meant-- overcome the attraction, return to the stream of life.

He allowed her to get on the bus first. She turned to view him in the artificial light, pausing only a little to take in his unusual eye color. Then she strolled down the aisle, settled into a seat, and became a footnote in his history.

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 10: "I shall want to be free ..."

2007-08-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

At six in the morning, Zone and Rock answered Siris Interlandi's summons on the intercom. Siris had set up her workroom on the lower level. The soldiers' quarters were upstairs in rooms that got more sunshine, were less damp.

She told them to get John Manegold out of the cast iron tub. Rock tightened his corded arms around Manegold's knees. Zone pressed Manegold's head and shoulders into his belly so he could lock his fists across the chest of the corpse under the armpits.

The corpse was soaking wet and warm. The warmth, however, was only on the surface. What one expects from a slab of meat left too long in the freezer, then thrown into a pot of water for many hours.

Meat on the bone, they knew, reacted sickeningly to a quick thaw.

Yesterday, when they lowered the body into the tub, they were glad they had specified the tub's dimensions and the Bhavaja contact had come through. Last night, no part of Manegold had been yielding. If the tub had been standard, Manegold would not have gone in. Without comment they had put him in and watched Siris sink Manegold beneath the water, apply weight.

Now Manegold was coming out soggy and sloppy and white all over, as though the laws of biology did not matter. They carried him to the workroom. Before their arrival, Siris had prepared one of the two lower floor bedrooms. The lamps were in place over a worktable. The soldiers put Manegold under the lamps.

Zone and Rock stood back, and Siris examined the body. Confirmed there were no scars. She probed the flesh. And she felt his neck.

Her mouth fell open. No fracture. Oh, how they must have panicked.

Siris imagined that it was administrative, the initial delay in transferring the body of John Manegold to its appointment in the capital. Something held them up. Maybe the medical technician, duly alarmed, had interfered.

It would have taken several days for the spine to knit. Maybe four days, or five.

They got the body away from any witnesses, stuck it in a freezer not because they knew the extreme cold would stop the process but because they wanted a secure chamber. Freezers locked from the outside.

Siris recalled the first time she supervised a walk by Hephaestion.

She had read that the demian tremona re-grew its limbs and closed its wounds in shocking ways.

What she read was nothing compared to Hephaestion's ability to resurrect. After years of research, the Kinder Project had no understanding of it. Hephaestion's blood prolonged life when pumped into healthy humans. Pumped into the sick and injured, the blood's healing properties were well documented. But a dying subject died and stayed dead. Nothing they had so far explained the phenomena.

"We lack the technology to unlock this puzzle," Mozun said, early on. "We, the world. How does it occur? What created the species? An ancient alien visitation? Is our friend a hybrid? A genetic mutation? Why can't we identify what it is that creates affarites? When we unlock the puzzle, we will control it."

So the Kinder administrators believed.

Siris adjusted the lamps over Manegold, then raised the blankets and checked the setting for the heat pad. Rock and Zone stared without expression. They could accept that a man frozen solid would get up in five days and speak to them.

Footsteps on the old hardwood boards in the hallway. Dance entered Siris' line of vision.

"What is wrong with Angel?"

Siris glanced over her shoulder, not at Dance, whose voice was small, uncertain and incongruous with the tough, compact soldier she was.

Siris confirmed that Hephaestion slept in a corner of the workroom, on the floor. He lay on his back under a sheet, his face turned into the wall.

Siris said, "He's just sleeping."

Dance protested. "He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he doesn't shit."

Siris leaned over Manegold one last time. He looked no older, no younger than Hephaestion. There were over two hundred subjects through history investigated by Kinder as affarites. Subjects one all the way up to Hephaestion never looked any older than this. They were perfectly proportioned, generally beautiful, and charismatic in some splendid or wicked way.

"He eats as he pleases," Siris said to Dance. "But he does not taste food the way we do. Food has a side effect that you are aware of. And since he does not need to eat, normally he doesn't. He produces waste when he is weakened, or when he eats. As for sleep, he needs about thirteen hours every ten days."

Dance stared at her sleeping angel. Siris was being open, was glad to speak. Felt that her altered status at Kinder freed her to say and do a lot of things.

"Why is he on the floor?" Zone asked.

Siris smiled to herself. "Because he trusts us."

A good thing to say. The soldiers liked her for it.

"And because it's more comfortable for him than a bed. You can't imagine the places he has slept."

Rock chuckled, imagining a few places.

"A clean carpet is paradise," Siris said.

Rock and Zone walked away, satisfied.

Dance lowered her voice. "Can he hear us?"

"No, absolutely not. His power is very selfish." Siris turned from Manegold to stare at Hephaestion. "I don't mean him, I mean the power inside him. I try to think of the power and Hephaestion as separate beings, because when Hephaestion's body needs something or gets hurt, the power ceases to obey Hephaestion's conscious mind and serves his body. When he needs to sleep, he has to sleep whether he wants to sleep or not. When he is injured, he loses the link to his power that he knows, consciously, he's going to need in order to get out of the shit he is in or to help others, because his power turns immediately to heal him. His power is like a little tyrant."

Dance frowned. "So if I needed to wake him up . . ."

"We can't. It's just the way it is. The only way to keep this from happening is to give him a powerful sedative every night and hope he sleeps two or three hours. Otherwise, all we can do when he has to sleep is watch out for him."

About four hours later, Hephaestion showed signs of moving toward wakefulness.

Siris closed the door to the workroom so the others, upstairs, would not hear his nightmare.

She sat near Manegold, certain that she should not interfere with Hephaestion's dreams, yet wanting very much to ease his torment. Then he woke. She knew because he was silent, he was still.

He got up and walked without speaking into the bathroom. She heard the toilet, she heard the shower.

He came out naked and wet.

She used to watch him when he was unclothed on the monitor. It was different now, but why should that change his habit? He did not understand nakedness as she did, anyway.

He dressed himself in the clothes of the businessman he was pretending to be. They were all in white shirts, slacks, and leather shoes, just in case.

He approached Manegold. "When will his heart start?"

"Tomorrow," Siris sighed. "Tonight, if we're lucky. Has Manegold decided? Is he here?"

"No, he isn't here. I don't know where he is and I can't find him unless I walk. If it gets to be a long time, I'll walk."

"That's dangerous, here."

He was close to her, looking past the lamps at the unconscious form on the worktable, nodding at her. "I know. For expediency, you'll have to ignore your principles."

She inhaled softly, not alarmed but shaken. The fastest way to make Hephaestion go and come back was asphyxiation. His power restored him inside twenty hours. Siris disapproved of asphyxiation. Without essential environmental controls, the method required violence.

"I can give you something first," she said, softly. "You don't have to be awake."

"Fine," he said, as though they were discussing the weather. "He could come back. He might." Then, suddenly, he reached past the lamps to squeeze Manegold's hand. "You are only a seedling, a child."

She looked up, surprised.

He registered her surprise and settled into the chair beside her. "You don't know what it's like the first time. Maybe I should tell you, because you are expecting him to behave as I do when I wake."

She got up, reached over the worktable, and checked her instruments. "You do not always wake in a well state. But you are at one end of the course and this young man is at another."

"No, it's the same thing in here." He touched his head. When he moved she was aware of his body, his breath. He smelled of the overly sweet soap and shampoo their Bhavaja contact left. His body never had a natural odor. "Our curse is we cannot pass the gate. Anyone who has died will tell you death is not a thing but a transition. It happens whether you will it or not, rage against it or accept it, believe in it or don't. Dying is another matter."

"Not the destination, but the journey."

He bowed his head and said nothing.

Siris folded her hands in her lap, worried. "I'm not getting it, am I?"

"No, you're right. You have always at some level understood that. You are very attentive when I walk. Your team, in particular, was always courteous, respectful, and careful of my comfort. Under other supervisors, the teams have been otherwise. I always thought you knew."

"Knew what?"

"That I am afraid to die."

She reached for him, her eyes wide. "The way we do it, medically it is impossible for you to suffer."

"It is the moment it starts, when I am not sure if I will feel it. Your people have mastered the process, do not be concerned. I don't feel it. My problem is I cannot stop the fear, and I cannot escape from it. And I want to pass the gate, and be new and innocent and unaware."

"Want to? I wouldn't lay your gift aside, if I had it." She exhaled, for emphasis.

"Aremon Cuilean was bound to a wheel. His enemies beat him until all the bones in his body were broken. But he was not dead. They put up the wheel in the sky, where they wanted his corpse to rot. They drove a sword into his heart. He died then. What god says it's right to awaken and remember that?"

Siris' fingers had brushed his wrist, then drawn away. Looking aside, she massaged her brow.

He said, "I remember looking at the flames climbing over the roof of my father's house. The people who hurt the stable master and one of his lads held my twin and me. I was waiting for my father to come back and take my sister and me to safety but he never came.

"To me it seemed that he ran through the fire with my mother and left us. The rebel slaves took us to their camp. It was a war camp. Sometimes we would hear the battles, and sometimes we heard nothing. But every so often, the women who fed us would make us walk among the dead on an expanse and pick up things. Knives, armlets, cloaks, helmets. Whatever we could carry. I was five when the smell of a battlefield became ordinary. When I ceased to cry out while a woman who gave me figs bent over a wounded soldier and slit his throat.

"Then there was a battle we did not win. Men came to put the children of the baggage camp into wagons. We were silent, unable to understand. Even when I was sold, I did not know it. I knew nothing until they took Tisiphone from me.

"I tried to run, to be free. They liked me there but the overseers were getting impatient. When one of the overseers asked about my parents, I told him they ran away into a fire and left me. He told me that parents don't run through fire just to leave their children, and my parents were dead.

"I believed him, but it did not help. They sold me at private auction. I read things for my new family, and wrote what I was told to write. When I got bigger, it became more difficult to sleep. I was allowed to sit at night in the library and copy old books. Everyone was pleased with my writing. They made up names for me and the children of the family played with me and were not allowed to trick or beat me. Sometimes, I allowed myself to call the master of the household 'lord' instead of 'master' because sometimes I called my father 'lord.' But as I grew older, I began to see the perfect lines of my prison. The things I could not do, like refuse to translate a passage of a book. I could not bathe in the pool, dine in the hall, greet a well born guest at the gate, walk unchallenged across the city, drink at a city fountain, or say no I will not perform this mission."

Siris stood up.

"The first man I killed was to be the last man I killed, as far as I knew when I took his life. I did not run or hide my guilt. I waited for them. They came with fists and boots and rope, and they put on their show of a hearing so their knotted little hearts could have something to rage against. We were the same, for I raged too. But I knew when and where and how, for me, it was going to end. I chose my time. And in the night before I was to die, I lay in my blood in a place without light and listened to the soldiers call the hours of the watch. Every hour was a nail into my body. I heard the soft voices of lovers passing, and a woman saying something to a man that resembled nothing a woman had ever said to me, and I hated him because he got to hear it. I hated the soldiers on the wall, who knew where they belonged, and I hated the children of the man I had killed, because they had known their father and his shelter. My power, then, was the vision and mind-calling. I could talk to the storms but I could not defeat them. I only slept a little and I could go a long time without food. I was sixteen. Then, at dawn, they came for me. I felt the fear so sharp and so strong that I wanted to cry, but I could not remember how to cry. Out on the road by the fort wall, they put a rope around my neck. My hands had been bound behind my back for two days. I had no more feeling in them. I looked up at the sky, surprised to see that it was still there. Then they pulled on the rope and my feet left the ground and I kicked and thrashed until the sight left my eyes. I have never killed a man that way. You know I have not."

"You have not."

"And I have never raped a man or a woman, or a child. I have never killed a child with my own hands. Everything else, if it can be thought of, I have done."

"I know this, Hephaestion." Siris was close enough to brush his leg with hers but she stayed still. He did not need to tell her this. "You must hold on," she said in a whisper. "You are not a god. Your judgment can be impaired, as can anyone's. If you insist on facing what is before us with an open wound in your heart, at least understand the consequence of your choice."

He shifted in his chair, looking at the worktable and Manegold. "I am very tired."

"Not here or now," she said back. "Please recognize the danger of straying from the mission while you are in this state. You are at an edge, you have just found out you are not alone."

He got up. There was a window in the bathroom that was visible from the bedroom-workroom when the door was ajar. He walked to it, leaned his shoulder against the frame.

Without looking, she knew that his eyes were closed.

She checked Manegold. She brushed his forehead with her fingertips, pushing back the hair from his brow.

"Kinder does not own you," she called to Hephaestion. "While the project can become the headquarters of your enemy, just as it has all these years been your sanctuary, still you must realize that you remain of your own will."

She felt, rather than saw his eyes slowly open.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked. In the past, he asked by rote. This was different, because he already knew.

