The Chaos Crystal (67 page)

The door to the conference room was open, a waiter arranging crystal water jugs beaded with condensation on the long polished granite-topped table. Maralyce was already seated near the head, sipping coffee as she chatted softly to Coryna and Arryl, who were sitting on the edge of the table facing her. He could feel the others around here somewhere on the rising Tide, but they hadn't yet arrived in the conference room.

Maralyce was dressed in a business suit. With her hair drawn back into a tight chignon, she looked like an accountant. Arryl still managed to look like a priestess, no matter what era she was in or world she was on, and her current colourful, floaty, caftan-like outfit only heightened the illusion.

Beside her, groomed to perfection, Coryna looked as if she'd just stepped off the cover of a fashion magazine. Or she would have, if there had been such a thing as paper magazines any longer and they had still had covers.

The women looked up as the two Tide Lords entered the conference room. Arryl waved when she caught sight of them. Maralyce frowned.

'Tides, you two look like a couple of insurance salesmen.' She spoke Glaeban, a language no Earthborn waiter had a hope of understanding.

'Lukys's message said to be inconspicuous,' Cayal said, answering her in English, a little wounded that all his care in dressing the part seemed to be wasted on her. And Hawkes didn't look
that
bad. 'What's with ancient tongues?'

'I'm afraid we might have begun to attract some unwanted attention,' Lukys said in Glaeban, entering the room behind them. 'And as they're so fond of saying on this world, the walls have ears. Or, to be more specific, highly sensitive, electronic listening devices. Has anybody heard from Kentravyon?'

'Haven't seen him in years,' Cayal said, as Lukys walked around the table and took his place at the head. He studied the older immortal closely as he took his seat. Lukys had aged a little. Or perhaps Cayal was just imagining it. His white hair always made it hard to judge.

Cayal still had no notion of how old Lukys and the other original Tide Lords were. He doubted they even knew themselves, given years were measured on a planetary scale and these immortals could stride across

worlds at will. Like Amyrantha, Earth was just another world for them, and there had been many more before this one and would probably be many more after.

That made their age not just impressive, but almost incomprehensible.

'It's been over a century since I saw him last.' He might be imagining it, but Coryna's voice always struck Cayal as being a little bit squeaky, almost as if she'd brought some of the rat through with her, back into human form.

Coryna settled in beside Lukys — where she always sat in their meetings — briefly touching his hand and smiling at him intimately, before getting down to the business at hand. Nothing, it seemed — certainly not time — had lessened the affection or the bond between them. She had aged very little since coming through the portal. In fact, Cayal could still clearly remember meeting Coryna back on Amyrantha when she was Oritha, the Torlenian merchant's daughter who thought her husband was Ryda Tarek, a gem dealer from Stevania.

In all the time they'd been here on Earth, he'd never seen a hint of Oritha's personality in Coryna's demeanour.

Is Oritha dead?
Cayal wondered, or
trapped inside
a body she's been forced to share with another consciousness for all this time?

And what of the others? There had never been a trace of Pellys on this world, or Tryan, Jaxyn, Brynden or Kinta, Ambria or Medwen, Ranee or Krydence, Syrolee or Engarhod or Lyna. He supposed they might have fallen through, but it seemed inconceivable for one of the others to have survived and the people in this room not know about it. Even Taryx, who was there in the Tide chamber with them right at the very end, hadn't made it through.

They were all gone now. Diala with her come- ravish-me eyes and her devious mind. Lyna and her

desire for nothing more than somewhere comfortable to wait out the low Tides. Ambria and her no-nonsense manner. Ranee and Krydence — not that Cayal thought those two were a great loss to anyone. Medwen — the perpetual bleeding heart when it came to lesser creatures. All of them were just memories now. They had gone the way of Amyrantha — finding the death Cayal sought and had never been able to achieve.

He envied them a little for that.

'It's been even longer since I saw him,' Hawkes said. 'Some time in the fourteenth century, I think.'

Cayal remembered a time when the Rodent was so new to this, that he couldn't bear to think of himself as immortal. Time had helped him adjust. And they had been here on Earth a
very
long time.

Cayal shook his head as he took a seat at the table beside Arryl. 'Are we sure he's not responsible for the current state of affairs? I mean, this
is
the man who thought up the black plague, remember, when somebody foolishly made a passing comment at a meeting like this sometime in the early Middle Ages that the human population was getting a little thick on the ground.'

'That was unfortunate,' Maralyce said, 'but not necessarily a bad thing in hindsight. What have you been up to, Cayal?'

'Trying to keep my head down. I mean
...
what else is there? We're not allowed to do anything useful. That would be
interfering,
and Lukys made us all promise we wouldn't.' He turned his gaze on Lukys, who had ordered the waiter to be gone while Cayal was talking. 'Isn't that what you made us promise, Lukys? When your wretched rift spat us out here on this shiny new world, just waiting for us to remake it? The rift that apparently killed everybody
but
me? What was it you said? Amyrantha was ruined because we couldn't help but interfere? This is a new world.

The worst of our kind are gone. Now we have a chance to do things properly? No Cataclysms. No abominations like the Crasii. No trying to take over the world every time the Tide peaks. This time we'll do it right. We'll just tweak things here and there, you said. Let nature take its course and nobody will suspect a thing.'

Cayal sounded a lot more bitter than he meant to. He rarely entertained the notion of death these days. This world they had made was new and intriguing enough that he found himself much less anxious to find a way to end it all.

Suicide for an immortal was a fleeting obsession that time, if nothing else, eventually wore down to nothing.

