The 97th Step (33 page)

"And that's our job? Bootstrapping humanity?"

"Just so."

"We're supposed to wipe out the Confed." It was not a question.

"In a manner of speaking, yes. It might be by education and evolution, it might be by revolution. We aren't sure. What we are certain of is when there's a sword hanging low over your head, it is impossible to stand up and look around."

Pen thought about it. Certainly he had learned about the evil that the Confed did, directly and otherwise.

No argument that the Confederation as it stood was a bad thing. But it was huge! How did an order the size of the Siblings expect to
do
anything about it? A gnat against a dinosaur?

His anger, meanwhile, was unabated.

"You manipulated me. You, and… Moon."

"Indeed. When there is a job to be done, the proper tool must be utilized to do it correctly."

"So that's what I am. A tool."

"There is no need to be bitter, Pen. We are all tools. Each of us has a purpose. You did not know yours.

We strived to offer you one."

"So you twisted me, warped me, tricked me!"

"You tricked yourself, Pen. We only gave you the opportunity to learn how to be a part of something larger than yourself. You have wanted that since you left home. You have said as much."

"To Moon. Not to the Siblings, but to Moon! I loved her. I still love her."

"No. She loves you. That's why she has been helping you. You only
think
you love her."

Pen glared at Von, his anger riding high and hot in him. "What the fuck are you talking about? What do you know about it?!"

Von's answer was soft, almost too low to hear. "You can't love another unless you love yourself. And you can't love yourself until you know who you are. You haven't discovered that yet, Pen. Otherwise, why would you be here, with me? You are still looking for answers."

"Fuck the answers!" His voice must have carried to the sentries, for they both stared at him. With effort, Pen lowered his speaking volume. "How can you know that?"

"Your focus has always been elsewhere. You told Moon she was the most important thing in your life."

"She told
you
that?" Pen's anger was swallowed by a surge of weariness. His and Moon's intimate talk, words given while lying naked together, and Von knew them. He felt betrayed, felt suddenly as gray as his shroud. How could she?

"Before Moon, there was the dancer, and your partner in crime. You were happy when you were with them."

"Yes. I was."

"But Pen—
have you ever been happy when you were alone
?"

Pen stared at a snow drift, piled against a plastcrete wall. Sunlight sparkled from crystals, tiny bits of silver against the white. His anger steamed, but he listened.

"As a boy on Cibule?" Von continued, his voice still very quiet.

Pen's voice matched Von's. "No. Not then."

"As a lane runner?"

"Sometimes, when Gworn and I first got together—" He stopped, realizing what he was saying. With Gworn. Not alone.

"As a thief?"

He fought to remember. With Shar Li, with Shanti… Then, "Yes, I can recall a time when I was happy alone."

"Really?"

"I remember a moment on Vishnu, I was on the walkway, by myself. I had just left Shar Li, I was on my way to see Stoll."

"And what were you thinking about?"

"Paradise. I had a friend and a lover and such a beautiful world as Vishnu…" He trailed off again, realizing what Von meant. He had been alone, but his thoughts were of things outside himself. Jesu be damned.

"And at the island on Earth, I had Moon, the others, the ritual of work and learning," Pen said.

"You begin to understand."

Yes. He did. Always, his happiness rode on another's shoulders. If Moon was pleased with him, he was happy. When he did the Ninety-seven Steps, if she said his performance of the Braided Laser had been correct, or the transition from Neon Chain into Vacuum Cage had been smooth, he was secure—in pleasing her. And when he was working, intent on accomplishing a given task, he didn't think about it at all. Even the thrill and tightness of handling a gun required that external focus. He felt cold, suddenly, but not from the air around him. It came from within. So simple. How could he have missed it all this time?

"What difference would it make, opposing the Confed?" he asked. "I would still be doing someone else's task. Doing what I had been led to do."