"Complete the mission. This young man has an opportunity to live. Whatever he feels now he feels because he is traumatized. I realize Kinder security is capable of containing him right now, because he is young, and it may be more of a prison for him than it has been for you, but if you can endure existence another three or five years, you can mentor him."

He threw his back to the window. "I will ask for a price."

"I have always been fair," she reminded.

"You will find a way to remain so. It will be between us, and I will do as you ask, but I will want recompense."

"Recompense how? In what way?" As if she did not know.

"I shall want to be free."

"Free, Hephaestion? Free of Kinder?"

"Not merely Kinder. I want to be released, and I want you to release me."

Of course this meant that Charles was right. Charles, Peter Weihing, and Kinder in general. Hephaestion first influenced, then manipulated her. Or manipulated her in order to influence her. In the face of awareness she felt a wave of helplessness. What Hephaestion wanted. Did he even understand that she was an outsider to Kinder now? Of course if she achieved, how should she put it, the bargain, the penalty for doing so was her life. That he would-- might --ask altered everything. That he intended to seal her to this action deepened her understanding of him in a profound way.

She sighed. "I am beyond the means, I am sorry." But she was not sorry and he knew it.

His voice hardened. "I will count on you. It is not necessary that you work for Kinder."

She roused herself and breathed deeply. This was a discipline taught by Kinder. Expectation, control through preemptive action. When pushed she was not above an old habit or two. The Stoic Mind was certainly an old habit. But-- where was the fear? She was surprised to find there was no fear. She was not, it seemed, afraid of 237. Perhaps she counted on him to know his enemy. She was not his enemy.

Slowly, she moved to a table for a pitcher of ice water. "Once done, it cannot be undone."

"Escaping Kinder or submitting to you?"

"Both. I would be especially thorough, Hephaestion."

"I would expect you to be."

"Where would I meet you?"

"In Nashipur," he said, from the window. "I was born near there. The city still cremates its unclaimed dead."

"You must promise that when you break out of the Kinder compound you do it without killing anyone. You must promise to leave Manegold behind."

He gestured to the closed door that led into the main room. "What I do, I do. But I will be alone. I would not kill for my freedom, not anymore. You know this. I only kill for the freedom of others. And you are right, we shall never be enemies. We will hold to that. I will hold to that."

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 11: Broken Sword

2007-08-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

When it began to rain, Hephaestion strolled into the upstairs main room and watched Zone and Edge play cards. Dance was napping on the second-hand sofa, her feet up and her dress shirt unbuttoned.

It was Rock's turn to scan the nine-inch television for news reports, watch the alarm panel, and monitor the satellite phone.

Hephaestion turned from the card game to the double windows that overlooked a hill. Beyond the trees ran a road. The trees blocked view of the road. Even so the drapes were pulled, giving the room a somberness that its single table lamp was unable to dispel.

He returned to Siris' workroom, stopped to watch her checking Manegold. She was never perfunctory but seemed to care what her fingers and her instruments did against her subject's skin. When she was done, she made a notation into a flex hand-held and sat with slim legs crossed, a finger in her mouth, absorbed in thought.

He moved into the bathroom and closed the door.

As soon as he could, he stepped over to the window, lifted the edge of an old plastic curtain, and looked down through the green-tinged light toward the street.

He cast his senses wide, much as a fisherman would cast a net. On the street that led up to the university a single car motored by. For a while, after it was gone there was nothing. Ajan Street was a mix of residences and storage sheds belonging to the university. Mostly people used the hill to reach the main street, to ride up and down through town on the big buses.

It was like coming out of the mist. The mist clung like a familiar lover, what he remembered of one. A woman's slender arms drawing him back to her skin, moist lips on his ear. The embrace warm and safe and thick with the scent of her sex. Sometimes sex made him dizzy. But he needed to get up.

To wake up--

Come here!

He slid his nose between the curtain and the cold glass of the window. He saw nothing, only the shivering latticework of tree branches.

He left the bathroom and said, "I am going outside to look at the main road."

Siris glanced at him. "Should we be worried?"

He was conscious of the beginning of a lie and hesitated. Unfamiliar territory, both. The lie and hesitation. When he did not want to answer Dr. Interlandi, usually he said nothing.

He opened his mouth. "Something has found me."

She frowned, trying to understand how he knew such a thing. On her feet, she followed him upstairs.

Hephaestion lifted a coat from the back of a chair, repeating the words to Zone.

Zone turned to Rock. "Shadow him."

"No," Hephaestion said. "You know it's not necessary."

Dance stirred from her nap, asked what was happening.

Hephaestion went down to the back door. "If I do not return in a quarter hour, you must move quickly to the next safe house. Be ready."

Zone snapped his fingers at his team. "Let's go."

Siris caught up to Hephaestion at the door. "Wait. What does it mean, something has found you?"

"I don't know what it means. I only know if I don't go outside, it will come here to us and you will not get your chance to see life in your new young man."

Siris stepped back. "A quarter hour?"

"That should be sufficient."

"If you don't return, we will find you."

He nodded. "I know. You will find me. Of course you will. First, the new one must wake. We agree?"

"Yes."

He brushed her cheek with the back of his knuckles, appreciating the unexpectedly pleasant contact because she did not flinch. He was glad for the intensity and veracity of her concern. It matched the intensity of the soldiers.

"Good," he said.

Outside, he inhaled the damp soil and mold of last year's leaves and walked into the rain.

He stepped toward the driveway, and there it was again: hesitation.

In his chest his heart did something it rarely did. It clamored against his ribs, making his skin hot.

On the street, he made his way down the hill. When he was near the corner, he saw a bus careen down the avenue without slowing.

A wind found the wings of his coat. He knew the wind was too cold for the season but he could not really feel it. The rain misted his hair and his face. He came to the corner, breathing slowly, trying to prepare for the shock of the woman he knew was waiting.

At the bottom of the hill, across the street, the city had built a stop for buses going into the city central. The stop had a bench, and there was a plastic shelter with an ashtray.

A woman stood inside the shelter. She wore a long, tan coat with a white scarf and gloves for her hands. On her feet were low heels. She did not need to wear high heels. She was tall as he was.

He looked past a spattering of cars released by the traffic light and gazed over at her side of the street.

Although her skin was brown he knew that she was not the Ussurian lady he had shared a bus with. How many bronze-skinned women were in Bhavaja? No, that was not the essential question. This woman, the one in the bus shelter, was the one he mistook the other for. This one was the one he wanted. She was the reason his skin was damp and his knees felt like water. This one.

--I am here. Should I cross over?

-- No, stay where you are. I will tell you when I'm done.

-- When you are done with what?

-- Scanning you.

Indeed there was something a bit larger than a flex in her gloved hand, which she had removed from a dark leather shoulder bag. Her eyes hid behind shaded spectacles. A plastic rain hood covered her hair. Her features, however, he could see: small, thin bones, a straight nose, a small mouth.

-- I'm not armed.

-- No, you are not. No trace of foreign substances in the bloodstream. Come over, please.

He checked the traffic light, waited for another downtown bus, then jogged across the street. When he entered the shelter, he lifted his arms. It was, he sensed, a wise and courteous manner in which to approach an official of the city. She put the flex-looking object into her bag. Proceeded to run her gloved hands over his body, starting with his coat, his pockets-- she removed a bus token and kept it --and going, next, inside his coat, touching his body with only his shirt and his slacks and her gloves between their skin.

She lifted his identification card from his slacks. The flex-sized object came out again. She slid the ID card into a side reader. "Bojidar Rambach, twenty-nine, from Borazjis. Entered the country sixteen days ago on a business visa. What is the name of your company, Bojidar?"

Her Volodyan was impeccable, down to the university finish. She had not learned the Volod state language in Volodya.

"XTO Sun Energies."

"In Borazji, if you please."

"XTO Sun Energies. May I put my arms down?"

"Is this your credit card?"

"Yes."

She used the reader on his credit card, studied the screen. "You are well endowed, Bojidar. Why are you so far from your office during the day?"

"I am visiting an acquaintance. Am I under arrest?"

"You are under suspicion. Arrest is not quite called for. Yes, you may lower your arms. Would you like to sit down?"

"I would not like to sit down here."

"Where, then?"

He held out his hand, palm up.

She put his credit card, identification card, and bus token into his palm.

"Take off your spectacles," he said, this time in Volodyan.

She shifted a hand to the frame, lifted away the glasses without pause.

Dark blue eyes gazed at him, hard as agate and as extraordinary against the even darkness of her skin as his pale metallic ones were in the smooth, fresh face of a young man.

He tilted his head like a schoolboy, staring. Then, "Will you lunch with me?" he asked.

* * *

The woman in the bus booth was telepathic. Generally, he initiated telepathy and sustained two-way traffic with his power. His consent and aid was critical, because he did not roam the world like a flex with its comm channel open. There was too much stimuli. His internal mental shield adjusted according to his needs. After centuries of use, the shield operated without conscious thought. One might say he was restricted access on an encrypted frequency.

She clicked to him when the rain began.

She had found him, shield or no shield, and called him out to meet her.

It seemed appropriate to do as she asked.

What was she dialing into? Why did he hear her?

He had gone outside to find out.

Then, at the corner, through the traffic, he saw her.

He probed her. Tried to, was denied. Got nothing. Not even the beating of her heart.

There was the telepathic exchange, followed by the patting down as though after defeating his shield she was not sure she had enough information.

Now he turned with her down the street, leaving the bus shelter and entering the rain. He glanced up the street as they started downtown looking for a snack or a sandwich shop. He glanced over at the little sidewalk mall. Nothing better would be this far from downtown. And he did not want to get on a bus, lose the intimacy of her movement at his side.

She gestured to a vehicle, a matte gray Sailles, an imported luxury model, parked illegally on the street. "Can you drive one?"

"I don't have the papers."

"I'll drive." She pointed to the car.

The doors lifted outward. He waited until she got inside, then joined her. He was drenched. It could not have been a good condition to expose the fine biscuit interior to. She lifted the rain hood, cast it dripping into the back seat. Her hair was black, as he knew it would be, its length contained in a conservative roll.

She entered her personal identification code into the dashboard computer. The code resonated in his brain. Maybe she did not know he could steal a code that way, file it and keep it forever.

The Sailles purred to life, glided away from the curb, and settled behind a bus.

"Let's go to the Sun At Top," she said.

Two roadblocks, at least, he thought. "Very well," he said.

"You seem surprised."

"I said, very well."

She pressed the accelerator, motored around the bus, and zipped to a traffic light. She applied breaks furiously, as though angry at the car for allowing the light to trap it.

The bus towered behind them, faceless and intimidating.

He said, "You're not from around here."

"How do you know?"

"The bus is reporting us. We are going to be stopped soon."

She had placed the bag between them on the front seat. Now she reached inside, consulted the small silver computer she had used to check his identification. She said, "You are right."

The traffic light changed. While they waited for it they saw no one cross the intersection. A delay at a checkpoint usually caused this.

She drove forward, but slid into the travel lane to let the bus pass. At the next intersection, a man in a black uniform jumped into the street to wave at them.

There was a police wagon at the curb, black, solid, and without letters or insignia, a familiar presence. Three uniformed men carrying rifles appeared on the walkway.

She pulled into the vacant space indicated by the waving policeman.

He pointed a wand at the car, waiting in the rain while the vehicle operations computer downloaded the Sailles ownership details to his wand screen. Hephaestion sat back. His power told him that the police knew the car and the police were not concerned.

A final glance at his wand, the policeman ambled to the driver's window. Rather than let down the window, the woman opened the intercom.

"Yes, the meaning of this would be?"

He huffed into her intercom: "You were driving suspiciously. Our citizens are alert."

"Thank you. May I go on?"

"Yes, yes, go on." He turned away, rolling his eyes. He never looked at Hephaestion.

Meanwhile, Hephaestion touched the policeman's mind.

The woman motored back into traffic.

"Tell me who you are," Hephaestion said, "and what agency you belong to."

"You can't pronounce my name. Most people torture my name into Zoa."

"Zoa what?"

"We will build trust slowly, Bojidar."

"Are you a government official?"

"Yes."

"For what country?"

"There, again, you go too fast."

"But you are not from around here."

"No, I am not from around here."

"Am I being detained?"

"We are going to a late lunch at Sun At Top. If ever I detain you, you will know it."

* * *

The restaurant was in the penthouse of the Miron Tower. Reservations were required. Zoa presented hers in the form of her identification card. Hephaestion touched the mind of the hostess as the identification card was scanned, came to understand that the woman with the bronze skin was a VIP. The hostess, a thin blonde in a black skirt and red bow tie perched neatly on a crisp white shirt, smiled tightly and escorted them into a small dining room with a stormy view of a park. The table with its white and lavender linen and antique chairs rested against the smoky glass.

