The 97th Step (38 page)

"What are we looking at?" Pen said.

"Watch. Focus and fix," she said.

The third graphic expanded, showing a close-up of a single planet. The viewpoint pushed in, moved closer, and stopped.

"Give us geographies," Moon said.

The image flashed, and names of cities, roads, mountains and rivers appeared as a map grid lit up an area perhaps the size of Australia.

Moon turned to Pen. "This is the planet Maro," she said. "The major populated subcontinent. We have it this close. The image shifts minutely each day, but we haven't pinpointed the city yet."

"Excuse my ignorance, but just what are we talking about?"

"Project Savior. All our projections add up to this, Pen. On this planet, this continent, somewhere, in the next month—plus or minus seven days—the focal point in the galactic balance is going to appear."

"Really? You are that sure?"

"We're that sure, my love. Three to five weeks from today, somebody is going to be down there who could affect the course of the entire galaxy. We think it'll be the man you were trying to be for so long."

Pen stared at the projection. Had integratics come to this at last? It was a pretty specific prediction.

"Wait a second. You said 'could' affect things."

"Yes. What happens to that person will determine if 'could' turns into 'will.' It might be that the wave recedes. All we have is raw data, and there is no guarantee that the probabilities will become reality.

There are a number of ways to interpolate them. In one, the Confed grows stronger, overwhelmingly so, and endures for at least another five hundred years."

"That's some crystal ball, Moon."

"In another scenario, whoever it is that appears at the apex of our integratic projection could possibly bring down the Confederation to a virtual halt within a quarter of a century."

"Jesu damn," Pen said softly. "I tried to do it for twenty years and never even scratched the paint."

"Exactly."

"I wasn't the man. You say somebody there will be?"

"If our calculations are correct. We could be wrong."

"You don't think so."

"No, my love."

Pen watched the projection. Magic, to be able to tell the future, or at least come up with a good guess.

"And what are we supposed to do about this person?"

Moon looked at him. "Find him or her. Teach them whatever they need to know. Guide them. Help them in any way we can."

"Do we know what will replace the Confed if it falls?"

"Not yet. We're working on that."

He laughed. "The impossible takes until lunch?"

"Something like that."

"So that's where you're going," Pen said. "That's why Spiral is taking over your job."

"No, Pen. My path lies elsewhere."

"Then who—" He stopped, understanding what she meant. Exactly what she meant. A year ago, even a week ago, he would not have known. He knew now.

"Me."

"You are figured into our calculations, Pen. You always have been."

"Seems as if you took a hell of a risk, planning on one man for this all these years. Especially given what you had to work with."

"Perhaps; but we took the risk and it paid off."

He nodded, not speaking. He had grown up some.

"Here you are. You have the tools. You know your path is not to oppose the Confed with a gun, but you have the teaching experience, the skills, the desire. And you aren't attached to it personally, as you once were. What we have done is to find you a worthy student."

"Think about it. Pen. To know your student might do more to help people than any one man in history.

He or she might be the person who changes a galaxy."

"It's a big might."

"There aren't any guarantees. You must have learned that by now."

Pen looked at the projection. Yes. He had learned that, along with so much else.

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Are you going to do it? Go and find this person and teach them?"

Here was a question of some significance. Are you. Pen, formerly Ferret, formerly Mwili, the man to teach the would-be savior how to save the galaxy? How to bring the Confed down? Are you willing to shelve your ego and play second to this person, whoever he or she is? There will not be any personal glory attached to it, you know. No statues dedicated to Pen the savior. Likely as not, nobody will even know, save Moon and a few others. Can you do it? Do you
want
to do it? Is this your place, after all this time?

Well? Is it?

Pen grinned at the projection, then turned to face his soul-mate.

Yeah. I think it is. That's good enough.

"Of course." He shook his head. "Did you ever really have any doubt?"

"It was always your choice, my love. That was always the point of it for you."

