Cauldron of Ghosts (32 page)

August 1922 Post Diaspora

“Hell, I’m sorry I asked at all.”

—Stephanie Moriarty, Mesan revolutionary

Chapter 34

Zachariah McBryde had never been able to weep for his brother Jack. He wasn’t sure why, exactly. At first, he’d been too shocked—not just at Jack’s death but at the manner of it. Suicide, committed by a traitor? It was unthinkable.

Eventually, the fact of his brother’s death had sunk in. But to this day, Zachariah had never accepted the explanation given by the authorities.

He’d said nothing, however; made no protest.

Life inside the onion, especially for someone as far into it as Zachariah, was far removed from what most people would have considered “tyranny.” The onion was not governed by democratic principles, certainly. The Detweilers had always been and still were the ultimate authority, much like the family that owned and managed a huge corporation.

But there was more to it than that. The family owners of a firm commanded the loyalty of their employees simply by paying them. The Detweilers did that as well, but the people bound to them in the onion also shared a common vision of humanity’s future. They were dedicated to a cause, a purpose, that went far beyond the simple acquisition of material goods and comforts.

The human race had produced many such ideologically driven and ideologically cohered organizations in its history. Most of them had been religious, most of the rest had been political, and some had been purely social in their orientation. But almost all of them had had one thing in common: united by a determination to persevere over opposition and enmity, they tended to be tightly disciplined and hierarchical. That hierarchy might be selected by democratic methods and guided by an egalitarian ethos, but it was ultimately authoritarian. Or, at least, tended in that direction. A pope is still a pope, even if he is selected by a conclave of his peers.

The Mesan Alignment was more hierarchical and authoritarian than most, by virtue of its own defining principles. There was no more than lip service paid to democratic methods, and none at all to egalitarianism, as you’d expect from a movement based on the principles of genetic superiority and inferiority. Ultimately, the Detweilers ruled because they were the Detweilers—the alphas of the alpha lines. More like a medieval dynasty, in some ways, than anything else.

That said, it was a modern dynasty with a modern, even hyper-sophisticated, attitude toward command and obedience. Members of the onion, especially those in the inner layers, were given a great deal of latitude. Their views were actively solicited and encouraged, not simply tolerated. An outsider—the archetypical alien from another universe, for instance—who observed the interactions of members of the onion as they went about their work, would have found them impossible to distinguish from the interaction of people in a democratic polity guided entirely by legal principles.

Until the ax came down. Then, the differences became clear and stark.

One could put that as crudely as possible. It takes a long time to execute someone in a democracy ruled by law. The Detweilers or their delegated lieutenants could do it in minutes, even seconds—no longer than it took for the order to be transmitted and the wherewithal of homicide assembled.

So, Zachariah had kept his mouth shut about his brother Jack’s supposed treason. The sophistication of the Alignment’s leadership had been demonstrated by their refusal to punish any member of Jack’s family. That had been true even informally. No one had lost a job, been demoted, or been refused later advancement. But open protest—resistance of any kind to the official line—would have been exceedingly dangerous. Quite probably fatal.

For all those reasons—perhaps other reasons, too; it was certainly not something Zachariah was going to discuss with a therapist—he’d never wept for his brother.

Now, as he watched his home planet receding in the viewscreen, he could finally grieve Jack’s death—because he was grieving for his entire family. The rest of them were still alive, true enough. But there was little chance that Zachariah would ever see them again. Now that the final great struggle was at hand after centuries of preparation, no one in the inner layers of the onion thought it was going to be easy—and certainly not quick.

The problem was simple and inevitable, as the leaders of the Alignment had always known it would be. The prerequisite for accomplishing their goal was the dissolution of the Solarian League. Whatever its faults and weaknesses—its many, many, many weaknesses—the League was just too great an obstacle to their purpose, by virtue of its social mass if nothing else.

Early on, the Detweilers had pondered the possibility of using the League as a vessel for the transformation of the species, but they had never found a plausible mechanism for doing so. The League had to go, therefore. But that same immensity meant that great forces needed to be assembled against the League—and very few of those forces could be allowed to understand their own purpose. They were themselves inimical to the Alignment; more so, in many ways, than the League itself.

Leonard Detweiler’s great-great-great-grand-daughter Cecilia had once depicted the problem thusly:
We will bring down the great bison with a pack of wolves. The tricky part is that we don’t control the wolves.

Thankfully, there had been enough room on the slave ship for Zachariah to have a private cabin. At least he was spared the presence of his Gaul keeper. So, as he watched Mesa dwindle in the viewscreen until it was just one bright speck among a multitude, he wept, softly and steadily. What made the tears so bitter was that he had never been able to say goodbye to anyone.

He was still weeping when the ship made its alpha translation and he left the system of his birth. Probably forever. Almost certainly for many years.