A balding, middle-aged man with gray lips appeared. He twisted his mouth into what passed for a professional sort of smile and asked what they were drinking.

Hephaestion checked his wristwatch. He was discovering the initial twinges of panic. Certainly, a swimmer gone far out to sea must feel as he did, looking finally for the shore and seeing it away in the distance. How did he get to this place? He glanced momentarily out the glass. The park was a toy park and the people in it small as ants. Even in the rain the people had come out. With a simple nudge of his power he folded the distance, folded it again, drawing the park close. So close he was just above it and looking into the face of a child with her mother. Mother and child were wrapped in waterproof plastic. The child was unaware of his attention. He was no closer to her than he would be if he had dialed a setting on his binoculars and gazed at her through them. Yet he could see that she had freckles.

Zoa's voice: "Do you have the Buiron 281?" She had a unique accent, which soon and quite involuntarily Hephaestion was certain he would begin to mimic.

He sensed the server's smile deepening greedily. "Yes, of course."

"The 179 is better," Hephaestion suggested for no particular reason. Then he said, "I'll have sebera with ice."

Zoa said, "What are you looking at?" when the server left.

"The rain." He turned slowly from the glass to see her. Slowly, because he hoped she had changed, lifted away the mask, and let him through the layers of tissue, vessels, and bone to her soul. In other words, he hoped to find her human. But she was the woman he first saw across a street in the rain, and she was not human.

"Where is your office from here?" she questioned. It was not an idle question.

He inhaled. "I'm at 4025 Cholykur, on the fortieth floor. We can go there, if you like."

"I'll have someone go there with the photo I uploaded from your ID. If they do not know you, I will have to arrest you. Shall we eat first?"

"Either way." He leaned forward slightly and inhaled again. He could not smell her with his power, and he wanted to smell her. Just the faintest trace of powder. Where? From where? Without her raincoat, she showed a triangle of flesh at the base of her throat, where her blouse was open. There.

She watched him with a small widening of the eyes.

He glanced at the bit of exposed skin, inhaled a final time, and slid back. "Do whatever you wish. I'm not very hungry, for food, that is."

The drinks came.

He stared at the glass while the server suggested marinated chicken to Zoa.

She sent the server away without ordering, then lifted from her bag the computer that looked like a flex but was not. A sip of wine preceded her sending a command over the computer.

Hephaestion picked up his glass, drank. The spirit would not affect him but the liquid acted upon his power the way water fed the roots of a plant.

She continued staring at her screen and sipping wine, unaware. Then she said, "We have a mystery."

He wrinkled his brow, choosing a look of perplexed innocence.

"Why does an XTO Sun Energies executive engineer have an energy wave similar to one that penetrated a security shield at a government facility?" She ought to have asked, "Why does the cosmos reflect the face of the goddess?" That he could have answered.

"Why does-- why do I what?"

She held the computer just above the table, scanning him. "You have an energy wave similar to one that penetrated a security shield at a facility here in Bhavaja several days ago. Would you like to see it?"

"Yes."

Could he mess with her little machine, its readings, trace its link all the way to the server, and take it all apart?

She rotated the computer, let him examine a screen with a file that read Rambach, Bojidar. In labeled panels he saw the data used by Kinder to build his Rambach identity. And he saw a sequence represented by a scan line. The sequence was his, Hephaestion's. She, Zoa, possessed technology to record it, replay, track, and match it. No doubt the sequence was as unique as a fingerprint or an iris scan. He admitted that it was only a matter of time before somebody figured out how to teach a machine to do these things. They called the life force signature, in ancient times, a call. Zoa called it an energy wave. Well, all right. The vettoi of the Wolf Isles were tracking energy waves with witchcraft a thousand years ago.

He gave back the computer.

"We shall be more frank, now," she said.

He said nothing.

"Why did you take his body?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Unfortunate, he thought. Very.

"How did you take his body?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"But you must. First, you penetrated my security shield, then when you returned to the same facility you shut the shield down. Who are you? How did you do that?"

"I don't know what you are talking about." He swallowed more of the sebera. "I'm an engineer but I never heard of a wave pattern, not in the way you're using it. What is a security shield?"

"You are an engineer for a company that builds power plants. Does your clearance level give you access to the storage locations?"

"I don't like where this is going."

"The wine is good, by the way. The body you took belonged to the son of a leader of a terrorist faction."

"Storage locations, for Quiranium?"

"Now, I think, I am going to arrest you."

He nodded, picked up his glass, and realized that it was empty. He looked away at the window, raised a finger, and brushed his upper lip.

She pointed her computer at him. "Elevated heart rate, body temperature. Pupil dilation indicating perception of threat."

He frowned and saw her stop looking at him and look at her screen. She tapped her reboot key, waited. Meanwhile, "I'm going to ask you to ride with me down to the lobby. Will that be a problem?"

Her computer was not going to reboot. Although he did not understand the technology, he had located the thing's energy signature. The unit was protected against a surge so he snapped the board. She'd find the problem, or someone would, when they checked the power crystal. The real problem was if she was recording when he did it, if the unit had time to upload that wave pattern.

"No," he said. "Might I make a call?"

"No," she said, and got up.

So did he.

The server hurried over.

She gave the server her identification card, which he scanned with an anxious smile.

Hephaestion did not bother to touch the server's mind or seek the cause of the server's anxiety. It was that his, Hephaestion's, brow was damp, his skin slick and pale as a man's face might be when he has learned a terrible and inescapable truth.

Zoa glanced toward the penthouse lobby. "Please," she said. "You will be in my custody, not the Volods."

He stepped away shoulder to shoulder with her. They entered the elevator lobby. Zoa pushed the button, then looked at him.

He glanced at a potted plant in the corner of the lobby, at an impressionist's work framed over an empty chair. He turned to the window, cleared his throat. Then he looked at Zoa.

"I think you actually believe that makes a difference," he said.

She gazed back at him, uncertain of his meaning. Her telepathy was off. Her telepathy was no more than data transfer on a frequency decoded by a machine that had been taught to use a bio-energy wave. Essentially, the machine had his number. But he had broken the machine.

She'd have to get a new one, download his frequency from whatever storage source his wave lived in as a file.

A file with the name Rambach, Bojidar.

The elevator arrived. There were two men in raincoats inside the car. Their respective puddles met around their booted feet. The men were heavy, thick-boned, so the boots seemed proper for them. They wore stiff, angry faces.

From Grazdoz's briefing and in other ways he understood the men were Federal Authority.

Then he was out of time. Most certainly. Although the others by now were well away from Ajan Street and the university.

The bearded men dashed off the elevator.

The hostess of Sun At Top fled her station, fearful of what was taking place.

Hephaestion raised his arms, permitted the search of his body. When the Volods grabbed him, he became a thing of stone. His heart steadied. His skin cooled.

The bearded men twisted his, Hephaestion's, hands behind his back and put manacles on his wrists. Predictably, they said things. Called him things. Promised things. And on the elevator, because they were impatient to begin, one of the agents struck Hephaestion across the face.

Zoa slid her body between the Volod and Hephaestion, his prisoner, and extended her hand to the agent.

"Please, no rough stuff."

The Volod smiled thinly at the wall. Have your way for now, that smile said.

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 12: Summary Execution

2007-08-19T08:16:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:

Peter Weihing was on his feet. It was not a videoconference, so he could throw his arms around and circle the chair he had flung away from the conference table in anger. Meanwhile, he threw cranky, sideways looks at Charles Cotas.

"Anselm Gakhal here."

Peter prepared his throat for an enthusiastic response. "Good morning, Anselm."

Gakhal answered with, "I am here with the board." The liaisons of heads of state for Kinder Group member nations.

Weihing paused to press the tips of his fingers together. He wanted the proper focus. "Greetings to all."

There was no reply.

Charles Cotas, seated above a file he did not need to consult, swiveled to face the wall. It was cherry panel with wainscoting, the wall. Very bare. He grazed his chin with his palm, smacking his lips. Waiting to hear Gakhal say it.

"How is my gift set?" Gakhal asked, predictably.

Weihing shut his eyes. "The knives are intact, but I'm afraid one of the swords has been broken."

"Do we have the tracking number?"

"I believe we do."

"It's a one of a kind sword. If I can't have it, I don't think just anyone should get it. Ask your package carrier to locate my gift set, Peter."

"It's been done."

"Good, your people are very good. Now, there is an emergency session of the Commission on Weapons and Defense at ITAN. This might be a difficult time to have my gift set unaccounted for."

"I understand."

Gakhal said, presumably to the board, "Does anyone have questions for Mr. Weihing?"

There were no questions.

The meeting was over.

* * *

He woke when he became aware that blood was coming out of his ears. The sensation was similar to the warm, sticky fluid that oozed over fevered skin from a punctured abscess. He expected next to hear the insistent thrumming of flies, smell ripe corpses thrown one upon another into a pit. A long time ago, as he seized the limbs of dead men and women, heaved the dead into the ground, many of the bodies still warm, pus had burst from boils large as his knuckles. It was his punishment and the punishment of his comrades to handle plague victims. He was still very young and a prisoner of war. The memory was tripped by the liquid in his ear canal. Fresh pimples of sweat on his temple, neck, chest, and groin accompanied the memory. Tickled by non-existent insects, his nostrils twitched. And the muscles in his arms fretted, bunching and twisting, forgetting that he was in restraints until the steel and leather edge of the straps reminded. Then his eyelids lifted. Not much, not much. Enough to let in a little light, a little information.

It was all a nightmare, the past, the present.

Except his ears were really bleeding, and suddenly he remembered death on the wind, the shaking ground, the vibrations of the planet's mantle as the power from his body shredded its surface. Human lives like little lamps flung into the chasm, going out in the wide black, the screams of the dying wafting to him on the backdraft as his eyes and nose and ears began to burn. Memory of a collapsing building, far away, the ground sucked away, caving in. The power wending forth through his pores against the rock and dirt.

The end is only the beginning.

He was with a Volodyan interrogation team, detained, they told him, under a federal article that permitted the Federal Authority and government troops to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely. Before the first beating there had been a kind of information session, a short speech by a senior intelligence officer about his, Hephaestion's, situation. The Volods called it Intake. Presumably, there were detainees who cracked at Intake, recognizing the inevitable.

He was at Sarika Base because he had allowed his arrest, though the official, his cronies, and Zoa did not know it. During the reception by the official, Hephaestion still had use of his power.

There was the matter of his energy matrix, his signature, stored in Zoa's computer and in some unknown facility, the mainframe or cube that had downloaded his signature to her palm unit.

First he must get through this, the interrogation.

The first beating disconnected his will from his power.

They had taken him from the reception block into a three-story structure, along a recently renovated unit, and out into a concrete courtyard. Three soldiers beat him in the legs and arms with metal batons, then kicked him in the stomach and head. His power sank beyond his cognizance, turned to what it perceived as its primary directive: Hephaestion's preservation.

After the beating, they took him to an interrogation room. They tethered him to a metal chair, ankles to metal posts, arms spread the length of steel rests with straps on his biceps, forearms, and wrists. His shirt, a soiled rag, was torn open so they could fix their transmitter pads in a line down the center of his torso. His feet, too, were bared. There were pads on the inside of his ankles, and a pad on his brow. When the pads were activated, his ears bled.

Just as his ears bled when he used his power to its utter depletion.

How many times across his existence had he emptied himself?

More memories.

-- Are there no pleasant ones? No pleasant memories?

-- See for yourself, he answered the intruder in his skull.

"We want to tidy our records," the middle-aged man in a suit began. "State your name, please."

Hephaestion understood that cooperation at any level led to further cooperation and he was about to be tortured.

The Kinder term for what had happened was "broken sword." Every mission had a "broken sword" scenario. In this instance, he expected his XTO Sun Energies cover to hold. The company office in Bhavaja would immediately provide the Volodyan government with his Rambach identity's background. He was an ex-army corps engineer with an advanced academic degree who had traveled Kodopovec Province with six colleagues on company business. The government of Volodya would be led to believe that those colleagues had returned to Borazjis by jet the day before his arrest. He, Rambach, had remained for a final meeting with the accountants. He was screwing a local university girl. No one knew her name. She was anti-regime, and so was Rambach.

XTO Sun Energies would send its government liaison with an inquiry about Rambach's arrest to the Volodyan state department. The state department invariably referred these matters to the Federal Authority. At FA headquarters, the Volods would take a report from the company and vow to look into the company employee's case. International Relief and ITAN asked for a database of such queries. Volodya was not an ITAN member nation but it wanted to be. The database held thousands of queries about nationals and foreigners. Most case dispositions read "Released from custody." Few detainees were seen again.

"You will be in my custody, not theirs," Zoa had said.

-- You do not know the Volods very well.

The transmitter pads fixed to his body received a signal from a remote controlled by the federal intelligence officer. The signal affected the nervous system.

