A Night Without Stars (85 page)

“Stand by. We're going to teleport you on board. We're going to teleport everyone on board.”

Kysandra's field function scan reported a weird quantum effect establishing itself around her. Then the flaming wreckage of Bryan-Anthony Boulevard vanished.

The habitation dome they'd been assigned on the
Golakkoth
was apparently small by Raiel standards—barely eight kilometers across. Its buildings were cubes and cylinders and hemispheres with narrow paths between, illuminated by colored strips set into the translucent surface. Walking along the gloomy alley, Florian could have sworn part of the darkness around him came from fog that lingered between the high blank walls, except when he waved his hand at the gray wisps they were never there.

His u-shadow guided him around a few more turns, and a doorway opened at the base of a cylinder. Bright white light shone out. The doorway put him in mind of a bussalore hole gnawed into a skirting board.

Three days ago, the inside of the cylinder had been a gloomy grotto with walls that seemed to flow as if they had a sheet of water constantly running down them. A typical Raiel dwelling, Paula told him. Now it was very different. Walls and floors had rearranged themselves—not just their layout, but their texture, too. The cylinder's interior had grown itself into something that resembled a plush human hotel, except it had no windows. Which was why Florian spent as much time as possible standing beside the bottom of the crystal dome, staring at the wonders unfolding outside. The entire Raiel armada was orbiting Ursell, unleashing energies he didn't understand to dismantle the benighted planet and use the debris to build five awesome new structures. DF spheres, Paula called them.

He went up the curving marble stairs to the second floor, where the big lounge had been established. Paula was already sitting at the head of the table, with Yathal standing beside her. Florian had been on board the
Golakkoth
for three days now, and he still felt intimidated by the Raiel. Yathal was as big as a seibear, but that was the only valid comparison to any creature Florian knew. All the crew were warrior Raiel, Paula explained. Presumably that explained why Yathal appeared to have a hide made of obsidian armor with inbuilt twinkling jewels. The Raiel's various tentacles were woven with black threads, and the folds of loose flesh around the back of his head had been groomed out to form a mane of white fans. Oddest of all were the leathery wings folded along his flanks that seemed far too small to allow him to actually fly.

The one time Florian gathered up enough courage to ask the
Golakkoth
's captain about them, Yathal told him they were vestigial, and the Raiel only kept them for tradition and decoration.

Kysandra was sitting beside Paula. She acknowledged Florian with a sly smile and a wink. When he sat beside her, he felt her hand close on his thigh, squeezing playfully. He blushed—as he supposed he always would when she was with him. Since they'd been teleported aboard the
Golakkoth,
they'd spent half their time in bed together, both of them devoted to re-creating the happy few days they'd enjoyed after she'd rescued him from Opole. He knew it wouldn't last, that the voyage home was just another interlude before his life truly began, but that didn't bother him anymore. The Commonwealth was in his future now. A dream made real.

There weren't many others at the table; Ry, of course, and Demitri and Corilla. He'd been somewhat disconcerted by Paula's insistence that Stonal and Captain Chaing be included in their small council, but she wanted alternative viewpoints included. “For a fair representation,” she claimed. Prime Minister Terese was also given a chair, though she'd said very little in their meetings. Florian thought she was still in a state of shock. He could relate to that; the decisions this small council had been making were momentous. That didn't seem to perturb Paula. He was finally starting to realize why Nigel had chosen her to carry his plan forward if he failed.

“If we're all ready,” Paula said.

Roxwolf materialized at the opposite end of the table. The mutant Faller glanced around, keeping his face expressionless. Florian noticed that a lot of his fur was rising, so maybe he wasn't quite so unnerved as his posture was trying to promote. “Is this my trial?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Paula said. “We acknowledge you were genuine in your attempts to side with humans, despite your earlier activities. We will honor that arrangement. However, there is a slight problem.”

“Of course there is,” Roxwolf grunted.

“We exterminated your kind,” Yathal said.

“You did what?”

“Long ago, before this fleet was ever built, the Raiel determined your species was too aggressive. You conquered all the worlds you encountered whose civilizations were not technologically advanced enough to stop you, destroying all the biological life you found without mercy. So we stopped you the only possible way.”

Roxwolf nodded slowly. “But those of us captured by the Void survived your massacre.”

“Yes.”

“And now we're all that's left?”

“Yes.”

“So you're going to finish the job?”

“No,” Paula told him. “I gave my word to the Planters that this situation would be resolved with minimal violence.”