"You knew what I would choose."

"I had a suspicion. A hope."

"Isn't life strange," he said, extending one hand toward her.

Moon caught his hand in. hers and laughed softly. "Isn't it just?"

Thirty-Eight

ON THE STARLINER to Maro, Pen noticed a group of Confederation officials bending their way to an earlier stop in the same system.

A factor and two senators from Earth, he gathered from their conversation, a trialog none of them bothered to keep private—or quiet. Each of the dignitaries was worth a quad of bodyguards, sharp-eyed men and women dressed in working black, gazes constantly roving the other passengers for any sign of trouble.

Also traveling with the officials was a phalanx of crack-sharp troopers, resplendent in their full dress uniforms, sidearmed and all polished plastic and drill field snappiness, swaggering about the ship looking for mischief.

Pen mostly avoided them, nodding and greeting them politely when he could not. He did not want trouble, not at this point.

The men and women of the Confed contingent also wore an arrogance, as visible as their uniforms, as loud as their self-satisfied laughter. Perhaps one could not blame them. They were part of the most powerful machine in the known galaxy, the chosen who could not be touched by the lowly. They were like the ancient Ksatriya caste, the warriors, or perhaps the Brahmins, the priests, rulers of all they beheld. To them, everyone else was below—sudra or pariah, it did not matter. It had been that way for hundreds of years, and no reason why it shouldn't go on for hundreds more.

Pen wondered what they would think if they knew that a threat to their power was about to come into being. A focal point for the entire system to fear, should it come to pass as the Siblings thought it might.

The coarse laugh of one of the Confed officials reached Pen, as the man nudged his companion and pointed at an attractive woman passing them. The two men snickered like adolescents sharing a smutty joke. Little doubt they were doing just that.

As the woman came abreast of Pen, he could see her face was flushed with anger and embarrassment.

Probably she was safe, if she just ignored them and kept on about her business. But she had to know that any—or all—of the Confed arrogants who smirked at her could drag her into a cabin or take her right here, and she would have little recourse. They had the power and there was little anyone would or could do to stop them, if it came to that.

The woman's voice was low when she spoke, so it did not carry far. Just loud enough for Pen to hear.

"I wish somebody would do something about those idiots."

Beneath his hood, Pen smiled. "Perhaps someone will," he said, also sotto voce.

The woman looked up, and managed a small smile. "Now there's a pleasant thought," she said.

Indeed, Pen thought.

Indeed.

Thirty-Nine

ON MARO:

Pulling at Pen was a feeling of impending something that made his path easy. A distant warmth called to him, and he had but to follow it to find that which he sought. Never had his higher perceptive aspect worked better.

He rented a ground craft and began driving it toward the energy he could feel.

There was also trouble brewing on Maro. Confed troopers were in evidence on nearly every major road.

The rumor was that the local priesthood was about to spark a holy war. That must be part of it, Pen knew. Maro might not be a pleasant place to be in the near future, but that didn't matter to Pen. He had survived a long time without knowing why. Now, he had a reason.

He smiled to himself, and went to find his destiny.

About time, but, hey, better late than never.

Fourty

THE CITY WAS called Notzeerath, and there was a human cosmic furnace radiating within it somewhere.

To Pen, it was like a bonfire in the middle of a snowy plateau. Anyone with the slightest sensitivity to such energies could not fail to at least notice it.

Pen walked down a crowded street. This was a city of believers in the cycle of reincarnation, albeit some of the faithful were half-hearted. Otherwise, many of them would no longer be in their present incarnations—on the plains a few kilometers from here, three-quarters of a million people had died only days earlier, directed by a manic priest fueled with hatred of the Confed or some god-inspired madness driving him. Those had surely been believers, for they had marched smiling into the jaws of destruction, never wavering. Pen had not seen it, but he had seen the results. There were bodies piled two meters high in places on that bloody plain. So senseless. So much waste. And yet somehow, all those deaths had produced the final conversion in Pen's quarry.