He was tortured, then put in a holding cell without a cot. He was weak enough to need sleep. When he drifted off, they came for him, and tortured him again.

Three days later, he lifted his eyelids. He was in the metal chair, liquid running from his ears. The Volod commander waved the remote, taunting him.

What is your name? Where were you born? Only trained military personnel resist these questions, the commander insisted.

"You are an engineer, are you not?" The Volod interrogator was impatient. "I am not asking for things unknown. We only want to confirm our files. Your name, now. What is it?"

The Volod intelligence commander had said his name was Libing, Caspar Libing.

Zoa stood behind the one-way glass in an observation room. He knew because over the telepathic link she had told him where she was. He could not sense her, had never sensed her.

But if he had been able to as soon as they beat him he would have lost the ability.

His power lived inside him, small, dark, and unreachable as a seedling.

-- Where is John Manegold?

An interrogation within an interrogation. Zoa had no intention of waiting for the Volods to grant her time with him. She was conducting her own interview. Every hour learning something the Volods did not and could not appreciate. Her replacement computer recording the reaction of his body to the torture. Measuring the knitting of bones and flesh damaged in the beating. She had drawn blood once, while he was in the chair, using a silver tube with a shielded needle. At the same time she had leaned over him and sniffed, her dark blue eyes inching wonderingly up his neck and to his face. She said nothing, had no inclination to communicate without her telepathy. Meanwhile she put together his physical profile, asking, finally, the essential question.

When she asked for John the man, and not John's body, he knew that she understood he and John were not ordinary.

Information she wasn't sharing.

"Fuck yourself," he said to the Volod commander with the pad remote.

And to Zoa--

--I'm busy right now. Please call later.

The Volod commander smiled and pressed the remote.

Hephaestion's power uncoiled like a snake, snatching him one or two levels above the agony, clenching him like a parent against the fire of pain, breathing on him its cool breath.

When the power let go, he found respite in oblivion. He had earned it.

* * *

From the doorway a government trooper stared across the shadows at him. A clipboard hung in her left hand. Her right hand brushed a slim hip covered by uniform trousers.

"This is an inventory of the property taken from your hotel," the woman said. An unknown voice, low. She wore trooper boots.

From the waist down, that was how Hephaestion saw her. He would not turn his head. He was naked. The cell was concrete and barren like the cage of an animal, only without any straw. In the middle of the floor was a drain. The cage could be scoured with a hose. Feces, urine, vomit, everything was dissolved under the pressure of the hose and forced down the drain.

They had not yet used the hose on him. Quite possibly that experience was in front of him.

He sat with his knees to his chest against the far wall.

Until the door opened he was not really in the cell, not mentally. The trooper's arrival brought him from the other place, from sanctuary. Now he occupied the cell completely, and his flesh, he had filled that as well. His flesh with its new bruises, the imprint of soldiers' boots throbbing, the body memory of transmitter pads juicing his nerve ends, contracting his muscles, burning his skull.

"You are Bojidar Rambach. I am holding an inventory of the property taken from your hotel under article 412. These items may be forwarded to your family if you agree that these are in fact your items and sign this document."

There it was. In the pit of his stomach. Like freezing acid.

Fear.

Here it comes.

He blinked up at her, to see her face. Her name--

"Do you speak Volodyan, Mr. Rambach?"

He unclenched his jaw, allowed his mouth to open and close before answering. "Yes."

"May I come closer, Mr. Rambach?"

He shook his head. Why should he want a pretty trooper to stand next to him? Why should he, at this point, want anything that reminded of life?

She advanced even so, a slim, compact woman about Dance's size but with a wave of straight brown hair aligned neatly behind little ears. Her eyes were large and gray and strong, so that her gaze felt something like pressure against a wound. He was the wound, a lost, tormented thing. She walked up to him, right up to him, as fearless as Dance, Siris, as undaunted as Zoa. She squatted, her gaze steady. His nearness was nothing to her. She dealt with broken lives all the time. Most smelled like excrement and week-old sweat. At least there was no waste matter on the floor.

She rotated the clipboard and pointed it toward his chest.

"Your property inventory, Mr. Rambach. Can you read?"

"I--" He swallowed. "How much time do I have?"

She stared at him. "Did you give him proper burial?" She asked this softly.

He was not sure that he heard her properly.

She recognized his puzzlement. "Did you give John Manegold a decent burial?"

He returned her gaze. "Yes, you can tell Commander Libing that we buried him."

She sighed and nodded. "That will mean something to the commander." She pushed the clipboard into his chest. "Sign this, so your things can go home."

"No."

"Fine." The clipboard was withdrawn with a snap of the wrist. "You are going with the alien to a post-mortem at their laboratory in the UKSB. Your family will never see your remains. You will never be heard from again."

"I know that."

"Are there any words you wish to give your family? There is always a record of these things. It may be many years before the record is opened, but then it may be of use to someone to know what you were thinking." She hesitated. "Have you seen it? Have you seen the weapon?"

"What?"

"There is no illuma in your blood or on your clothes and property but what does that mean? You never touched the weapon, all right. Did you see the weapon? Are you the one who arranged the Quiranium for the detonator?"

"May I have clothes?"

She stood up. "I'll ask. I'll see. I doubt it. The weapon, it is not what you think. Surely, you must know enough to be afraid for your family. One Needle will not fall. A thousand Needles, a thousand, will fall. The weapon will change the world as we know it."

First, polite threats, next beatings and torture. Finally, a death sentence and a pretty trooper to appeal to his humanity. He wondered if it ever worked. Yes, of course, it must.

"I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of weapon are you searching for?"

She whispered, "The weapon," as though afraid others would hear.

He looked up at her now. "Will you get me something to wear?"

A clipped breath. "You've nothing for me, then?"

"If there is a weapon, I know nothing about it. Nor would ... nor would he ..." She blinked. "That hasn't occurred to you, has it? That Manegold was innocent, and I am too?"

She threw up her chin and muttered. "We are all innocent, Mr. Rambach."

When she was gone only a little while, Zoa came to the door. He was restless and tired of feeling the cold. It would help if they offered him food. His power was like a distant light working to sustain its glimmer against a steady wind.

Five days and he had not been given food.

-- Yes, and no dehydration. Zoa.

-- I am dehydrated.

Zoa entered the cell carrying clean trousers, a button down shirt. The shadows deepened the richness of her skin. Her eyes were wells, unreadable.

-- This is a maintenance worker uniform. Will it suffice?

-- Yes.

His first death he had been naked.

He gathered his limbs under him and stood. Zoa passed on the clothes, then lifted out her curious computer. While he dressed, she observed the screen.

-- There is a weapon involved, and you know of it.

-- Yes. Zoa's reply.

-- It may be time we speak of it in, how shall I say this, realistic terms.

-- I have been trying, Mr. Rambach.

-- No, you are trying to implicate me in a terrorist enterprise. I am not a terrorist. But I think, soon, certainly after the unpleasantness is over, you and I will have something of an equally serious nature to discuss. Is there a weapon unaccounted for, or of an improvised nature, that can destroy a multitude of lives?

-- Yes.

-- Is it yours?

-- Am I supposed to trust you now, Mr. Rambach?

-- I'm here, aren't I? Have I not done all that you asked? I allowed myself to be taken into custody. Don't you think that I knew how it would end? If you don't trust me soon, this will have gone for nothing. And I will not be able to help you.

-- The core module belonged to us. The trigger must be improvised with materials gathered from your planet.

-- When I come back, I will be in your custody?

-- Yes. But first, Mr. Rambach, I am going to record your death for scientific purposes. My office has already questioned my conclusions as to your biology. I used supportive data, of course. However, the data also says that you are human.

-- I am a different kind of human. They're coming.

She looked for the first time away from her computer and at him. "You are experiencing distress."

"Hush," he said. "Record me if you want, you won't be the first. Remember what you promised and I will see you when I wake up." He turned from her and raised his palms to his heart. His head bowed. "Lady of the Blessed Waters, a child who hears your call beseeches you to receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen."

Two men, at the door.

Zoa spoke to them. "I brought him the clothes. He asked for them."

"We consider such things wasteful, Inspector," said one of the Volods, "in our land. I'm going to put holes in his new shirt."

Zoa said: "I'll reimburse you."

Hephaestion looked over his shoulder at the newcomers. One was government intelligence, the other a Federal Authority commander, Caspar Libing. It was Libing who made the comment about the shirt.

Libing exposed a pistol. He held it by his leg, his finger on the trigger.

Hephaestion shifted his bare feet to face the commander. He lowered his hands, fixed his gaze on the drain in the center of the cell. They would wash his blood away through the drain. At the edge of sight, he glimpsed Libing raising the gun, Zoa her computer.

"Say something," the intelligence official urged. "Spare yourself. Give me something I can use to help you."

Libing said, "He suffered enough, you son of a bitch, without you bastards stealing his body for some sort of propaganda war--"

Hephaestion said, "I understand why you care. I've been told about you. I'm sorry for you, Commander Libing, because I don't think he'll forgive you for what you did any time soon. I think he has far to go before he can do that, but I forgive you," and Libing shot him.

The round passed under Hephaestion's heart, exiting his back through a wound the size of a child's small fist. The impact knocked him back a step.

Libing fired again.

This time, the left ventricle was hit. The shock interrupted the connection between brain and body and Hephaestion began to fall.

The third round smacked into his ribs and tumbled through his lungs.

Hephaestion's legs folded, pitching him backward over the drain. His head, arms, and hands thudded the ground and bounced. Blood boiled through his chest. His lungs became liquid, useless. His lips parted for a breath that was not coming as he searched the shadow high above him, where the ceiling used to be.

He lost consciousness two and a half seconds later.

--- Exile continues with the Book of Valten

Chapter 13: Awakening

2007-08-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

From the Book of Valten, on the events of Year 04.753 of the Vision of the Lady of Holy Waters:
~ ~ ~

The first thing he said to her was "I thought--" And there was a pause, not very long but long enough. "I thought you were someone else."

That was a day ago. The sun was up, barely. Morning light slid past an antique shade the color of ginger ale. There was a breeze off the meadow. The main road was a kilometer north, national highway 502, and it ran north toward the Goraneg. By Val's reckoning, he, the special forces soldiers, and the Brianov doctor were within two hours of Skaja-Volz.

He woke at an abandoned farmhouse. The farm, they told him later, was far from the chain of safe houses arranged by Kinder Group intelligence. The mission objective remained his extraction but the operation team leader, a man called Zone, was following something called a "broken sword" protocol. The doctor and the soldiers were going to get him out of Volodya, then retrieve or destroy-- or destroy --the one who had found him, the one he most needed to see.

The one who was like him.

If there was any good news, it was that the way ahead was full of abandoned places. Terrorized by Federal Authority crack-downs and Holbek atrocities, much of the rural population seemed to have fled to the city.

The others told him later they thought something bad had come to the area, come and gone, leaving farmhouses, clothes, personals, even photos still in their frames, toys in toy chests, pots and pans. Sometimes, the special forces soldiers said, they found blood spatter on a wall, on the floor. Only one body did they find, out in a tool shed. It was an old man, and his head partially severed by a blow to his neck.

* * *

Siris had been told they were going to Skaja-Volz.

After Manegold woke.

Manegold waking up was both the problem and the cure.

Something had occurred that ended the hunt for Manegold's body. The last Kinder-affiliated contact she and the team dealt with was at a depot on the outskirts of the last province. He had delivered a vehicle that would pass a few checkpoints. Good for two days only, he warned. To Siris' inquiry, the contact said that police had given up looking for Manegold's body. The body, the feds were saying, had been destroyed by the terrorist cell that stole it. For the present, the government was chasing something bigger.

Siris made sure that no one, not even Holbek, saw John Manegold's body or the container in which she transported it.

But after a while the body was not a body. The body was an unconscious man. And the man had to travel in containers that allowed the flow of air.

A day ago, after a soft night curled in a musty chair at an abandoned farm, Siris woke to use the washroom and found that John Manegold had shifted on his cot.

The Kinder soldiers-- Zone, Dance, Edge, Rock --were up already. One had been on duty. The others prepared for the push east in a panel truck toward Skaja-Volz.

She was in the back of the house, listening to the soldiers in the other room, the buzz of insects outside the vented window, looking at a man who lay tangled in a sheet.

John's back was to her. He remedied that, rising as he rolled over. With one foot on the floor, he swung his face in her direction.

Said, "I thought--" with that pause. "I thought you were someone else." Nailed her to the floor with a rich baritone turning textbook Ollano.

As she was in shock, literally in awe, but not just in awe of him-- it was what he had done, who he was, what he had been ten days ago --in shock, then, she cupped the back of her head. His blue eyes were magnets. He was magnetically male, a male in his prime, dark blond hair sleek and thick. The stock photos had failed to capture enough. She recalled the video feed of his death. That footage was absolutely real, down to the application of ankle restraints, the tightening of the noose. By the gods. With a camera often it was too little or too much. Now she knew why the reporter had lost her mind, and her country, over him. Women everywhere must have fallen at his feet.