“And in turn we acknowledge our debt to Paula,” Yathal said.

“The Vatni are coming with us,” Paula said, “as are the Macule Units with their precious gene banks. They are already in stasis along with Bienvenido's population. The Raiel are using Ursell's mass to construct colossal wormhole generators. Even so, the voyage home will take several years.”

“We will not permit your species to accompany us,” Yathal said. “We will not turn you loose on our galaxy again.”

“So Bienvenido is yours,” Paula said. “It's far enough away to prevent you from ever posing a threat to us again.”

Roxwolf peeled his lips back. “I can't live on Bienvenido.”

“I know,” Paula said. “So you have a decision to make.”

“What decision?”

“We can repair the distortion that afflicts you,” Yathal said. “We can make you whole again, and return you to Bienvenido. Your kind will never know who you were.”

“Or,” Paula said, “we can download your memories into secure storage. Then when we're back in the Commonwealth, you will be given a human body, or you may transfer directly into ANA. The choice is yours.”

Roxwolf held up his arms, looking from one to the other, from fur to skin. “I am both and yet neither. I know too much, and I am curious; that alone condemns me to my kind, no matter how pure my physical body. Above all, I want to live without fear and without limits. That's all I've ever wanted. So…I choose human.” He grinned his fearsome grin. “Until something better comes along.”

This was the bit Joey Stein welcomed, yet dreaded. The fact he could think at all was welcome. It meant he was alive—which in itself was rather surprising, given his last memories of the crypt under the palace: way too much pain and blood and that psycho PSR officer. Although now he considered his last moments, they were mixed in with another set of memories, of operating within the lifeboat package smartnet and throwing a force field over the Rose Courtyard so that children and parents alike could cower together. Then the sky had darkened as the gargantuan Raiel warship had arrived above Varlan.

His eyes snapped open and he sat up. That was what he was dreading—the abysmally thin force-grown clone body provided by the re-life clinic. Pain and depression for months, attended by well-meaning self-righteous therapists. Too weak to resist their patronizing ministrations.

Except there was no pain, nor even stiffness. He didn't feel hungry or weary. When he brought his hand up in front of his face it seemed perfectly normal, the hand his twenty-year-old self had possessed oh-so-long ago. Before the colony starship flight to another galaxy, when he was so tired of the jaded lives lived by Commonwealth citizens. Before shuttle fourteen's science mission into the Forest, when his body was suffering from a glitched tank yank procedure. Before being caught by Faller-Rojas and forced into contact with the egg, the terror of slowly being eggsumed. Before his uncharacteristically noble suicide to save Laura. Before Nigel's intervention. Before being downloaded into the lifeboat package's smartnet. Before 250 years stuck to a sodding Tree…

Joey blinked and looked down at his new body, which lay naked under a sheet on a bed. He tugged the sheet aside and saw he wasn't some spindly bag of bones covered in tight skin that was all protruding veins. This body belonged to a fit, healthy adolescent, ready to conquer the universe.

Cool! Re-life clones have really come on while I was away.

Now that he was awake and thinking, his u-shadow brought up a host of initialization icons into his exovision.

I'm back in the Commonwealth. Fuck me, we actually made it!

He chuckled. The clinic room was pleasant enough for an institution, all pearl-white plyplastic walls occluding the medical systems. A wide window looking out over a leafy suburb with a broad lake in the distance, triangular sails of big yachts sailing around. Mountains cluttering the far horizon. Another bed next to his, with a bemused youth looking at him.

“Bollocks,” a startled Joey blurted, and tugged the sheet back. “Who are you?”

“Is that any way to greet your fellow jailbird?” Roxwolf asked.

Earth's T-sphere deposited Paula in front the neoclassical Capitole de Toulouse at the center of the city. With a quarter of an hour to go until dawn, the splendid building was illuminated by strategic floodlights, which imbued the region's famous pink bricks with a warm glow. The vast Place du Capitole where she'd materialized was deserted apart from a formation of bots slowly clearing the night's snowfall from the ancient stone slabs.

Chaing stood beside her, his body rocking back and forth from the impact of the teleport. “That's impressive,” he said, staring at the Capitole. “A bit like the Captain's palace.”

“Really?”

“Not as big.” Chaing turned a complete circle. “Where is everyone?”