"No. This time, you have a choice. We sharpened you and gave you a direction, but the choice must be yours, and it must be conscious. You can take another path, live any way that you choose. Your will is your own. While we hope you see the lightness of it, what we want—both Moon and I want—is for you to achieve your own goals, no matter what they turn out to be."

"Are you telling me Moon wouldn't be disappointed if I turned away from this?"

"If Moon thought that joining the Confed and
opposing
us was what you
truly
desired, she would be happy for you. You see, most of the time, Moon knows who she is. She can love another
because
she knows. She wants the best for you. Anyone who truly loves another wants the best for his or her beloved, even if it excludes the lover in the end."

"You really believe that?"

Von nodded. "I
know
that. That's why I could smile at the thought of Moon with another lover. It was making her happy, and that's what I want."

"No shit?"

Von paused for a moment before answering. "There are times when it's harder to maintain that purity than other times. I'm not a saint, only a man. But I try."

"It's still hard for me to believe."

"You might not be able to control what you think or feel," Von said, "but you
can
control what you do. I'm not perfect, don't claim to be. When I'm centered, I'm fine. When I'm off, I'm off. That's the way the game is played. I keep trying, though, and that's the important part. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. That's the way of it."

Pen nodded, but did not speak to that. There was a lot here to think about. Things he hadn't ever wondered about before. He had no long-term goals, save to get back to Moon. Listening to Von, he understood that goal to be out of his reach. Moon would not accept him as an extension of herself. Until he learned about his own center, she would not have him. And after he learned…?

In a moment of clarity he knew. Were he centered, he would not
need
Moon. The choice to return would be no less important, but it would not be all-consuming.

What was it Von kept harping about in his teaching? To achieve a want, you had to give it up?

Intellectually, he understood that; emotionally and, he guessed, spiritually, it still didn't make sense; still, he had a stronger feel for it in this moment than ever before, that idea of nonattachment. As though the clouds had parted for a moment and allowed a single ray of sunlight into the darkness. He could almost see it. Almost.

But—what was to be done? Should he join with Von in his quiet war against the Confed? Rescuing holy teachers and passing on bits of wisdom to fools such as himself?

No, that wasn't his path. He was a loner, had always been so, despite his attachments to others. Fighting the Confed might be worthwhile, he knew that, but not Von's way. He would have to find out how to do that on his own.

Pen glanced up at the two soldiers, who had turned away from the shrouded priests. No problem there, they must have figured.

Maybe they were wrong, he thought.

Maybe they had turned their backs on the very man who could topple the Confed like a laser cutter slices through the thickest tree. For an ambition, he could do worse. To be the man who brought down a corrupt and repressive governing system. Maybe not the worst rule men had ever lived under, but certainly one that deserved to be changed.

Now there was a goal.

It felt
right. No matter that Moon and Von had manipulated him into it. Hadn't he been thinking the same thing earlier, about getting to the top of the mountain? Trek or flitter, what did it matter if the end
did
justify the means? It did that sometimes. Not always, perhaps, but in this case, maybe, just maybe, it did.

He looked at the representatives of the Confed, secure in their invulnerability, then back at Von, impassive behind his shroud. He could still search for that sense of inner peace, but he could also do other things along the way. After all, God was patient. God could wait.

Odd how such major changes in a man's life could come about so quickly, based on such flimsy things as feelings.

In the flick of an eye, he made his decision. A new direction, bam, just like that? Yes. Just like that.

Damn.

Thirty-Three

SO PEN LEFT, perhaps not certain that he finally knew his path, but convinced he at least had a valid reason for moving. The Confed was an evil thing, and illusion or not, according to the rules of the cosmic game, part of
his
reality. Therefore, he was justified in doing something about it. What? Why, he would bring it down, a simple enough goal. Not an easy task, but then few things worth doing were easy. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, after all, and one against billions was certainly a stretch, for any man.

Despite that, he felt confident. He would do it. He had learned skills, he could learn others, he could find the way. For the first time in his memory, he had a real goal. That meant something.