"Your hair," he said, now, "made me think you were someone else."

She drew a steadying breath, brushed her recently clipped hair with the tips of her fingers. One subject was in her tender place, and in her blood and bones, fifteen hundred years out of her league. Which meant that she would not be going weak in the knees for a twenty-something exile.

"I'm Dr. Siris Interlandi," she said. "In the other room are members of a military team sent to rescue you."

He got up. The sheet rose with him, held by his fist. He wrapped his waist. "I know who you are."

Because he was rising, she jumped. John stepped away from the bed. She averted her gaze.

"The air is sweet," he said. "Hephaestion was right. Everything feels as it did before . . . before there was no feeling at all. You must forget, then, don't you think? When there was no feeling but the"-- he searched for the word --"memory of feeling. Everything is backwards in that other place. One must forget how he came to such a state, to such a place."

I am talking to a dead man. She stared at the floor, at the wall. "He said that one never forgets."

"I am sure he is right. Where are we?" the dead man asked. "I have not been aware of our travel for some while. Two days, I think. You were headed northeast toward Skaja-Volz, I thought. How close are we to the city?"

"Very." She located her senses. "I should examine you."

"May I use the washroom first?"

She said, "Over there." Cognizant of her thrashing heart, and the pattern of sunlight on the rumpled bed sheet.

"Skaja-Volz is a mistake," he called from the other room. "It is too close to the Goraneg."

"We need an egress point. The Alinan border is over the mountains. We can't leave the country with our identification papers anymore, and we've gotten rid of everything the Volods could use to track us." She looked in the direction of the washroom, not sure he was still listening. "Satellite phones, locator beacons, everything was sacrificed. We're cut off from our base of operations, completely on our own. Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can."

"Things have taken a turn toward the unexpected, I'm afraid. I'm told we can't fly out or purchase passage on the rail. We'll have to walk across the border, John."

The door opened, but John did not come out. "I want to bathe," he said.

"Where did you learn Ollano?" she called back.

"I heard you speaking before I woke."

She opened her eyes. Hephaestion had led her to expect a wilting, confused boy. Was there an error in judgment? Or had she simply forgotten her history? Forgotten the others?

Aremon Cuilean, for one.

Hephaestion had spoken of the Cuilean's second death, the execution by ordeal perpetrated by the titled supporters of his cousin. What about the Cuilean's return? Hephaestion had forgotten what he became to his enemies, and what he did for his people.

What of the others? Siris opened the catalog of memory. Textbook stuff. Kinder research.

There was Norah Gaunt. Look at the totality of her revenge.

Reagan Thaine, warlord of Danica.

Amorganos Parthalan, the man they called the Killer of Thousands. How many hard deaths did he die before he opened the ground beneath the battlefield of Bryn Carra?

Manona of Grete.

Menkaura, the gladiator.

Agrahavar.

Wilting and confused was not the same for the affarites as it was for her. Forget what the affarites went through, what they suffered. They were not, historically, prone to weakness. Even when they failed they were giants.

"You mean when you were dead you heard us speaking."

She heard the pipes open and the thrash of water. "Yes," he said, as he was drawing water for a bath.

* * *

"When I was a little boy-- no, thank you, I don't need that," John said to Dance, who had offered a meal bar. "When I was a little boy my nurse told me a story of the Goraneg."

Zone and Edge exchanged glances.

"You had a nurse?" Dance interrupted.

John was accommodating, albeit matter-of-fact. "Yes, we all did. We were a large family." He noted the stunned stares. "I grew up in a castle."

Siris raised a finger as though requesting an audience. "Petronille?"

"You've read a little about my family?"

"A little. Your siblings, were they ever ill?"

"We were all very healthy. Why do you ask?"

"You are aware that you do not need to eat," she told him.

"Ah." He lowered his gaze. Several hours had passed since his bath. The breeze tumbled a plain tan curtain thrown over a double window in the conversation room. Rock was on guard outside. The rest were parked on the floor or in chairs around the man they had code-named Wolf, the dead man who was no longer dead.

Siris pushed. "You are aware that you're different."

"Yes."

"Your siblings?"

"They knew I was different, too. Every one knew."

"Were they? Different?"

"They were very different from me, and from others. But they were not one of a kind, not as you mean, except to each other."

"Did Hephaestion communicate with you?"

"Yes."

"Was information provided, specifically what is happening to you now and where we are trying to take you?"

"Yes."

"Do you consent to our taking you from Volodya?"

"Do I consent to leaving my beloved Volodya, my home? Let me think about it and I will get back to you."

Siris smiled slightly at him. "You were telling a story about the Goraneg."

"The Volker invaded Volodya. Before the Volker won the Goraneg, the native population resisted for quite some time. The Volker, though, were master strategists. Why fight the hill people when the Volker could starve them out? That is the Goraneg's legacy. You should know that whenever the locals caught a Volker warrior in the mountains, they cooked and ate him. Cooked him alive. When the Volker won the Goraneg, the hill tribes were the people with whom they bred. I am Goranegi, part Volker, part Volod. My ancestors were aristo invaders, and upland Volods. There is a reason my father's fathers became strong in the Goraneg. I tell you this so that you understand. We may get past the Federal Authority checkpoints but we will never get by the Goranegi. That way out is no way at all."

Captain Skocz said, "But we have you."

John looked at him blankly. "That is not an option." He got up, cast a long, neutral look at the captain, and left the room.

* * *

"We were moving by day and sleeping at night. Now that you're awake, the soldiers think we should do the opposite." Siris stood in shin-high grass, speaking at John Manegold's back in the meadow behind the rust-colored barn. A day ago, he woke. It was time to move on.

She swatted at field flies, annoyed. Field flies mid-season were unheard of back home. Checked her wristwatch. John faced the meadow, hands at his side. She wanted to ask him about his abilities, what he understood about them, how much of them he'd recovered. She supposed that his telepathy was at one hundred percent. What else could he do? He was young, yes, but not without some faculty.

Something occurred to her. "You know where Hephaestion is, don't you?"

John pointed his chin at the innocent sky. Was there a reason that he did not face her?

She felt the heat speed up her back and arms. "Gods, is he in danger?"

John nodded. "He was in a restaurant with a government official-- ah, no." His head lowered a fraction in thought. "She was not of my government, this government. She was an international figure, an official of ITAN. But more, more--" His voice trailed.

"John." Siris placed her fingers at her throat. She felt the cords in her neck swell and vibrate as she uttered his name.

"The woman told him that she could track him with a flex. When I approached the table they were sharing, Hephaestion broke her flex so she would not find out that I was there."

"When did you approach this table? When you were discarnate?"

"I was not in my body."

"Track him. Track him?" She must think. "With a flex, track Hephaestion? He is running down the technology, then. This is bad, very bad. John, where did he go? Did he go with her?"

"She took him to Sarika Base."

The name of the base was familiar, and not in a good way. "Why there? Technology that can track Hephaestion? And he believed her. Oh, of course." She folded her arms to her chest, squeezing hard. "First you must have something to track, a code, a signature. There's a file somewhere. The file would be his signature. He'll find his file and erase it."

"He was arrested."

"He cannot be arrested." Obviously the young man was incognizant of the power of a fifteen-hundred-year-old affarite. "He is not-- I know that he has communicated with you but he has not told everything. John, it's important that we catch up to him. Can you take us to this place-- what is the name of the base?"

"Sarika. It is in Bhavaja, but, no, we can't go there."

"Why not?"

"He is telling me," John said, and he turned to look at her, "that I must wait here, and you and the others must wait here with me."

She felt the thrumming cords in her throat sink and soften. At the same time, her face compressed and filled with hot liquid. Against the heat, her eyes misted. But it was because John was crying. Of course she had known, though the knowledge lived beneath her conscious, why he faced away. The tears had no affect on his voice.

She would be silent a while. She would let him tell the trouble.

"Too much," John said in a while. "There has been too much killing. We have become a nation of killers. I do not know my country. I do not know my people."

Siris opened and closed her mouth, choosing, momentarily, silence.

"Something has happened. He is trying to explain it to me, but he does not know yet what we are dealing with."

Siris said, suddenly, "I'm sorry. He told us. About the woman, your partner-- she died too. I'm sorry."

"Maria Zakarij." He hesitated. "She's passed the gate, it's all right, you know. When she passed me in that other place, she was all right. It is harder for me than for her, now, because I know she was murdered, and I know who murdered her."

"You sound like him, you know. It's not only the way you speak but ..." She let her voice trail.

"His cover," John said, "as an engineer for a power company meant that in theory he has access to Quiranium material storage. Quiranium is banned, you are thinking. Why would an international official care about an engineer with access to Quiranium storage? XTO Sun Energies has several storage facilities abroad, about as many as any other power company. The official was looking for a quantity that entered Volodya about twenty days ago."

"And was lost?"

"It was brought into Volodya illegally. The official believed Holbek bought the Quiranium into the country through a sympathizer."

She tore her gaze from his. It was not possible to stop her eyes from leaking. "I understand wanting a strong bomb in a small transportable device but Quiranium detection is the most basic component of every security system in every major city on the planet. And a Quiranium detonation would threaten the treaty with the Holland-Tchey. What is worth pissing off the aliens?"

"Apparently, a Quiranium-powered event is needed in the detonation system of a bomb that uses Holland-Tchey technology."

Her glance snapped to his face. She realized that after about a minute she was still standing in the grass staring at John and the out-of-season field flies were eating her up. She found her voice. Her scalp was damp and her mouth dry.

"Hephaestion died."

He nodded. "Yes."

She covered her eyes. Hephaestion would have gone with the official for a chance to destroy his signature file. Once the official inflicted injury, he was vulnerable. So, Hephaestion was in transition. Out of his body. He was a traveler.

"Are you able to communicate with him?"

"He is telling me to say, Don't worry. He does not want you to worry."

She threw a hand to her mouth. "Is he all right?"

"He is still with the official but he is all right. The official has technology that prevents him from returning to his body, but he believes this security measure is temporary and he may be able to wake sooner than usual. And I should not flirt with you, he says, even though you are very pretty. He says you are his little sister and I must be respectful."

Weeping and laughing: "Hephaestion did not say that."

"He says, That is better. And that I should say he has every reason to believe you will see him again." John stepped toward her and placed his hand on her arm.

She welcomed the gesture of fellow feeling and covered his hand with hers. "Ask him what I should tell the others."

"We should brief them."

"The official he was dealing with, is she a Holland-Tchey alien?"

John paused, presumably to receive a response. In a moment, "That is not--" Then, "If I am lucky." He kept his gaze on Siris. His cheeks were damp but his eyes had cooled. Now he drew his hand away. "She is Holland-Tchey."

"Her involvement will invoke a new protocol. We cannot tell the others about her."

"If you say we should not, then we should not. I am thinking that either we must tell them everything, or I must go ahead on my own. And I do not think your soldiers are disposed to let me leave your company. Your orders are to kill me and burn my body if I cannot be extracted. Am I correct?"

"You're not asking for confirmation, only to see if I'm going to lie."

"I suppose." John sighed, presently. "Hephaestion says that you, of all those he's known in that place you call Kinder, you alone have never lied. He says your mind and your words have always been in harmony, and that is why he gave you the means to speak to him of what had gone before. He says that I should trust you."

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 14: Science Commission

2007-08-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Valten:

In Arafuria, the transport taxied to Hangar XI on the Science Commission's compound in the UKSB. The transport was a colorless stealth war glider covered in organic armor. Zoa had ordered the transport because of the cargo, but there was no interference pre-flight or in-flight. Piercing New Continent airspace had been surprisingly uneventful. Zoa was told by the air controller that the international aviation control board had cleared its airspace for her.

Pryor Leighton, the ITAN ambassador to the Holland-Tchey, arrived at the Science Commission shortly after Zoa. He settled his residence, which was divided from the main Holland-Tchey facility by strategic landscaping and daunting security measures. Leighton's staff grew considerably meanwhile-- six days elapsed in short but chaotic fashion. The ambassador's staff now included ITAN science ministers, a coterie of ITAN military brass, and liaisons to the governments of the UKSB, Brianovia, and Aiglentina, the so-called superpowers.

Leighton's conferences ran until all hours, driven by updates from international intelligence, to which the Holland-Tchey hierarchy was politely made privy.

Leighton believed, as did his cronies, that if the Commission hierarchy wished, then she, they, and the entire Holland-Tchey delegation, would vanish off world, thereby abandoning Leighton and his planet to its folly.

Zoa knew better.

