The 97th Step (27 page)

Pen thought about his reply, composed the layers of speech and action, and smiled under his shroud. He said, "I feel quite well. Brother Cube." His fugue-intent was:
No, nothing bothers me, honored teacher
.

"Good to hear. I had thought you looked a bit tense."
Really? I still don't think so. But 1 defer—for
now
.

"Well, I am testing for my next layer in a month, perhaps I am a bit nervous about that."
Nope, I'm not
nervous about anything
. A lie, and blatant, because he could see the old man smile under his hood, not buying it for a minute. Cube didn't even need to speak.
That wasn't very subtle. Pen. Surely you can
do better
?

Pen felt very much out of his depth. It was worse than learning a new language, because it was so encompassing. He could see how easy it was to get lost, and this was the simplest of conversations.

Maybe his idea of trying to find out things from Moon by this method was not all that clever. She was not as good as Cube, but she was far advanced in this game over Pen. He remembered the conversation she had had with Dindabe, what seemed like half his lifetime past. They had been dancing fugue, and he had missed it, save for the faintest of suspicions that something was going on. How had Dindabe known fugue? It didn't matter. He had known, somehow, and that was how he had passed the then-Ferret off to Moon, Pen was now certain of it. It had seemed magic at the time.

"You seem pensive," Cube said.
Have I lost your attention, Pen
?

Pen was at a loss. Fugue required at least as much concentration as the Ninety-seven Steps,and by wandering off mentally, he had lost the thread.

"Uh," he began, "uh…"

Cube laughed. That needed no fugue to translate.

Damn.

Integratics.

Here was another subject, one even more slippery than fugue. The butterfly-and-tomado aspect of it seemed unlikely to Pen, when first he began to study it. That events so small
here
could eventually connect and cause things so much larger
there
seemed altogether unrealistic. If ever a god wished to construct a complicated dance, surely this theory was it. Electronic tarot cards or a fiberoptic gel crystal ball seemed to make as much sense.

According to the theory, everything affected everything else, and if one looked long and hard enough, one would eventually see the connection.

In Pen's mind, stars might burn down and die while he looked for some of the connections.

The teachers were fond of using colorful metaphors in describing the science, if science it was. They talked of spinning disks, of expanding balloons, and of fossil footprints in rock. It did not take Pen long to realize that even a basic understanding (not to even speak of mastery) of integratics would require as much as or more time than fugue. Statistical analyses had to be coupled with sociobiological projections; politics with troop movements; the latest galactic music trends with the literature of a hundred years past.

And all of these had to connect to each other. The resulting picture, if indeed there was one, was so large as to be outside Pen's scope of vision. He could see pieces now and then, and a major example used by his teachers was, he had to admit, quite astonishing:

On Maro, a low-level watchman fell asleep while monitoring a safety computer for a crystal mine. During his slumber, a gas leak occurred, pressure built up, and there was an explosion that killed six men and destroyed sixty-nine mining dins.

This mining disaster on Maro caused an immediate shortage of compounds used in making densecris on the sister world of Nazo, the result of which was a drop in stock values of a major manufacturing concern. Said concern scurried to raise the stock price by engaging in quasi-legal and illegal transactions, got caught at it, and thus wound up causing a shipload of Confed auditors to bend to Maro from Earth.

This ship's engines malfunctioned upon leaving subspace, and the ship exploded, killing all onboard.

One of the auditors on the destroyed ship was the lover of the holoproj star, Kerri Cherry, who, in a fit of depression, jumped off a building in Tokyo.

Unfortunately, Cherry's leap ended on the roof of a chauffeured aircar carrying the Supreme Commander of Confederation Ground Forces, Carstair Immeler. The armored car crashed, the S.C.'s restraint system failed, and he was splattered all over the inside of his vehicle, quite dead.

Immeler's death caused a scurry of political and military activity as the potential successors fought to be chosen, resulting in the assassinations of two Over-Befalhavares by poison, and a mysterious disappearance of a Systems Marshal.

