Infinite Day (65 page)

So on the
Sacrifice
, time passed. Only the artificial raising and lowering of light levels announced a day's arrival and departure. Merral felt that without this—and the deliberate anchor points of meals, worship meetings, and entertainment events—the time would have just smeared into an unbroken span of grayness.

Merral soon realized that the mood on the ship was very different from what it had been on the outward journey. For one thing, there were twice as many people. And for another, the
Sacrifice
was so much larger that it was harder to find people on over a thousand meters of corridors spread over three levels. Fortunately, someone managed to get the diaries of the delegates back into full working order so that everybody could be contacted without too much trouble. Another change was the absence of the military training there had been on the outward journey. For better or worse—and Merral was unsure which it was—the
Sacrifice
was now a more civilian ship.

The gray, purposeless phenomena of Below-Space were just as prevalent as they had been, but now their threat seemed muted; they brought with them much less sense of menace.

As the first week passed and life slipped into a routine, Merral detected a growing feeling of relief on the ship that sometimes edged into an air of relaxation. Yet despite this, he found himself personally troubled. The presence of both Isabella and Anya seemed to be a constant reminder of his failings in the area of relationships. But deeper matters also troubled him.

One day, Luke cornered him and steered him into an unused room full of furniture. “Merral, what's the problem?” Luke asked with concerned eyes.

After some prevarication, Merral said, “I have questions, Luke. I'll be honest.”

“Such as?”

Merral moved a finger through the dust on the desk he was leaning against. “Luke, we lost two men back there. Three, if you include Azeras. We needn't have.”

There was a patient, sympathetic look. “And whom do you blame for that?”

“Well . . . the envoy could have prevented the deaths. Yes, I'm grateful that he appeared. Very grateful that he dealt with the enemy forces. But . . .” His voice tailed away.

“But he could have stayed? Or gone with us to the end?”

“Yes.” Merral nodded in the direction of the freezer room where the bodies were stored. “And those two would not have died.”

“So, basically, you're asking the oldest question.
Why
?”

“Yes . . . I suppose so. Why, having saved us in one situation, did he not save us in another?”

Luke stroked the pale gray scar on his cheek. “You are honest enough to realize that the
he
you refer to is God? The envoy is merely his servant.”

“Yes. But what's the answer?”

Luke shrugged. “There are no easy answers. You could ask a similar sort of question at the very highest level. Why did God create the universe, knowing evil would occur? Why didn't he redeem the cosmos as soon as evil entered? Why has he allowed thirteen thousand years to elapse since the triumph of the Cross?”

Merral made no answer. Outside he could hear people walking by. Finally, he said softly, “Tell me
why
.”

Luke sighed. “I can't. In this life, we are given no real answer.”

“And there are no hints of answers?”

“Only the traditional ones. That we will know one day. That he does these things for his glory. I suppose that means that the darkness somehow enhances the light.”

“You mean that the deaths of Ilyas and Slee in some way heighten God's mercy to the rest of us?” Merral heard the skepticism in his voice.

Luke frowned. “I wouldn't express it like that. I don't know how you can express it without sounding trite or banal. But light needs darkness to show its glory.”

“I find that unsatisfactory.”

“Of course.” Luke gazed at him with sad eyes. “Maybe he withholds the answers to remind us that he alone is God.”

“Perhaps.”

Luke seemed to stare into a corner for a moment. “Merral, I am not immune from such questions. But if we understood God, we would
be
God . . . or greater.”

“I suppose so,” Merral said and left it at that.

But the difficulties had not gone away.

With the reduction in military preparation, there was more free time on the return voyage. Those on board the ship occupied themselves in different ways, from sketching to juggling to crochet. Despite carrying a greater workload than most, Merral found himself with time to spare and so began slipping back to his private world of the castle tree. He found it increasingly engrossing and was soon spending well over an hour a day immersed in his make-believe world. Convinced that he now had a viable organism, he began to turn his focus to the challenge of making his tree breed. He created winged seeds that, on hot days, fell out from the outermost branches, glided away, and were then carried high by thermals to drift away for hours or even days. But he found that too many of the glider seeds were falling to the ground in dry soils, and he began to experiment with ways of making seeds that would land only on warm, moist soil. In the end, he created seeds with cells on their undersides that were sensitive to water vapor and to what, outside Below-Space, would have been the color green. When the glide path took the seeds over ground of just the right color and an adequate humidity, the wings detached, allowing the seed to fall to the ground.

Pleased as he was with his progress, Merral sometimes found himself concerned by the amount of time he spent tending and endlessly fine-tuning the giant tree. A defense came easily.
I need an escape. Here, I relax. My artificial trees are the only real nature we have in these ashen worlds of Below-Space.
Yet he recognized that ultimately, the big attraction of this world was that here things were simpler.
Here, if I make a mistake, I can just restore a previous version and move on. Here, Slee and Ilyas do not die. Here, I am not faced with Isabella and Anya. Here, there is no war.