Early in the morning of the seventh day after her return from Volodya, Zoa found herself at the tail of a procession through a corridor of the inner sanctum of the Commission's ultra-secure Human Research Center. The name of the connecting air-locked laboratories and halls and conferral rooms was printed in her native tongue, represented by a single character that the humans could not read. In Zoa's language, the character resonated at many levels.

When humans visited the security areas, they were told that they were entering the labs. All the work areas at the Arafuria Science Commission were called "labs." Humans were told nothing about the laboratories' designation, their purpose. If the humans insisted on possessing the information, the Commission would take its research outside gravity, or worse, abandon its research and the humans altogether. ITAN tolerated the shielded doings of the facility as a third-world human might a toothache.

Now Leighton strolled the colorless corridor beside Her Excellency, the head of the delegation. Leighton was a slender, pale-skinned man in his early sixties. He had a heavy, coifed head of darkened gray hair. The shade of his hair was supposed to make Her Excellency respect his relative seniority in the affairs of humans, when in fact Her Excellency was painfully aware that on her world a being of sixty years was adolescent.

In contrast to the ambassador's pale gray suit, Her Excellency wore a single drape of black silk. The drape produced a high collar and long sleeves. The only part of Her Excellency visible outside the drape was her high head with its light brown skin and wavy spillage of black hair. Telepathic, Zoa was aware that Leighton found Her Excellency profoundly attractive. Syrinx, too, was aware. She was one hundred and eighty years old.

Leighton gave Syrinx his briefing. "At present, we have no intelligence on the position, dead or alive, of John Manegold."

Syrinx wrinkled her brow, indicating deep interest in the news. "That is unfortunate. He was a prisoner in the custody of security personnel. Why they failed to tag him eludes us."

Leighton turned his head to gaze into the black crystal of a laboratory window. He did not want to show his distress.

"The advanced governments of our world, Your Excellency, use prisoner tagging for just this reason. We are not dealing with a member country, unfortunately. Volodya undoubtedly messed up."

"Undoubtedly."

They paused at an air lock. Zoa-- and her fellows --were treated to a telepathic wave of disgust from Syrinx, who regarded Leighton sternly. The human staffers accompanying Leighton shifted uncomfortably, aware of the stakes.

The air lock opened.

They pressed on. The lock sealed behind them. They were in a tight, windowless chamber with rows of blue and red panels. The panels hummed. Meanwhile, a voice explained in Solonian, Ollano, and Aiglentine that a sterilization process had begun.

Presently, the panels dimmed.

The forward air lock unsealed with a pneumatic thump.

The group stepped into another corridor.

Leighton said, "Our intelligence channels are wide open."

"You have driven your quarry deep into the ground," Syrinx criticized.

"The ground is not that deep." Leighton attempted confidence. "We will find the weapon."

"Let me show you something."

Syrinx stopped in front of a black crystal window. She emitted a psychic tone. The lab's security system acknowledged her command and the window's protective shield dissolved.

Leighton found himself on a balcony over an austere, white chamber. In the chamber far below him was a broad examination table. The table was metal or some kind of alloy fitted with arm, wrist, waist, leg, and ankle restraints. The restraints were similar to devices used to pin condemned UKSB prisoners as they received lethal injections. Leighton observed a young man naked and restrained on the examination table under a bank of severe lights. The young man was quite dead, though the mechanism of death eluded Leighton. The man was dark-haired, physically fit. His nationality was undetermined.

Leighton cleared his throat. What was a human doing in a Holland-Tchey facility? Did the aliens kill the man? Had matters advanced to the point at which the aliens were running their own manhunt? How was he to react to the realization that the Holland-Tchey were dragging humans off the streets?

He collected himself. "I am afraid I don't understand what I am looking at, Your Excellency."

Syrinx released another inaudible, psychic tone. Data appeared in Solonian on a holographic screen in front of Leighton.

The ambassador shifted to focus.

Syrinx said, "Your species went through a period noted as the Purge. You are familiar with it."

Leighton squinted at the screen, which shifted as he reached the bottom to the next page. When he wanted to revisit a previous page, the screen changed automatically.

Syrinx sent a command to the system. The window took on a faintly green aspect. Leighton recognized that a filter had been added. He took his eye off the data screen and gazed deeply into the chamber.

"Lady of Light, what is that?"

Syrinx gestured to the data screen. "The item to which you are referring arrived seven days ago. At that time, the man had three wounds by projectile arms."

Leighton felt his gut clench. "Oh, no."

"This human is dead, Ambassador, as you understand the term. He was dead seven days ago."

"Then what is that?"

"Let me tell you what we did, first. We performed surgical techniques on the corpse. Dead tissue responds predictably, Ambassador. I do not think the terms dead and living apply to this man as they apply to you and to me."

Leighton stared at her in horror.

Syrinx smiled faintly, surprising Zoa. Zoa disapproved of this briefing. She had more or less promised Rambach that this would not occur. But then she had no idea what the Commission would do once it took her reports to heart.

"Ambassador, you are looked at a living entity."

Leighton screwed his head around to gape below at the examination table.

Ambassador, you are looked at a living entity.

She was not referring to the human, of course, but to the irregular, disjointed coalescence of light pricks. The pricks of light, like tiny, glowing dust particles, hovered above the corpse. Using the alien filter, the light swirls were as visible as the table. Leighton saw that the light swirls were in constant rotation in and out of the corpse.

"Does it-- is it one life form or many?"

"We cannot answer that."

Leighton experienced his greatest moment of disorientation. "You don't know?"

"No, we do not."

His knees felt weak. "Is it, are they communicating?"

"Not in any conventional or unconventional manner that we understand. There is no reason to believe we"-- she inserted the name of her species in her native language, a complicated series of sounds beyond human vocal ability --"lack the means to communicate. We have concluded it has no desire to communicate."

"Can you destroy it?"

Syrinx shook her head. "We do not know."

Leighton suddenly felt less like a schoolboy in a lecture hall. He felt like he had something to offer. "During the Purge, we found that all such aberrant life forms were vulnerable to fire."

Syrinx looked at him, her expression thoughtful. "Fire."

"You have found our curse, a demian." He filled his lungs, dramatically. "What their kind did to us, back then. Your Excellency, you cannot imagine. Our survival depended on the Purge. Thank the Lady they were too hateful to breed--" Leighton had a sobering, altogether dreadful thought. "The connection between John Valten Manegold and this thing, I, uh--"

Syrinx lowered her voice. "The Manegold is a terrorist of the most extreme sort. Finding the body of John Manegold is paramount."

Leighton jerked a nod. "I understand."

* * *

Zoa waited until the humans disappeared back into the air lock and Syrinx, seemingly gripped by the vision in the observation room, raised her slender hand.

Zoa glided forward. She trained her gaze on Syrinx's profile, which was not inappropriate. Avoiding the chamber was in Zoa's best interest. Her responses were at a lower energy center than usual, a place her species called the physical body. At this level, she was all instinct, blowing hot and cold with emotion. She needed focus.

Syrinx, her mouth a taut line, communicated telepathically. It's not a symbiot. She referred to the second, incorporeal being in the chamber as though it was a single life form. We did a fair job with tissue regeneration on this Rambach. If his heart were beating right now, he would sit up and wave. Oh, yes, except that we removed oxygen from the room.

Zoa responded without speaking. Yes, Excellency.

-- Do you know why we removed oxygen from the room?

-- To study the second life form's reaction.

-- Precisely. The second life form did nothing.

-- Yes, Excellency.

-- We sent in a technician with liquid fire. The second life form did nothing. We gave our technician a disrupter. Nothing. It's not a symbiot, as I said. How can it be if the man is dead and the life form is unaffected?

-- Perhaps it is affected in a manner we do not understand.

-- An understatement. It stays with the body, but does not react when the body is threatened. I agree the one thing we lack is understanding. A life form we have not seen before ...

Zoa thought, It has no wave pattern.

-- Incorrect. It has no detectable wave pattern. Therefore, we are not able to net or disrupt it, or even block its telepathy, if it has such. For what we know, the entity knows our thoughts. For what we know, the entity could leave the human, the chamber, this facility, and do as it wishes. Recall, my dear, the early millennia of our evolution, when we knelt to a deity of energy. If I were living then, I would say that I was looking at a particle of the creatrix.

Zoa shuddered. But Syrinx was thoughtful, grounded, and of course correct. It might be prudent to lower our disruption net and allow Rambach's consciousness to find his body.

-- Why should we do that?

-- Excellency, we know that the entity will not talk to us. Rambach can and is willing to talk to me.

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 15: Allies

2007-08-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Valten:

When discarnate, Hephaestion always felt the pull of his body. He could be with his body, normally, in a swiftly flying instant.

This time, he was lost, stranded, halted in space. The raising of the security net with his name on it had the effect of dislocating him from the echo essential to reunification.

He simply could not find himself.

A tact of the Holland-Tchey, he supposed.

He recognized the tact and accepted it. There were no periods of wandering panic. True, this had not occurred in all the epochs of his existence. Yet there was no reason why it could not. This type of thing was the grit of Kinder's research and in front of him. Unfortunately for the Kinder Group, the aliens were ahead in the field, which meant that he was at the mercy, temporarily, of Zoa.

Moreover, his psychic apparatus had alarmed too soon, as he had (apparently) healed well ahead of time. When the mechanism of death involved significant tissue damage, he could remain in limbo a long period.

No mystery there-- the aliens' mastery of tissue regeneration was amply documented. Of course, he had good reason to want to wake in four days, not twenty.

Meanwhile, he located the Kinder ops team outside Skaja-Volz, warned it through John Manegold that Volod officials were getting word from the Holland-Tchey that Manegold was alive. Fortunately, and perhaps only for a short time, Skaja-Volz's military higher-ups applied logic to the intel, thereby corrupting the message's content. The Volod troopers stationed in and around Skaja-Volz were supposed to be looking for a fugitive, not a corpse. Instead, the Skaja-Volz hierarchy assumed an error in the encryption and were in all earnest searching for a body. At checkpoints, the soldiers were tearing apart centimeter by centimeter vehicles that could haul cargo while passing smaller conveyances with just a peek in the trunk.

Still, Hephaestion wanted Val to wait at the farmhouse. When Hephaestion was sure he knew everything Val knew, and when he was reasonably assured of the ops team's cooperation, he turned his mind to finding a way to deal with the Holland-Tchey.

* * *

"Did you locate the weapon?" Zoa, the interviewer, clutched her machine, her little computer, pointing it at him.

The way she did this, the way she held her machine and studied its data screen was different, although her computer was not. Zoa, somehow, was different too. Her appearance. The long drape with the high collar. Her hair down around her shoulders.

She had things to tell him.

Excuses, explanations.

Why her promises had gone awry.

But she was not talking, not in any true sense. Her mouth moved, and out came these tight, offending questions, as though he would keep the location of the weapon from her if he knew it.

They let him find his body, turned off the net that kept him from himself, then closed around him their security barrier. It was beyond them to understand that as long as he could sense the net, once he had been in his body long enough he could disrupt the technology. Clearly, they had no understanding of what they were dealing with.

It mattered greatly to Hephaestion what came next. Besides wanting to help Zoa, he was concerned about the weapon. She was, it seemed, quite concerned about the weapon, and he figured with relative certainty that if it had an energy signature he could find it. The fact that she'd involved her people made things a trifle uncomfortable. Alas, the Holland-Tchey still knew him as Bojidar Rambach, a Borazji native. If under the alien's scrutiny his alias was going to fall apart, it would have fallen apart by now.

Several hours had passed since he woke. He decided to let a few more hours go by.

Zoa left at one point, and he sighed, using the span to go over his options. The last time he'd stretched within his power, he'd killed a large number of people. He didn't like the memory, but there it was. His memory, and he owned it. A long time ago, he would have considered being what he was, doing his thing, the most potent expression of joy. Well. If he lived, he supposed he ought to tell that to the new one, to the boy. Or maybe the boy already knew the power wanted to be used. Perhaps. Not every affarite ended up in a six-century binge of destruction.

Five hours, now, since he woke. Zoa was beside him, speaking pointlessly, in circles. He could not yet extend upward with his power-- the security shield was there --but he could reach just beneath it and follow its signature. The net was for his life force, his consciousness. It had nothing with which to contend with his power. And he was very nearly at full charge.

Following the net to a set of controls was a start, but not good enough. He wanted, too, the system that stored his energy signature, the file labeled Rambach, Bojidar. It lived in a massive room that housed the alien equivalent of mainframes. He didn't understand the power source. The shielding, too, was impressive. Replacement equipment would have to come from a transport ship-- he wasn't sure he wanted to disable the embassy. He didn't want it to look like he'd raided their artificial intelligence either. Ah, crystal boards. Good enough.

Now, the problem of the people. He couldn't sense any of them.