In the end, the new S.C. picked was Pram Abel Reilly, a Confed hard-liner, known as the Hammer. One of the Hammer's first actions was to reinterpret the Confed Standing Orders about rebellion and treason.

During a peaceful anti-Confed demonstration at Macumba University on Mason, a handful of students carried placards in front of the campus security building. Reilly ordered his local commanders to stop them. As these things sometimes do, it got out of hand. Violence escalated. Rocks and bottles were thrown, shots fired.

Most of the student body, irate over the deaths of their fellows, stormed over the campus and occupied several major buildings.

Troops moved in with riot gas.

Somebody stole a shipment of military weaponry, carbines, and the students started shooting back.

It was time for some serious negotiation, but the Hammer decided to bring things to a quick end—by using tactical nukes. For all practical purposes, the university was destroyed in the ensuing explosions, along with more than twelve thousand students, two hundred professors, five hundred support staff, and more than a thousand local residents. Not counting Confed troops, whose casualties were kept secret.

An object lesson, Reilly said, it will make the dissenters sit up and take notice, by God.

It had certainly done that. If the Confed had seemed asleep, the action against the students had shown that awakened, the wrath of the beast could be mighty. Blind, maybe, but nonetheless effective for that.

So, a man falling asleep on one world might be said to be responsible for the deaths of thousands on another world, not to mention a new policy of Confederation repression throughout the entire civilized galaxy.

Butterfly and tornado, indeed. Hindsight showed it, but how in any kind of rational galaxy could anybody
begin
to predict something like that in advance? It sounded to Pen like mysticism, pure and simple. He could see the linkage only when shown from the now, and moving backward.

And had they spotted that one in advance? Not precisely, but they had managed to get glimmerings of something like it.

At that, his teacher had wandered off into charts and numbers again, and while fine in theory, it sounded like so much mumbo-jumbo to Pen in actual practice. According to their projections, which admittedly were still sketchy, something of major galactic importance loomed out there somewhere. And somewhen.

So far, the best computer-augmented crunchings had narrowed it—whatever
it
was—to one of four stellar systems. As for time, well, they had that down to a mere hundred years—plus or minus fifty or sixty.

Precision was not their forte at this stage of the game, Pen thought. But he did not say that aloud.

Throughout the complex studies, Pen was still, by and large, a happy man. He had progressed to the Overshroud, and now wore the First Layer, the gi. He had only to gain the utility belt, the
yuyo obi
, and the
manto
, the cloak, to be a full-fledged Sibling.

And there was Moon.

As he got better at fugue, there were times when Pen considered asking about the destruction of the Confed rep's ship. But, as time passed, the event grew dimmer. His link with Moon strengthened, and he could usually tell where she was in the compound simply by intuition, the same sense that had led him to her in the swamp that first time. His exercises in HSP began to work more often than not, although mostly when it was Moon with whom he practiced. Not magic, but still something he had trouble understanding.

Together in bed, Pen and his teacher were a tangle of passionate limbs, tingly and warm, and hearts pounding. There was, he figured, too much joy there to risk by overturning old rocks. Rationalization, sure, but why the hell not? His life had been full of dark places—was it so much to ask that he allow himself to stay in the light as long as he could? Wouldn't any reasonable man do the same?

So the time went, Pen learning, loving, and content for the second time in his life. Not every man got another chance. He was willing to stay here studying for the rest of his life. It was simple, but he was learning that the good things were. He didn't need a pleasure condo on Vishnu to be happy.

He had everything he needed right here.

Twenty-Six

PEN LAY IN Moon's bed next to her, sated and comfortable. A night bird chittered outside in the warm darkness. The only light came from the power control panel on Moon's desktop computer console, green and red diodes that gave the room a dim, ghostly glow. The scent of musk lay heavy in the air.

"You're happy, aren't you?" she said.

He grinned at her, barely able to make out her face under the panel's sensor lamps. He could see faint reflections mirrored in her eyes. He started to say something flip, but at the last moment, realized it was a serious question. "Yes," he said. "I'm happy."

