The 97th Step (29 page)

Not that he had any choice.

Twenty-Eight

THERE WASN'T MUCH to do to get ready. There was no deadline, no admonition to be gone before the sun set, but the implication was clear enough: the sooner the better.

What Pen owned could be put into a small bag. A second shroud, that was the extent of his wardrobe.

He had long since recycled his "civilian" clothing. He hadn't gathered much in the way of
things
: he had a reader and a dozen or so marble-sized recording spheres he could call his own; a piece of sculpture Moon had given him, a nude female dancer cast in bronze, not much larger than his hand; pocket tools, which he carried in his utility pouch. His old credit cube, much depleted, but with enough stads still banked to live on for a year or two, provided he was frugal. Small odds and ends.

The things he carried would not weigh him down. The memories were what lay heavily upon him.

Especially when he began to say his good-byes.

He was dry-eyed and numb through most of it. Smiling under his hood, nodding at his teachers. In the kitchen and wine cellar and storeroom and powerhouse, he smiled and nodded, shook hands, embraced some, slapped others on the back. He exercised the ritual of leaving, performed the dance robotically, and he tried to sit
atman
upon his own shoulder to watch it. Tried, and failed. It was hard.

Spiral was harder. They danced around it.

"You know, I'm going to miss you. Pen."

"Yeah. Me, too, you."

"Now I know there was a better way, a more peaceful method, but I'll never forget taking out that Confed quad."

"We had some good times, all right."

"You give 'em hell out there, Pen. If anybody can, it's you. I'm sure it's all for the best."

"Sure, Spiral. You take care of yourself."

In the bonsai garden, among the tiny trees he'd never see reach maturity, he found Agate. They walked among the small and ancient plants. Pen felt a catch in his throat as he realized he might never see this garden again.

Next to a small recycled stream, Agate perched upon one of the three rocks—granite, pumice and quartz—and asked if she might recite a poem for him.

"Yes, of course," he said.

"I didn't write this one," she said. "But I offered to say it."

Pen took a deep breath and let it escape. He didn't ask who wrote the poem before he heard it.

Afterward, he didn't need to ask.

There is no comfort in change—but also no learning in the steady drone of peace There will be no greater sorrow than watching you go—except for watching you grow old and tired here—clarity awaits elsewhere.

It was short, pithy, bittersweet, and he fought to keep the tears from welling as he thanked her. Part of it he understood, part of it still not. But it touched him, nonetheless.

Surprising how little time it actually took to make the rounds. A few hours to close out four years. They were both sad and happy for him, most of them, and he appreciated that, though none of them understood how he felt. No mixture of emotions for him, no joy of leaving. He would have done anything to be able to stay.

Moon was not inside the compound. He didn't need anybody to tell him that, he felt her distance, just as he knew where to go to find her.

He left by the Northwest Gate, and walked north toward the ocean. The sound of the breaking waves droned in the salty, fishy air as he climbed a small hill that overlooked a steep drop to the blue-gray water. There he found Moon, staring out to sea, the wind trying vainly to unravel her wrappings with its chilly and insistent fingers.

He moved to stand next to her. For a long time, neither spoke. Only the wind sang, and its voice was no more than a moan.

After several eons. Moon pointed at the spot on the water a few hundred meters offshore. "That's a Langmuir slick," she said. "Do you know about them?"

"No."

"It's a spot where dust and debris, seaweed and such, collect. An odd circulation habit of surface water under a steady wind. Doesn't seem to matter how hard the wind blows; in anything short of a hurricane, you get that kind of dead spot." Her voice was deliberate, as if she were lecturing to a class.

Pen didn't say anything.

"You wouldn't think that such things would exist. There's a place in one of the Earth's oceans hundreds of kilometers in area where it does that. Called the Sargasso Sea. Old-time sailors used to fear being trapped in the seaweed that collected there."

"Moon—"

Her voice changed. Pain entered it. "That's what this place has become for you. Pen. A Langmuir slick."