"Why can't I sense you?" Hephaestion interrupted the interrogation. He lay restrained on the table clothed in dark supple trousers and a pullover. His feet were bare.

Zoa hesitated, so that even without his telepathy he knew she was considering lying. "We are a telepathic species."

Good answer. "So are we."

"In what way?"

"In what way? I haven't proven that, then."

"I assumed we were communicating telepathically through my link."

"Turn yours off. I think mine is better."

She had a reaction that confounded him. She almost looked as though she was about to break out in a sweat. "That's inappropriate."

"We're not getting along again?"

"We are fitted with a regulator that allows us to have privacy when we want it. Our public mode allows the kind of interchange you and I have experienced. If I do as you want, if I turn it off, the most inappropriate communication could occur."

"If I'm telepathic, you mean."

"Yes, of course. If you're not, then ... nothing would happen."

"Turn it off. Let me see you. And turn off your hand-held. You'll be able to hear me without it, I promise you."

She glanced at the hand-held, at him, up at the monitoring station above them, and back at him. She nodded once, perhaps (he supposed) to acknowledge a command from a superior at the monitoring station. Then she put down her computer.

He shuddered. Didn't mean to. It just happened. A blossom of sound, except it wasn't audible. He heard it somewhere inside, where he'd feel the most intimate of caresses. His body shivered again, and his lips parted. Okay, there she was, and he recognized her. When he'd found John Manegold, he'd found her. She was like this then, a note of pure energy, and she'd played it for him. She'd moved through him without a word, and she'd taken something like an imprint of his essence. This time, he moved forward and hesitated. She touched him with her mind. It's all right. He tried to fashion thought, tried at first and failed. It was all elemental now, just the moving back and forth, all feeling, a feast of sensation. But somewhere in this he had to possess himself. He had to. So, he tried again, and was able.

"You have an internal switch that allows this to happen?" he asked.

"Yes. We've done this before."

"Not something I'm likely to forget. You are so incredibly beautiful. How many people are nearby?"

She shut it down, shut down the sharing, and picked up her hand-held, regarding him coolly. "Why do wish to know?"

"Well, we are on what's called an unleveled field. I must make it level, so I can get some work done. Tell your people to step away from their consoles, and to stay out of the room with the mainframes."

Her eyes only widened a little, showing almost no alarm.

He wasted no more time. Floating a charge along the nearby systems, he was perhaps more than thorough. He detected a flare, and snuffed it. The mainframes were more challenging. To obliterate them he would have had to destroy the chamber. He only wanted to snap the crystal boards. They'd have replacement boards nearby. Meanwhile, he sat up on the table. The mechanical restraints had been easy to do away with. He hung his legs over the edge, observed Zoa as the room's illumination altered, failed, and faded. Emergency lighting, now. He could feel the presence of a massive generator, and, now that the main artificial intelligence chamber was dead, the resonance of back-ups flaring to life. He crippled the redundant system, but left the generator alone. He twisted his head to look up at the blank monitoring window, made sure Zoa wasn't holding a weapon, and realized someone had asked the holding room's life support to go to off. They still did not understand, he realized, what they were dealing with. If they were all set to exterminate Zoa along with him, subtracting oxygen from the atmosphere might be phase one of a very lethal package. He needed to breathe, and he was going to win this contest even if meant he had to rip a chunk of the building from its foundation.

"Sorry, darling," he murmured as he stood up.

The chamber door complained bitterly, then gasped and fell outward. That took care of the oxygen problem. He suspected lethal gas was next.

"Zoa, just for a moment, please get down."

The monitor window shattered outward. He attacked it from his side but controlled the explosion so that the damaged viewscreen fell toward him and not on top of the room's occupants. It jerked back as one crumbling piece, which he bundled neatly as it tumbled mid-air and flung aside. He was looking, now, at security people and dignitaries surrounding a tall, handsome female aristocrat. The aristocrat held a portable computer. He brought up a knuckle to blot a bead of blood that had blossomed under one nostril, then inclined his head to her. Sorry. And cracked the power crystal in her hand-held.

A mental scan showed that the area was under automatic containment. No one was leaving, except him, and no one was going to get through the magnetically sealed containment doors unless he took the doors off for them. No matter. The one he wanted was standing just above him, looking down her pretty nose at him.

She fashioned her query like a blow. "What are you?"

"I'm someone who needs your attention."

"You might have tried asking for it."

Zoa stood beside him. "Excellency, he did-- try."

The older woman flicked a glance at Zoa before adjusting her gaze to Hephaestion. "You have my attention now."

-- Next Chapter

Chapter 16: Civilians

2007-08-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

... Continues the Book of Valten:

If the end of doing nothing meant doing something, Val had decided he was ready for anything. Anything, of course, was anything but taking on, at some unholy hour, four international soldiers and a doctor, stealing their utility hauler, and striking out for Bhavaja. The urge to burn a trail toward the distant city was no urge at all. It felt mandatory, inevitable, and dizzying. As he did not sleep, he sat with his need to go after Libing, and he paced with it, felt the need sparkle along his nerves.

The last thing he wanted to do was kill Caspar Libing. Unfortunately, the list of things he wanted was depressingly brief. And what did want have to do with it? His father, he supposed, would have understood what he was going through. Sometimes, the desire to seek Libing hurt like fire hurt, but most of the time it felt cold and heavy, like a block of ice settling just above his stomach. When he thought about letting Libing live, the ice shifted and grew heavier.

He tried to reason his way through it. Remembered that after Celesta he'd grown intimate with stit and an injector. He couldn't smoke stit like any boy-o, no, he had to put the pain down a deep hole, shovel dirt over it, and cover the hole with stones. Mainlining stit gave what he needed but when his mother died, he'd found the pit again, only it was all dug up, and there was Celesta in it looking back at him. He hadn't done much thinking then. He'd followed his feelings and the rest just sort of happened. He couldn't make himself say Caspar hadn't loved him. He wasn't confused enough to go for self-deceit. He couldn't make himself hate Libing because Maria's life failed to equal the other man's need to follow orders. The pain came when Val heard his own words on Libing's lips, as Libing must have spoken them to Maria.

She would have trusted Libing after that, let Libing's words-- Val's words --serve as a password, a gentle key in an emotional lock.

When Maria transitioned, and while he was in that other place, Val had learned she'd died of pills mixed in a drink prepared carefully by the federal agent. She'd thought she was taking something to sleep. She'd thought, too, that she was alone. She hadn't suffered. Now, Val was alone, and within him was the means to teach Libing what that felt like.

He'll know already, Val thought. You'd be doing it for another reason. You'd be doing it because it's easier to hold on than to let go.

Would the feeling get better once he left Volodya? He knew the answer, but wished he didn't.

And then he felt Hephaestion's telepathy. It was different this time, potent and textured. The difference between looking at water and actually getting wet.

-- We're here.

We're here? What did that mean?

Val moved through the rooms of the farmhouse. The soldiers saw his face and got up to follow. The one outside saw him come out, looked at him curiously, and asked what was wrong.

"He said he was here," Val said.

The doctor was behind him. She made a soft sound, like a gasp but not quite. "Where?"

"Whoa." That was Dance, who skipped off the steps. "That's not ours."

A slender wing edged over the roof of the farmhouse. The wing's surface seemed to ripple, changing like the hide of a chameleon, absorbing the watery sunlight without reflecting it. Attached to the wing was a glider. The craft rotated above the farmhouse before coming down in a soft vertical landing. The grass reacted to it, but not the air. There was no smell of metal, exhaust. There was no sense of heat.

On the ground, the craft looked small.

* * *

"There's not enough room on it for all of us," Dr. Interlandi said.

Captain Skocz-- Zone --bet that everyone was thinking the same thing.

He strode forward. Step one, make an inspection of the craft, check the credentials of the owner. Step two, get his package-- the swords --over the border. As far as he was concerned, aliens or no aliens, if he got the doc, Hephaestion, and the Manegold out of Volodya, then things were looking up. He and his team could take the rest of the day off.

The hatch opened.

Skocz stopped.

A young woman in slacks and a sweater stepped out. She was dark like the women of Ussuria. Was she Ussurian? He wasn't sure. She wasn't dressed like a pilot or a player. She held a computer in her hand, the alien's version of a flexible hand-held. That made her Holland-Tchey. Shit. The Manegold and the good doctor had talked about aliens, and, no, he wasn't getting orders right now from HQ because he was dealing with portables and there was nothing to tap into. The sat phones were traceable; he'd ditched them a while ago. And there were no fly-overs by friendlies this far out in the boonies. How was he going to make this make sense to Kinder? How was he going to explain that Hephaestion had formed an independent alliance without, so he claimed, compromising Kinder-- no, that just wasn't going to read right.

Here was Hephaestion now. The captain looked up at subject 237, didn't realize how glad he was to see 237 until he saw him. He said, "Nice ride."

Hephaestion was dressed like the alien female, all in black. He might not have heard Skocz, because he was staring in another direction, frowning.

* * *

Something inside the craft was thrumming, and the thrumming was moving. Instinctively, Val's power reached toward it. Like knows like, and the thrum was more than interesting. It was a heady blur of nourishment and ardor that sank through him layer by layer, promising to show things, and offering to hide others.

A woman came to the ramp first. Val got nothing from her. A curiosity, but he let it go.

There was something behind her. It blossomed at her back, slid into the hatchway, and took over the ramp. Free of the ship's shielding, it unfolded laterally a succession of luminous layers that extended beyond the ship. The source of the light flowed forward. Broad glowing panels, like iridescent wings, billowed, multiplied, and multiplied again. Val was slowly peeling back the barrier of his internal shield. The effect was galvanizing. It made Val weak in the stomach. With absolutely no instruction in the matter, Val knelt in the grass and hung his head in obeisance.

* * *

Hephaestion reached the younger man quickly, raised him up by the shoulders.

-- Ah, no, don't do that. Never do that. That is not how we greet our brothers and sisters.

The younger man was too stunned to answer telepathically. "I had no idea."

"Do you think there's a book for this? Never mind it. Your shield isn't satisfactory, you're too young. I can help with that. It's no good if it hurts you to look at me."

"Are you one of the gods?"

"That mistake's been made before, usually right before hell breaks loose. No, I'm not. I'm what you are, just older. I'm reaching toward you now, can you feel me?"

"Yes, this is different. I can see you ... Almost like you're one of them, a man."

"I am a man. Now, we need to go inside somewhere where we can talk, everyone together. It's important." Drawing John Manegold toward the farmhouse door, Hephaestion gestured to get the others' attention. "We need to talk. Zoa's aircraft can fool radar but this is an uptight country and she's deviated from her flight plan. We're on a tight schedule."

* * *

The farmhouse dining room. Siris settled in a chair, hands in her lap. She was across from the pilot of the alien organic glider.

The pilot was, for Siris, the second encounter with a member of the species known as Holland-Tchey. The first occasion had been seven years ago at a bio-technologies emporium in Coire. She was there to interview for an internship with ITAN. The ITAN board had seated two Holland-Tchey, a male and female. The male's skin had been splotched with bronze, but was, generally, ivory. The female's features, arms, and hands were all ivory. The Brianov delegate explained the aliens were, in terms of emotional, mental, and professional development, teenagers. Somewhat put out, Siris had wondered why ITAN would assign adolescents to question her.

It wasn't until after her interviews that she'd made the mental adjustment to grasp that a Holland-Tchey adolescent was somewhere between eighty and one hundred and ten standard years of age.

Hephaestion's female pilot was older than that, with skin that resembled the warm bronze of the southern lands. Her hair was gathered into a bun, and her eyes were the blue of sun-kissed tropical waters. Holland-Tchey biology was classified, so Siris had no idea what was going on behind the lovely skin and slender bones. On the surface, as the female lacked the ridged nose (sported by some among her kind) and possessed five digits, not four, on each hand, the pilot appeared human. Hephaestion's computer-aided sketch hadn't done the alien proper justice.

Grabbing a chair at the head of the table, Captain Skocz pointed at the alien with his chin. "We're not authorized to discuss our mission with you."

Siris inhaled. The window in the dining room was open, which was good. Too many tensed people. This wasn't what the room was for, and she tried to imagine the people who lived here coming in out of the fields, children home from school, fruit and home-baked bread in baskets on the table, a floral centerpiece maybe. She tried to hear their voices, to remember what it was like to feel safe.

Skocz had twisted his chair about, straddled his seat. "Nor are we authorized to change the mission," he was going on matter-of-factly. "With that said, Angel wants us to listen to you, so we're listening to you. But I'm thinking you should be speaking to ITAN instead of wasting your time speaking to us. Whatever problem you have, that's where you're supposed to be solving it."

The alien named Zoa scanned the table and lingered on Skocz. In a voice that rang a bit lower than a voice Siris expected from a human woman, "We are allies," Zoa reminded in Ollano.