"Why?"

He wasn't ready for that one. Now he did try a joke. "Why? Have you so little self-confidence? No mirrors around?"

Moon did not speak to that. The silence stretched uncomfortably, and Pen felt as if he had somehow disappointed her. He tried to make amends. "Look at all that I have. You are a very special woman, Moon. And all this"—he gestured with one hand, taking in the compound and the totality of the Siblings—"it's everything a man could wish for."

"So, as long as you have me and the order, you're happy." It was not really a question.

He imagined sharpness in her tone, felt her displeasure. What was wrong? Was she trying some kind of fugue on him? His belly clutched at itself in cold fear. "Have I done something wrong, Moon?"

Another long silence fell upon them, as tangible as a blanket. Then, "No, not you. I have done something wrong." She rolled up onto one elbow and faced him. He copied her motion. She said, "Before and after you practice sumito, do you do your meditations?"

"Certainly."

"What do you feel when you meditate?"

He was at a loss. What was she after? "Uh, well, I feel a sense of calmness, of—of—relaxation—"

"Really?"

He paused. She wasn't going to be put off by anything other than truth. "Sometimes. Sometimes, I don't feel anything. I wonder what we're going to have for lunch, I think about you, I worry about a cramp in my foot. All of us have distractions, you taught me that."

"But when the meditation is going well, when you get lost in it, what then, Pen? What do you feel then?"

He was confused, afraid, and he didn't know what she wanted him to say. "I don't understand."

She leaned back, and sat up, looking down at him. "What is the most important thing in your life?"

He took a deep breath. That one he could answer, no question about it. "You are," he said.

Moon reached out and put her hands on the sides of his face. Her touch was gentle, loving, and somehow, sad. She said, "Forgive me for that, Pen. We all have our flaws, and mine has been a blind spot where you are."

"Moon, I don't understand. Why wouldn't that make you happy? To know you are the most important thing in my life? I love you!" He sat up, shaking the gel pad of their bed, and reached for her. She came into his arms, unresisting, and hugged him tightly. It was all right, whatever it was, they could work it out—

"I love you, too," she said. "But not nearly as well as I should have. Not nearly enough."

She would say no more. They made love again, and her passion seemed undiminished, but there was a core of sadness within her he could not touch. What was wrong? What had he done? In that few minutes, he had gone from being almost unbearably happy to feeling an almost absolute dread.

Somehow, he had fucked up, and he had the conviction that it was going to cost him Moon. He hadn't known what love was before, and now he did. Or thought he did. Given what others said about it, and what he had read, what he felt for her had to be love. But that was threatened, all in an instant. How could that be? What had he done wrong?

She put him to work in the wine cellar under the Stores building. There, Pen learned the ancient art of riddling, the manual turning of wine bottles.

His teacher was Bolt, a solid priest of maybe sixty, gone gray by the look of the hair on the backs of his hands, and as efficient at small movements as any man Pen had ever seen. One had to be, he learned, to be a riddler.

The cellar was dimly lit, the overhead lamps giving out no more than a soft glow that barely allowed one to move safely among the rows of aging wine bottles.

"We make only about a hundred and fifty cases of sparkling wine a year," Bolt said, as he led Pen down a dusty corridor. "Eighteen hundred bottles. Use three different kinds of grapes for the press. Can't call it champagne, that's only allowed in one of the old Euro districts, but it's the same method. Yeast eats the sugar right in the bottle, makes alcohol, and dies. That's where we come in. The dead yeasts and sediment have to be removed."

The two of them reached a turning in the corridor. Rounding it, Pen saw a different row of racks. These were angled so the bottles pointed down at about forty-five degrees, bottoms up.

"Here's how it works," Bolt said. "Each bottle has to be turned, every hour. See the pulse-paint on the outer bottles?"

Pen nodded. The top row of a dozen bottles had small specks of glowing orange on the outer rims of the two outermost hot-ties. The paint was at six o'clock, throbbing softly to its timed bacterial pulse.