It was an expensive price to pay.

He had paid his own price, of course, years of wasted effort, but compared to dying, it was little enough.

He had wandered, as Moon had said, in the wilderness, looking for something. Now, here, the time had finally come to find it.

When you know who you are, you know what to do
? his inner voice asked, a voice now filled with laughter instead of dread. It had what
it
wanted, finally. Truth—and truth is the defense against fear. Pen had not known it for far too long, but finally, he did. Better late than never at all.

"Yes," Pen said aloud. "Absolutely."

Well, let's go and find this furnace who is going to heat up the galaxy, shall we?

"Yes. Let's go and do that."

Pen felt the glow of his pupil-to-be shining through the morning as he walked in the bright sunlight.

Various alcohol-and electrically-powered vehicles rolled on hard plastic tires along the smooth streets, humming intermittent Oms that overlaid the constant thrum of the local broadcast generator he could feel under his boots; pedestrians and scooterists went about their business, walking and scooting along; most were unconscious of the God-touched one in their midst. Not all, for Pen could see people turn with a puzzled look now and then, in the direction of the energy flow most could not feel. They did not know what, but they knew
something
unusual was happening. Confed quads marched here and there as well, weapons slung for fast action, eyes and ears alert.

Pen rounded a corner and stopped, as if hitting an invisible wall. There. Just ahead. There he was.

A man, young, dressed in a thin and ragged coverall, his feet bare, stood on the street staring into infinity.

He looked to be a soldier, from his issue clothing and his bearing. Some irony there, perhaps. A man roasting in the fire of cosmic consciousness, holy, but undirected, and one of the Confed's own. At least he
had
been one of them. But no more. Now, what he needed was a teacher.

He needed Pen.

Feeling almost overwhelmed by emotion, Pen approached the young man. His heart speeded up, and his breathing started to come faster. He slowed his walk and breathing. Easy, Pen. Still, it bubbled joyously in him, and it was all he could do to keep from dancing. Here was what he had been preparing for nearly all of his life. It no longer mattered that he, Pen, was not going to be the hinge upon which the fate of civilized man turned. He understood truly for the first time what his role was to be, and knowing one's place was more important than the place itself. Such a simple thing, and yet it had taken him a lifetime to learn. All great truths were simple, and that was both great and true itself.

He was not going to be mankind's savior. But he
was
going to be the savior's teacher. It was a fine place to be. For him, the only place to be.

Here was the moment: Pen remembered what Von had said to him, decades past. It would serve as well now as it had then:

"Lost, pilgrim?" Pen said.

The young man refocused himself back into the physical world with visible effort. It must be hard to come back to
Maya
when one was living in Paradise. He smiled at Pen. "Lost? No. I don't know where I am, but I'm not lost."

Under his concealing mask, Pen's smile was radiant, nearly matching that of the younger man. The proper response, of course. He laughed. "A zen answer, pilgrim, and perfect for a holy man. Have you been such long?"

"I'm not a holy man. Until a few days ago, I was a soldier. Something… happened. I… saw something, felt something, somehow. A vision."

Pen nodded. He would have to explain things to this man simply, for despite his new-found power, this soldier was a child. Well, it was time for his work to begin, finally. Pen said, "Ah.
Relampago
. You are blessed, pilgrim." He smiled at the man's blank look.

Blessed: You have felt the cosmic fire I wanted to feel for so long. It was only when I gave up trying so hard to get it that it finally became possible for me. I have not basked in its glow as you have, but now, I have a purpose. It's a start.

Blessed: Knowing your place is more important than the place itself, I finally understand that.

Blessed: Knowing who you are gives you a freedom. You have felt the cosmic allness, and so you know in a way that is not possible for me to know. Someday, perhaps, but that's not important, not really.

Yes, you are blessed, young soldier. And after all these years, finally, so am I.