“Earth has a very small population these days,” she told him. “It was already heavily weighted to the old and wealthy back when ANA was built. Not decadent, just…staid. Younger people were leaving for the newer worlds, so the ones who stayed got older and more conservative. Then they started downloading themselves into ANA. So the physical population declined further. It's holding steady at about sixty million these days.” She waved her hand around the center of the city. “ANA preserves our cultural heritage; the buildings mostly have stabilizer fields, and armies of ANAdroids perform caretaker maintenance on the infrastructure.”

“ANAdroids? You mean like Demitri?”

She gave him a small smile. “Not quite.”

A compact ellipsoid-shaped regrav capsule slipped down out of the gray sky, its chrome-yellow fuselage reflecting the city buildings in weird contortions. A doorway opened in its midsection.

“Come on,” Paula said.

There were only two seats in the cabin. She settled in one and waited for Chaing to sit beside her before ordering her u-shadow to turn the fuselage to full transparency. He gripped the seat as they rose and headed toward the northeast.

“So these houses, they're all empty?” he asked in faint bemusement as they passed over the rooftops.

“Lucky for you and your people,” she said. “I remember after the Starflyer War, when we had to build entire cities on the new planets to house the population of the Lost23 worlds. It effectively bankrupted the Commonwealth for a decade. And that was very basic housing. You've got some of the greatest houses on Earth to choose from.”

“I'm not ungrateful,” he assured her. “I just don't believe anyone wants me as a neighbor.”

“You'd be surprised,” she told him as they passed the city boundary. The landscape below them was dark, revealing little. Not that there was much to reveal, she acknowledged. Earth's rural areas had been encouraged to revert to their naturalistic pre-farming state. Towns and villages decayed and fell to the encroaching vegetation, with only “historically significant” structures and a scattering of private homes remaining. With woodlands finally reclaiming their original vast domains, wildlife also prospered; even previously extinct species had been re-introduced thanks to modern retro-DNA sequencing. Effectively, Earth became a park planet, with all the ecological damage that centuries of rampant industrialization and agriculture had wrought slowly healing.

“This person we're visiting,” Chaing said. “Did you tell him everything about me?”

“Yes.”

“And he still agreed to help?”

“You're not quite as unique as you think, Captain.”

“Don't call me that. The PSR doesn't exist anymore.”

“As you wish.”

“What kind of person is he?”

“Someone who had it a lot rougher adapting to the Commonwealth than you. He'll tell you all about it, I'm sure.”

“That's part of my problem. So many of your citizens have volunteered to counsel us. Millions, almost one for each of us, and from every Commonwealth world. That level of kindness is…I'm not used to it.”

“I know. Culture shock can be overwhelming. Just trust me, and meet him.”

“Of course. But…I am curious why we don't just teleport to this place. I thought you could teleport anywhere on Earth.”

“Almost everywhere. People are entitled to seclusion if they want it. There are many reasons: political, personal. ANA doesn't discriminate, but it does enable.”

Five minutes later, the regrav capsule was approaching a modest valley, barely a couple of kilometers wide, and meandering away to the west with a small river churning away along the center. Thick forests coated the slopes, the denuded deciduous trees and pines glinting pale gold as the rising sun caught the ice and snow clinging to their branches. Several ancient houses were dispersed between the trees and the water, their frost coating making them difficult to distinguish as dawn light seeped across the land. It was the long trails of wood smoke rising from their chimneys that gave them away.

Paula brought the capsule down in a broad clearing, whose tall trees isolated it from the houses. She quickly buttoned up her fur-lined winter coat as she stepped out onto the thick grass. Her breath was white in the still air; it was several degrees colder here than it had been in Toulouse. A narrow path led from the clearing, down the slope to the homes.

“This way,” she told Chaing, setting off. After a moment, he followed.

An old
moulin
stood on a small rise beside the river. Its thick stone walls didn't need any stabilizer field to maintain them, though they'd clearly been renovated at some time in the last century.

Paula walked up to the big wooden door and knocked loudly. It took a while—there was plenty of noise from inside: voices, clattering kitchenware—then the iron latch was lifted and the door opened.

Edeard stood on the worn step, wearing a burgundy-colored dressing gown, framed by a wan yellow light. He grinned in welcome. “Investigator Myo, it's been a while.”

“It has. How are you doing?”

“Pretty good, actually. And you must be Chaing?”

“Yes. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“No problem. Come in. We're about to have breakfast.”

Downstairs was mainly one large room, furnished with old-fashioned chairs and settees and tables and chests. There was no plyplastic or malmetal anywhere, although she did see a holographic projector on top of a dresser; it took a moment to recognize, it was such an old system. A galley kitchen at the far end boasted a big old iron range cooker, with coal glowing pleasantly behind its grill door. The smell of fresh-baked bread filled the whole place.