She turned to face him. "If you stayed here, you'd only stagnate, spinning in the eddy of our order, going nowhere, learning nothing. You
have
to go."

"No. Don't say anything. I want you to stay. More than almost anything I don't want you to leave. I would have you be here, with me. But if I keep you, you will never be as much as you should be. Some day, you'd blink away the scales and see what I had done to you, and you would hate me for it."

"I'd never hate you," he said.

"You would. And I couldn't bear it. So, what I'm doing isn't particularly noble or altruistic. You're missing a part of yourself, Pen, and I want you whole, more than I want you to stay. They don't teach us about love here. Maybe it can't be taught. I don't know. If I could love you a little less, I could keep you. But I
can't
, Pen. I have enough of my center, and I know the truth of it."

He felt very small in that moment. The universe was too daunting, too hard, too overwhelming to bear.

He could hear the love in her voice, and yet, she was sending him away. There was something wrong with him. He had failed her. He had failed himself, and there was nothing he could do to fix it. Never had he felt so helpless, not as a boy under his father's lash, not when Stoll and Shar had died. In the depths of his drunken odyssey, he had not been so alone as he was right now. He was a man who had found Paradise—twice!—and had been thrown out both times. Once in anger and death, and now again, with love. Why? What god had he offended so, to be punished this way?

What was he going to do?

For once, his sarcastic inner voice remained quiet, even that part of him crushed and silenced under this new weight. He had to find the truth, whatever it was that Moon wanted him to find, no matter how much work nor how long it took, but—how was he going to do it?

How?

Part Three

The Ninety-Seventh Step

The truth waits
 
for eyes unclouded by longing
.

—ANONYMOUS

Twenty-Nine

MOON HAD ARRANGED for him to receive a new credit cube. It identified him as "Pen," and the number of stads so credited was easily twice that in his old account. The name he'd used for the old cube was an alias and unlikely to be in anybody's look-far comp, but according to the new cube, he was a fully accredited member of the Siblings of the Shroud, with all of the rights and privileges attendant thereto.

As far as the Confed was concerned, he was a new man. The brainwave pattern imprinted on the read-only chip imbedded in the cube was almost legitimate, slightly different than that recorded for the twelve-year-old Mwili Kalumu—enough to keep a Confed computer from matching the two on first pass, but close enough so that an encephaloscan would probably be forgiving. Tolerances were pretty slim, but there was a range the machines were programmed to allow.

A new man—but one with the same old dreads.

He busied himself with mundane-tasks as long as he could, but eventually it was time. All that he owned was packed in a bag hung over his shoulder. One of the palliates had been detailed to drive him to the port, a boy who seemed still in his teens. He made Pen feel old.

"Thanks just the same," Pen said. "I'll walk. Might as well go out the same way I came in."

The palliate seemed altogether too respectful, as if Pen were some kind of awe-inspiring figure, and that raised a sad smile under the shroud. If only you knew, boy.

Moon was gone. He had not seen her since they had stood together by the cliff, watching the sea. He reached for some feel of her, but wherever she was was beyond his range to sense. Just as well; a tearful parting scene might undo him completely. Better to remember the Moon of before.

So, with the day's first thunderheads building over him, Pen walked away from the place he had called home for the past four years. As time went, four years wasn't all that long, even in a man's life. He was, by biological reckoning, still young. He had skills and knowledge he hadn't had before, and money enough to keep him for a time. And once again, none of it deadened the echoes inside of him, that empty, hollow feeling.

Down the road he walked, wrapped in an emotional flux as tangible as his clothing. He managed only a few hundred meters before he had to stop and look back.

Gathered inside the gate stood maybe fifteen shrouded forms, watching him.

Pen's indrawn breath was nearly a sob. His teachers and friends had turned out to watch him leave. The sense of what he was losing almost had him then, washing over him like a breaker. He managed to turn away without waving, but he felt a sense of bittersweetness as he began walking again, something he hadn't thought of before.

Maybe they were going to miss him a little, too.

He had attended to all the little details, to keep himself occupied, but he had neglected an important one: Where was he going to go?