* * *

When she came into the living room of their apartment, Stephanie Moriarty’s face was taut and drawn. So much so that her natural beauty was overwhelmed by her own expression.

Cary Condor noticed at once. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m . . . not sure ‘wrong’ is the right word.” She began slowly removing her jacket. There’d been a chill that morning when she left. As she did so, she retrieved something from one of the pockets and held it up.

“I found this in the fish.”

“Oh, my God.” Cary practically whispered the words. She got up hastily and came over to stare at the little chip; so flimsy it was translucent. It looked more like a fish scale than anything manufactured. That was by design, of course.

“I’ll get the reader. Don’t move. Well . . . I mean, don’t . . .”

Moriarty’s expression shifted into something more derisive. Perhaps oddly, that made her look beautiful again. “I
did
manage to get it all the way here without destroying it, you know. I think I can hold on for another few seconds.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. It’s just . . .
Jesus.
I never expected we’d . . .”

“It might be nothing, you know.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Stephanie.”

Cary rummaged around in the drawer where she kept the specialized tablet. She kept it hidden for reasons that weren’t really very reasonable. To the eye, the tablet looked no different than any other. Only a close and careful examination would reveal the unusually small slot where an out-of-the-ordinary chip could be inserted. The only people who would conduct that sort of examination were Mesan security agencies and if they’d fallen into their hands the proverbial goose was cooked anyway.

Whatever a goose was. She finally found the damn thing and held it up triumphantly.

“How could it be ‘nothing’?” she demanded. “Who would put a blank chip in a
bacau
fluke?”

“Oh, gee, let’s see. The Tabbies, for starters. Then there are the Ivas. The Bureau of—well, no, those thugs haven’t got the brains—but there’s always the—”

“Shut up.” Cary took the chip and carefully inserted it into the reader. “If they’d spotted us they wouldn’t be fooling around with something like this.”

“Sure they would. Use us as bait to reel in our confederates. All of whom are dead and missing except Karen, I grant you, but they don’t know that.”

By now, Cary had the necessary codes entered. “Shut. Up.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the possibility that some security agency was playing a longer game than usual. She just didn’t want to think about that while there was still a chance—one hell of a good chance, in her opinion—that—

The message came up and she began reading it off. “Ambassador Jim Johnson.”

Stephanie had her own tablet out. “
The Envoy
by Giacomo ibn Giovanni al-Fulan. Got it.”

“Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow,” said Cary, speaking slowly.

Stephanie had been counting off the words as they were spoken. “Chapter Eleven, got it.” Her half-surly skepticism was gone by now. “This
has
to be from Angus.”

That was a reference to the Havenite agent who’d set up this system, Angus Levigne. The cypher was an idiosyncratic one that he’d devised himself. “It’s not as tight as a one-time pad,” he’d explained, “but it’s less limited, too. Any really good decryption expert could crack it, but not very quickly because there are so many arbitrary variables that you commit to memory.”

In that matter-of-fact absolute-zero way he had, Angus added: “Be easier to just subject you to truth drugs. Speaking of which”—he’d handed them a large vial of tablets—“take one of these at least once a month. They’re a composite designed to counter truth drugs.”

He’d sounded quite pleased. Angus was . . . a little weird. And a lot scary.

* * *

It took a while to finish. When they were done, the two women stared at each other.

“Can we trust it?” Stephanie finally asked.

“Who knows, for sure?” Cary shrugged. “But the way I look at it, somebody would have had to crack Angus himself to get all the variables that make the cypher work. And how likely is that?”

Stephanie chewed on her lower lip. After a few seconds, she said: “To be honest, I can’t imagine it happening at all. I’m pretty sure he could resist torture for . . . well, a long time.”

Cary chuckled. But there was no humor in the sound. “ ‘Long time’ as in . . . ?”

“Really long time. But it wouldn’t matter anyway because he’d be gone way before then. He’s . . . you know.”

“Weird.”

Stephanie’s smile did have some humor in it. “Let’s just think of him as ‘different,’ how’s that? The key point is, yes, I think we can trust it.”

“Yeah, me too. We’ll both have to go, though. The way this contact works, one person can’t do it alone.”

Stephanie looked to the corner where Karen was resting. Sleeping, rather. She slept most of the time now.

“It’d just be for a few hours. And it’s not until tomorrow anyway. She’ll wake up sometime before then and we can explain it to her. So at least if she wakes up while we’re gone she won’t wonder what happened to us.”

“And if we don’t come back at all . . .”

“She’s dead in a few days instead of a few weeks. Way it is.”

As was generally true of seccy revolutionaries on Mesa, both women were awfully hard-boiled themselves. That was the baseline against which you had to measure someone like Angus Levigne. Even by
their
standards he’d been . . .

Weird and scary.