Paula breathed in deeply. It was a smell that took her all the way back to her own childhood, when her mother had prepared most of the food by hand.

Salrana was standing behind the kitchen counter, filling a copper kettle with water at the white porcelain sink. She gave Paula a quick smile. “Investigator. Tea or coffee?”

“Tea, please. Milk, no sugar.”

“Chaing?”

“Uh, the same, thanks.”

Salrana put the kettle down on the range's hotplate.

“How's Burlal?” Paula asked as she, Chaing, and Edeard sat at the long table in the middle of the room.

“Practicing,” Edeard said with a martyred tone, and pointed his finger at the ceiling.

“Practicing?”

“He'll be a teenager in eight months. He's asleep.”

“Ah, right. Well, it is only just dawn.”

“Everyone in the community gets up at dawn, especially in wintertime,” Salrana said. “We make the most of the daylight.”

“Of course. And how's Inigo?”

“He and Corrie-Lynn are fine,” Edeard said. “They live next door if you want me to get them.”

“Maybe next time.”

The kettle started to whistle. Salrana took it off the hotplate and poured the boiling water into a teapot. Then she came around the counter.

Paula raised an eyebrow. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Salrana said, putting a hand on her bump. “Only two and a half months to go now. She'll be a spring baby.”

“That's lovely.”

“This is a sweet place for children to grow up,” Salrana said firmly. “When they're older they can make their choice about which culture they want to be a part of. Until then they have peace and a gentle community to nurture them. Those are the best values a person can start their life with.”

“Like Ashwell?” Paula inquired.

“Yes,” Salrana agreed. “Just like Ashwell. Or as close as we can get in the Commonwealth. Plus, nobody bothers us here. I'm not having our children grow up as freaks for the benefit of the unisphere and gaiafield. Nobody is going to dream their life.”

“That's over,” Edeard said. “Especially now.” He gave Chaing a long look. “There are a couple of disused cottages farther down the river; a bit dilapidated but…You can stay with us until we make one ready. Projects like that always fire people up around here. It shouldn't take too long.”

“The wonders of Commonwealth technology,” Chaing said sarcastically. “Makes it all worthwhile.”

“One step at a time,” Edeard said. “You can run away into the Commonwealth if you like. It's easy enough to alter your features. Nobody would ever know who you are. Except yourself, of course. And that's the problem, isn't it?”

“Is that what you're offering, to help me forget?”

“No. That's another Commonwealth perk. Any memory can be ripped out. But I don't think that's what you need.”

Chaing shrugged. “I don't know what I need. I used to be certain about everything. The Second Great Transition took that away. I look around at where we are, and I don't see how I can fit in. I'm wrong for the Commonwealth.”

“I know a bit about having people judging you for the things you had to do.”

“Do you?” Chaing asked skeptically.

“Oh, yes. I did things that were necessary at the time—terrible things—and nobody ever forgets. I believe this little valley might be able to help you come to terms with your past. We live a life without the complications of the Commonwealth mainstream here. Time and understanding are our healers. One day even I might be able to consider leaving.”

“I killed someone,” Chaing said bluntly. “Someone I knew, someone I…liked. She was very similar to me—just opposite. She's what I see when I look into a mirror. There might have been another way, but I just couldn't let her win. Bienvenido would have Fallen if she had. So I did what I had to. It's not what I am. And that sets me apart from everyone.”

Edeard smiled in sympathy. “I learned a long time ago that sometimes, to do what's right, you have to do what's wrong. Perhaps I can teach you that.”

Ry and Anala had to take a commercial starship to Orakum; the External world was a long way outside the network of wormholes that linked the Inner worlds of the Intersolar Commonwealth. It took three hours to fly the forty-six light-years from Balandan, the closest planet with a wormhole. Three hours in a small cubicle together, with no viewport. However, the gravity was variable, from one point seven Earth standard (the heaviest H-congruous world ever settled) to zero. They set it to zero.

A regrav capsule took them from the starport out across a continent that was still mostly pristine hills and plains, devoid of human settlements. Finally, it dived down through the spindly clouds. The house was easy to see—a plain white circle with glass edges, standing on a central pillar that was also glass-walled. The gardens extended around it for acres in every direction, looking strangely unkempt and boasting several small stone ruins. They landed in the shade of some giant rancata trees, whose reddish-brown leaves cast a gentle dapple.