And so he continued to visit the simulation.
After all
, he told himself,
it doesn't affect my duties as mission commander.

Vero, utterly engrossed with his Augmented Library, barely noticed his friend's preoccupation.

“Not quite the sum of all human knowledge,” he said quietly to himself once as he stared at the gleaming cube, “but pretty close to it.”
And my task is somehow to master it
.

For hours on end, stopping only briefly to visit the bathroom or get a glass of water, he pored over the data, cross-checking and annotating files. Every so often he would copy some piece of information into an ever-growing compilation.

Sometimes he would read for an hour only to realize that he had learned absolutely nothing, and his spirits would fail him. Then he would suddenly stumble across some nugget of knowledge on the Krallen, or the lord-emperor, or the structure of the fleet, and he would see how worthwhile it all was.

Vero's studies ranged forward and backward in time. He now had files that went back a long way; accounts—not all in agreement with each other—of the great conflict that had ended the Rebellion. (Not, of course, that it was ever called
that
in any of the Freeborn accounts.) He even found narratives that went back before the Rebellion, which gave William Jannafy's version of the great debates that had split the embryonic Assembly. Comparing them with the Assembly accounts he had long known gave Vero much cause for thought.

The only sources of knowledge he did not consult were the books he had acquired from the priest's room. He had glanced at them, and what he saw had so bemused and appalled him that he'd simply wrapped them up in black cloth and put them away under the bed. He resolved that he would look at them again only when he had utterly exhausted all the possibilities of conventional knowledge.

Ten days into the journey, Luke came in to see him, bearing two steaming mugs.

“Vero, you missed the coffee break.” He handed over a mug and lowered himself onto the bed, the only spare space in the room. “I thought I'd better come and chase you down.”

“Oh, is it that time?” Vero made a slightly apologetic gesture to the wallscreen, which showed a large technical drawing. “Thank you; I got engrossed. There's a lot here on the Allenix.”

Luke squinted at it. “Not my sort of engineering. Looks like what would be the nervous system in a human.”

“It is.”

Luke's gaze turned to Vero. “And is your knowledge useful?”

Luke is worried about me; that's why he's here.
“Very much.” Vero wondered whether or not to tell Luke about the fact that he had just found out how to access Betafor's internal data. He decided not to.
She may be listening.
“And, Luke, there's a lot more where that came from. On the lord-emperor, for a start.”

The chaplain gave him an encouraging look. “Tell me about him. He is a puzzle. I was expecting someone far more . . .” He shrugged. “
Awesome
? Maybe. In appearance, he seemed the most ordinary of men. But then, appearances deceive.”

“Yes. H-he is an enigma. Even, I think, to his own people. There are mysteries about him. Yes, he is used by the powers. But he has achieved extraordinary things, he possesses an extraordinary energy, and he is utterly r-ruthless. He punishes failure without mercy.”

Luke cradled the cup. “What drives him?”

“Something very deep and very dark.” Vero paused, trying to express something he felt was inexpressible. “Nezhuala reminds me of Jannafy. There is the same hunger for knowledge, whatever the cost. The same hatred of boundaries. The same desire to go further than he ought.”

“The enemies of God's people have always resembled each other; the Devil is not very inventive. Are there any differences from Jannafy?”

“Yes. History never repeats itself exactly. He is a harder man. Jannafy probed and speculated and then—reluctantly, I think—rebelled. This man has gone further. I think he could kill every man, woman, and child in the Assembly without losing a moment's sleep if he felt it would serve his purposes.”

“Do you think he is human?”

Vero found himself staring at a blank wall. “Luke, I have no idea. His origins are obscure. The records talk a lot about gene-engineering of humans; so that is a real possibility. Did someone, in the end, create a monster?” He turned to Luke. “What do you think?”

There was a silence before Luke spoke in a tone of somber certainty. “Oh, I have no doubt: he's human.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Vero, as you admit, such men have appeared before. Nezhuala is just the latest, and perhaps the worst, of his kind. Certainly the most powerful. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. Or suns.”

The silence between them returned and endured for some time as they drank their coffee. Then Luke gestured at the screen. “You're working long hours on this.”

As I expected, he's concerned for me.
“I th-think it needs doing. We desperately need knowledge. Knowledge allowed us to defeat the Krallen. Knowledge gained us this ship.”

Luke made no answer but just stared at him, and Vero found that his defensiveness had deepened. “Wh-what I have here is a vast database on our enemy. I know where he comes from, more or less. I know what he wants, and I know his forces. If we can get this—” he reached out to stroke the cube on his desk—“to Earth, it may make all the difference.” As he spoke, Vero remembered the books of the priest that lay under his bed. He felt a sudden sharp pang of guilt.

“I can see the logic,” Luke said, but Vero sensed concern, rather than conviction, in the chaplain's face. “And have you found anything yet that will help us defeat them?”

“No. Not yet. But, Luke, for the first time, we have access to both Dominion and Assembly data. I can put these things together. It is a potent cocktail.”