True, he didn't have to decide here, since he would only be taking a connecting boxcar to a major port in Australia. Still, sooner or later, he'd need a destination. There was never any question of his staying on Earth. He couldn't be that close and not find excuses to flit back and see Moon and the others. Assuming she would allow it.

He thought briefly of retracing his earlier paths. Going home to Cibule, to see if his father still lived.

Maybe going to Vishnu, even Thompson's Gazelle, to look up Dindabe. But—no. Old paths were just that. He knew on some level there was nothing to be gained that way.

So, which way, O wandering priest?

In the back of his mind, he had a glimmering that he'd played with: Koji. The single planet of the Heiwa System was known through the galaxy as the center for religion. Millions of pilgrims found their way to Koji every year, to study, to teach, to seek out answers to questions beyond logic's ability to adequately cover. If a religion was organized above the stone-age level, it probably had a branch on Koji.

Buddhists, Jesuits, Tillbedjare, Libhobers, Trimenagists, Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers—Koji welcomed them all; more, a de facto truce existed with the Confed—somebody was bright enough to realize that movements with billions of followers might be best left alone as much as possible. Maintaining civil order was difficult enough; fighting religious wars did not greatly interest the Confed. Fanatics would stand until the last man—witness the Battle of Mwanamamke in the Bibi Arusi System, led by Thomas Reserve Shamba and his Right-to-Freedom sect in the late 22nd Century. The Confed had won, but the victory had been pyrrhic. It had been expensive, time consuming and bad press, too. No, the Confed treaded lightly on Koji when it walked there at all, and it watched very carefully for bare and holy toes where it stepped.

So—Koji?

Might as well.

The ship bent and warped normal space, courtesy of the Scales-Waller Augmented Reality Analog Instigation Construct, more popularly known as the bender drive. The math and metaphysics of the drive were both highly unlikely and, according to some, downright impossible, but they had given man interstellar space. Some had it that it was mere illusion, but then some had it that all was
maya
, and in the end, arguing philosophy was mostly a waste of time, illusion or no.

Pen sat at a table onboard the starliner, sipping at ginseng tea, watching a couple try to keep a three-year-old girl occupied. It looked to be a full-time job. Pen had wondered about children, whether to take on the responsibility of them, but he had little confidence in his ability to guide a life other than his own. How could he teach when he had yet to discover the purpose of his own existence?

The little girl managed to slip the controls of her parents. She made straight for Pen.

"Why are you all covered up?" she asked. No guile there, just simple curiosity.

How to explain
that
to a small child?

"Because I'm hiding," Pen said.

"Who are you hiding from?"

"Myself." Saying that spooked him. He hadn't realized how much truth was in that simple statement.

The girl shook her head, disturbing her fine, blond hair. "Won't work," she said. "You can't hide from yourself. You're right there with you."

She's got our number, hasn't she
? came Pen's inner voice.
You can't run and you can't hide
.

The child's mother arrived and dragged the little girl away, murmuring an apology, while carefully appraising Pen's shrouded figure for possible danger to her offspring. The mother could not realize that the child was more dangerous to Pen than he could ever be to her.

One other memorable event happened on that voyage through bent space. Actually, it took place several weeks earlier on a world twenty light-years away, but the news of it only arrived at Pen's ship when it docked for passengers on the way to Koji. Once in realspace, the liner uploaded newscasts and passengers could replay them when they so desired. Pen had been out of touch for a long time, not caring what happened anywhere except on Manus. He sat at a holoproj table and flicked the unit on, to see what the Confed was allowing its subjects to see these days.

The event had been covered in great detail, for the Confed wanted it shown. There must have been a platoon of camera operators working to capture it all.

On the world of Wu, said the voiceover, in the Haradali System, two local factions fought over control of a prime piece of real estate, property used for growing a particular kind of grape that would only flourish in a narrow latitude. The grapes were used in making Timbalee wines, some of the best wines ever devised, according to experts, no matter what vintage you might choose.