Skocz made an attempt to look politic. "I don't decide what my mission's going to be, and that includes hooking up with allies for a party on the side. I'm not even supposed to be talking to you."

"Fair enough," Zoa replied. "But in this case I ask you to see ITAN as a juggernaut that requires a vast amount of resource to refocus its energy. I'm coming to you, of course, on behalf of the Science Commission to achieve an end, quickly, that will save billions of lives."

"How's that again?"

With raised eyebrows Siris, next to Hephaestion, was thinking she should be in an office right now, coding data into her computer for the archivists. The interplay between Skocz and Zoa, it was all beyond her. She had more in common with the people who baked bread here once. Okay, maybe that wasn't true. But achieving something at ground level that affected the fate of billions of lives-- this was surreal and quite unnerving.

Hephaestion leaned toward her. "I'm here," he whispered, catching her hand under the table.

He'd sensed her panic and reacted. Oh, this was great, outstanding. She wondered if he suggested she leap from a cliff, would she do it? How compromised was compromised? Meanwhile, the connection, skin to skin, was potent and (in some odd way) familiar. She caught a flicker of his metallic eyes, tried to read what was behind them, tried harder, and got nothing. Then she offered a nod. This wasn't just about the alien, after all. Hephaestion, who was the subject, not the leader, had brought the alien to them. So this was about him, too, something he wanted.

"Before we tell you what has to happen," Hephaestion said, "you must know and appreciate the problem." His lips parted slightly. "There is a weapon. If it detonates, the weapon will create a crater the size of Prome. The blast radius will exceed two billion kilometers. The explosion will create a layer of dust between the sun and the planet's surface, and so a layer of ice will spread over the planet and last for many years. It is possible the shock swell, if the weapon is detonated in Volodya, will send a tidal wave ten meters high to the coast of Brianovia." Hephaestion looked around, and waited.

Siris looked around, too. Was it even remotely possible Hephaestion was right? The alien, Zoa, was watching her, but Siris ignored the alien and settled her gaze, somewhat unexpectedly, on John Manegold. She had never seen one person kneel to another person before today. What made him do it? Oh, he was young but was he, really? What had those eyes seen? What had those hands done? This has more to do with you, John, than us, Siris thought. What you were, and what you are.

Presently, John Manegold studied the blowing curtains in the dining room window with an expression that appeared eerily unfazed. He was slouching a little, but it was not a young man's slouch. He was like one of those scholars you found on a park bench looking away across the lake. There were no answers on the lake, only the surface of the water, and maybe the sky coming down to meet it. Such men had no questions, possessing, at least in their minds, the answers.

Siris tucked in her chin. Dance, Rock, and Edge, staring at Hephaestion so hard their faces looked like cement, seemed to be biting down mentally on the bomb problem. Zone, at least, looked like he was trying to reconcile mission directives with the new information.

"What kind of bomb is this?" he wanted to know.

The alien answered: "It is a device that uses antimatter technology."

Siris snapped to attention. "You've lost another one?"

Zoa canted her head. She wasn't just a pilot, Siris had to realize. The alien behaved like a treaty enforcer, and one mustn't forget that the only person at the table older than a Holland-Tchey adult was Hephaestion.

Settling her hand-held in her lap, Zoa said, "All right, we'll start at the beginning. Weapons that employ a matter-antimatter event have been banned among the worlds of the"-- Zoa said the name of her species in her native language --"greater than fifty of your years. Several explorer-class craft launched before the ban. Such craft were never supposed to land. We can only assume there was a malfunction. We tried to track them in a timely manner, but one had fallen into your gravity well where it seems the scientists of your world were able to disable its beacon. When we located the vessel, we formally discovered your world. Unfortunately, you had already attempted to reverse-engineer our point singularity canons and the antimatter missiles." The alien spread her hands and sighed. "That is our fault and we know it. We have stayed among you looking for the pieces that were stolen, and here and there we have found them. I implore you to listen to Bojidar. Especially you." She turned her head to look at John, who did not return her glance. "Bojidar insists the Volods put you to death without cause."

"They feel they had cause. But my government knows better than that I am an extremist or a man who has killed other men. I am not what they said I was, or what you believe me to be."

Zoa and Hephaestion turned to one another, making Siris wonder what she missed.

Zoa added, "What we know so far suggests an operative with ties to illegal arms sales recovered and then sold on open market a module from the debris of a collapsed research facility in the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa. The Manegolds are rumored accomplished arms traders."

John said, "We were, and probably still are."

"The module is the containment system," Zoa went on. "The rest of the device can and apparently has been improvised with materials from your planet. You will not be the same people if it detonates. Your world will not be the same world."

Flicking glances here and there, Siris wondered, Do we believe this? Is this real?

Apparently so, for the Manegold sat up as though yanked, exasperated, pissed, or all of the above. He swiveled toward Zoa with blue eyes lowered and his thoughts veiled. "I'll do what you want. Why must everyone go with me?"

Hephaestion let go of Siris' hand. "It's the plan."

"Yes, I know it's the plan." He gestured to Zoa. "When she lets me, I can feel her thoughts. But I don't like this plan, especially the part where you say I need an escort." Looking at Zoa directly: "I don't need an escort."

Zoa said, "I think that your military partners would disagree."

"He wouldn't," Manegold said, meaning Hephaestion, "and while he was telling you what he knows to be true, he would also tell you that no one present, except him, can stop me if I decide to leave." There was an appropriate silence. "So," John said, "is there another reason the soldiers and the doctor must come with me?"

"Yeah," Skocz stepped in. "Wherever you're going, we're going because that's the mission."

Zoa said, "And there's a problem the soldiers and the doctor didn't foresee."

Skocz asked, "What kind of problem?"

"We're sure the people who are building the bomb," Hephaestion said, "or who have built it, know we're here."

"You said we're sure," Siris said. "How are you and she sure?"

"We made contact with them. Don't you remember Crivosin?"

"No," Siris said. "I wasn't with everyone outside Bhavaja."

"I remember him," said Dance.

"Nice fellow. Our intelligence gave us a man who wanted to help us prove the execution was a sham, that Wolf was alive and able to be rescued, but our side didn't know about the device, and we didn't know how well Holbek was entrenched in Volodya. I have seen"-- he tipped a nod in Zoa's direction --"their data, their intelligence. It's credible. Crivosin is part of the group that stole laser technology and programmed it to destroy a building. He didn't help us with our identification papers and just go away."

"No, of course he didn't," John said. "But I can still get away from the group and head into the mountains on my own."

Skocz shook his head once. "No, absolutely not. That goes against my mission objective."

John exhaled. "You haven't any idea what's being proposed."

"I think I do."

Siris looked at John, and at Skocz. "Will someone explain it to me?" because John wasn't exactly going pale but it looked like his skin was thinning. And a cord had started thumping the column of his throat.

"It's possible I'll be shot on sight, but if," John said, "I last ten minutes, or one hour, then, yes, I may be able to pull the location of the device from their minds--"

Hephaestion: "--we will."

"I don't think they'll shoot me. I don't think they'll want to take just one hour to kill me either."

What did he say?

"I think they'll try to make killing me last longer than that. The problem becomes," John was saying, "how do I get information out once I've got it?"

"A transmitter," Zoa said.

So this really was the plan?

Wastagh, on the other side of Dance, shook his head fast. "There's no transmitter in the world, I don't care how small, that'll get past a decent scan."

Zoa sighed. "That's why he'd have two. One will be of your world, and they will find it. The other will be of our world, and they will not find it." She leaned forward. "When they find the first transmitter, he will be ten times more interesting as a prisoner than he was before they got confirmation that his execution, escape, and flight into the Goraneg was a set-up. Once they think they've won, they'll want to debrief him." Zoa glanced around the table. "There are risks, but it is the only plan in the field that puts an operative right next to Holbek. Is it possible they'll call in an upper echelon operative, maybe one of your brothers or uncles, to question you?"

"That's not only possible, it's likely." John hesitated. He and Zoa locked glances. "It's our way."

Zoa sat back. "That's the easy part. Here's the hard. We can't assume they're not watching."

John tilted his head, mouth compressed. "No, you shouldn't assume. My family was piggy-backing spy sats and re-tasking commercial ones when I was a boy."

"If they're watching, they won't have missed you and your little aircraft," Siris said to Zoa.

"Actually," Hephaestion said, "the Holland-Tchey have pretty good disruption technology. Any sat pointed at this region is seeing nothing for now, but at the end of the next quarter hour, they'll want to to see the team and, assuming they've seen him already, they'll want to see Wolf. Too long of a delay and we may have undesirable company, at an undesired time."

Zoa shifted her gaze to Siris. "I'm sorry, but once we talked to Bojidar and he explained what you were doing, the first thing we considered was the possibility of satellite tracking. It's because of satellite tracking we decided not to pick you up or rearrange the composition of your team. We thought about the reason Holbek hadn't made a try for you yet. Satellite surveillance is the best explanation. You're headed north--"

"Excuse me, but that's a no-return mission for everybody," Skocz said. "And that goes for her, too." He turned to Siris. "Bloody hell, doc, she's saying we're headed for a trap but no worries, march along now and never mind it. She's saying to carry on like we're still trying to walk across the border into Alina. Like Wolf is stupid enough to let us keep going north up to the mountains, which, by the way, he wasn't."

"Based on our intelligence, if you drive into the Goraneg Mountains you will run into Holbek."

The captain hissed through his teeth. "The problem being that after about five minutes of slapping us around, Holbek is going to do the math. They want Wolf, but the rest of us, we're tag-alongs. We're expendable--"

"I'll be with you," Hephaestion reminded.

"No, no, I don't think your going with them is a part in the plan we should keep," Zoa said.

Hephaestion and Zoa locked glances.

Zoa said, "It is no longer necessary."

John turned his face to the wall, and very deeply inhaled.

Hephaestion said, "The hell it's not."

"We spoke about risks associated with you rejoining the team, but only briefly because we wanted you present to manage the asset. When we thought the asset was a terrorist."

"I told you he wasn't a terrorist."

"No, he isn't." Zoa sighed. "No, he isn't. Therefore, the risk to the mission caused by your return to the team is no longer acceptable. Bojidar, you were arrested in a public place in a major city."

"It can be managed."

"It doesn't have to be managed if you don't go. Holbek may be fanatical, but it is competent."

Hephaestion's brow wrinkled, and Siris saw his chest rise hard, and fall. "The doctor is a civilian."

Siris thought, Why is he worried about me? "I don't understand. What's the exit strategy?"

Skocz grunted. "Doctor, with stakes this high, you don't let a little thing like the absence of an exit strategy stop you. She's saying everybody is expendable and we win, body count aside, if the planet doesn't go boom. Some of us make it back, that's good, but us getting out isn't an essential element of the plan."

"That may be okay with you, but what about Wolf? He's a civilian, too."

Zoa faced her. "Without the man known as John Manegold, there is no plan. If Holbek didn't want him, we wouldn't be discussing this. It appears Holbek wants John very much. Among humans, John is a fluid telepath. This device has eluded every scanner known to your world and ours, yet it exists and it is here, on this world, and we have very little time to find it. He must make contact with Holbek if we are to get the device and the people who have it."

John flicked a glance at Hephaestion. "Why do you wish to go?"

"You don't know yet what I can do."

"Amen." This was Dance.

"Perhaps I don't, but I think I understand you a little now. By the way, your friend from the Science Commission is right. If you talked to someone who works for my father, that man and his people stayed with you, and they watched you, you just didn't know it. So, the question becomes, is the device as dangerous as you think it is?"

Hephaestion bit down, swallowed thickly.

It was Zoa who spoke. "Yes."

Siris assumed Hephaestion answered in some other way.

"Then I will do," John said to Hephaestion, "what the Science Commission is asking. You, however, cannot come. You were arrested in full view of the public. Everyone else can decide for him-- or her --self."

"I didn't bring you this far just to send you back."

John's expression shifted as though he was, for a brief moment, startled. But then the light sank beneath his skin, and he became stone. "Have you, my brother, lived so very long without companionship?"

Hephaestion, softly, as though the query was made in private and it was in private he intended to reply: "Yes."

"Then I am sorry for you." John allowed an abrupt but meaningful silence, after which he stood up. "The road we want is not through Skaja-Volz, but west through Montinia."

"What's Montinia?" Skocz asked. "Some kind of town? We saw no Montinia on the map."

"Nor will you ever. Montinia will put us on the Razgrada backroads inside two hours. I think our vehicle can manage but several hours upland, that is Serdice and the Goraneg skirt. Unless we find an ATT between then and now, we will have to climb on foot. I tell you this so you can prepare. I will look after everyone who comes along as well as I am able but know that the goddess is a better caretaker of human life than I am. Someone, please, alert me when it is time to leave. I'm going out now for some fresh air." And he left.

-- Next Chapter