What to replace it with? Well, that might be harder, but by the time he got to that point, he was sure he could figure something out.

He got a job tending bar on Hadiya. The Shin System was one of the majors, even if Hadiya was one of the less advanced of the six worlds in it. He built and served drinks in a spaceport pub called the Nocturnal Eye, and he spent his off-time fomenting revolution. His converts were mostly students, the young and idealistic, and they knew him only as Mwili.

Once away from the pub, he had a formidable disguise: he wore a throat inducer that changed his voice, and a thin-layered skin mask. More important, he used Von's trick—he left his shroud at home. Anybody who knew anything about the Siblings knew they never went unshrouded in public. Pen still shook his head when he thought about Vaughn/Von. He had never suspected, and he had
known
the man under the layers of near-living
kawa
.

He studied the subject of revolution. He read political texts, ranging from Mao Zedong and Machiavelli on old Earth to Carlos Perito on Alpha Point, to Lord Shamba and his doomed army; he watched holoprojic program balls on revolution, dug from dusty library sockets; he began to learn the mechanics of guerrilla war. It was not so much shooting as ideological conversion. He had to convince people that the Confed was evil, which should be no problem; more, he had to convince them they should
do
something about it, and that might be a bit tougher. He was confident.

The pub he worked in was seldom without a contingent of troopers, either waiting to ship out or in a holding pattern on Hadiya itself. There were others who frequented the Nocturnal Eye, men and women who spent a lot of time looking over their shoulders. To all of them, Pen listened.

"—damn uplevels twat thinks she knows it all," said one soldier over his spiked wine. "Just because she's a fucking
officer
. Well, she wasn't so know-it-all when we were rolling around in bed together."

Pen nodded, pouring the man more wine. "On the house, trooper," he said. "Man like you deserves a free one."

And likely a man like you won't be around much longer, bragging about sleeping with a superior officer.

Either she would take care of it or the Confed military would.

"Goddamn straight, pal. Thanks."

The man spilled half of the free drink, sloshing it all over his uniform as he tried to down it. Drunk. But that was okay with Pen. Drunks were a great source of information. The soldiers had a word-of-mouth comline that was faster than White Radio, and all kinds of classified scat got into it. And what drunk trooper couldn't trust a tender who gave him free drinks?

"—yeah, well, the fucking uplevel toad heads is doing it to us again," the soldier continued, "spacing us to squash some kinda student unrest on a dinky wheelworld in the Bibi Ah-whachamaeallit System."

Pen nodded, and added more free liquor to the man's glass.

Propaganda, his for the taking. Good agitprop was better if it could be gotten before the public media started chewing it. It made a would-be revolutionary feel like he or she was one up on the enemy to know things in advance.

So far, his revolutionaries had only printed radical pamphlets and pulse-painted graffiti on a few Confed walls. A gnat flitting around a dinosaur, to be sure, but a start. A message to the dissident students on the wheelworld—he'd have to pry the name out of the drunken soldier carefully—from their brothers and sisters on Hadiya would create a sense of solidarity. He hoped. Whether it would help those about to be flattened by the Confed military machine was doubtful, but it would make his small group feel as if it had struck some kind of blow for freedom. Sometimes one had to nurse a tiny spark for a while before it burst into a major conflagration.

Pen also knew that inflammatory holograms and defaced walls were not going to be enough. In order to damage the beast, direct action had to be taken. Revolutionaries needed rallying points, events to which they could point and count as moral victories. Enough straws could break the back of the largest beast.

The three men and two women leaders used pseudonyms, at Pen's insistence. He had organized his radicals under the old cell concept, keeping each group to a maximum of five, using phony names, and never telling any one cell any more about the others than was necessary. In truth, he had only thirty-five people enlisted all total, but he allowed them to think the "Movement" was much larger. An old trick, but one these children did not know.