'And nobody
does
suspect anything,' Arryl said, looking around the table for some agreement. 'Do they?'

'1 have two words for you,' Maralyce said, looking mightily peeved. 'Intelligent Design."

'Between that and Darwin's theories,' Lukys added, 'they've pretty much got the whole thing worked out, except for who's responsible.'

'It's like Harlie Palmerston's
Theory
of
Human
Advancement
all over again.' The Rodent seemed to find that several-million-year-old memory amusing. 'Should we tell them the truth, do you think?'

it wouldn't matter if you did,' Coryna said. 'They wouldn't believe you. Besides, our problem is much more immediate. And the reason Lukys thought it important we meet.'

Cayal sat a little straighter in his chair. They had met like this no more than once or twice a generation since coming to Earth; even less since technology had improved to a point where they might be inadvertently photographed as a group. It would only take one dedicated conspiracy theorist with the resources to check a little too closely into the backgrounds of the

people gathered around this table for some rather inconvenient alarm bells to go off in all the wrong places.

'What's the problem?'

'Well, it's mostly your fault, son,' Lukys said, fixing his gaze on Declan.

The Rodent looked shocked. 'My fault? What's
my
fault?'

'Your misguided attempts to save the world.'

Cayal smiled and turned to look at Hawkes. 'You know, you should probably stop doing that, Rodent. It never seems to work out too well for you, does it?'

Declan never got the chance to answer. The Tide surged around them. As if he'd been waiting for the chance to make a dramatic entrance, the doors at the end of the conference room suddenly banged opened, and Kentravyon strode into the room, declaring, 'The world wouldn't
need
saving, you know, if you'd let me do things my way.'

'Good morning, Kentravyon,' Lukys said, not reacting visibly to the new arrival's decidedly theatrical entrance.

The doors closed gently behind Kentravyon of their own accord, with a slight push on the Tide. One of the others in the room must have done it. Kentravyon would have slammed the doors shut if it was left to him.

'Nice of you to join us.'

'Your message sounded as if you were worried,' Kentravyon said. He was dressed in a long black bishop's cassock, a jewelled crucifix around his neck. He stopped by the side table where the coffee was laid out and looked around in disappointment. 'What? None of those little pastries?'

'What do you mean?' Declan asked.

Nobody commented on the way the madman was dressed. Every time they saw him, he was dabbling in one religion or another. Cayal had seen him preaching

in a mosque, heard he'd bathed in the Ganges with a million followers at his back calling him Kartikay and was quite sure that if Kentravyon could have figured out a way to swing it, he would have done a stint as the Dalai Lama.

'I mean those little croissants they make with the cheese —'

'I mean about doing things your way,' Declan cut in impatiently.

'Ah, that,' Kentravyon said, taking the empty seat next to Cayal. it's commonsense really. Things never got out of hand on Amyrantha, or any other world we've been on, because we made sure society never developed much in the way of technology. Every time they looked like discovering the sort of know-how that has screwed this planet up so comprehensively, the Tide came back, we started squabbling with each other, and tah-dah! The end of civilisation as we know it. Back to the drawing board and discovering everything all over again.'

'Which gets back to why it's your fault,' Coryna said, looking pointedly at Declan. 'You're the one who founded AEVITAS Inc.'

'What's AEVITAS?' Arryl asked, 'Isn't that Latin for immortal?' Kentravyon said.

Declan shrugged, and shifted in his seat uncomfortably. 'Actually, it's closer to eternal.'

'Very droll,' Maralyce said, rolling her eyes.

'Declan wasn't being funny, Maralyce,' Lukys said, it's an acronym, isn't it, Declan?'

The Rodent nodded, it stands for Allied Exploration Ventures for Industrial Technology And Science, actually.'

'You're
responsible for that?' Arryl asked, somewhat awed by the news. 'God, AEVITAS is one of the biggest privately-owned companies on the planet.'

Cayal wasn't nearly so impressed, 'I thought some reclusive, nut-job trillionaire
...'
He stopped and

turned to Hawkes as the pieces fell into place. 'Ah, I get it. Declan Hawkes
...
Deke Hawkins.
You're
the nut-job trillionaire.'

Declan seemed a little embarrassed to be unmasked, but he was unapologetic. 'Lukys said to keep a low profile. He didn't say anything about starving.'

'You can't starve, idiot. You're immortal.'

From the smile on his face, Lukys wasn't exactly angry about it either. Cayal wondered if there was a bit of paternal pride involved. Hawkes was his flesh and blood, after all. What father wouldn't be proud of a son who'd made himself the wealthiest man on the planet — even if it had taken him a couple of million years to do it?

'I'm not blaming Declan for being wealthy,' Lukys said. 'We've all made and lost fortunes over the years. And made our share of mistakes.'

'Not on the scale of this one,' Cayal said.

'Really?' Lukys remarked with a raised brow, 'I recall us having a discussion in a room, not dissimilar to this one — well, minus the data projector — some time ago, about the inadvisability of performing miracles when the Tide is at its peak.'

'Wasn't my fault they saw me after I was supposed to have died,' Cayal muttered, deciding it was probably better if they didn't bring up that particular past miscalculation.

Arryl's eyes widened. 'That was
you,
Cayal?'

He refused to answer. Some things were better forgotten. 'You said this was about the Rodent, Lukys. Let's hear what he's done this time.'

Lukys nodded. 'Declan's sin, if I can call it that
...'

'You may,' Kentravyon said, making the sign of the cross.

'Declan's sin,' Lukys continued, as if Kentravyon hadn't spoken, 'was his plan to mine the asteroid belt.'

'How can that be a mistake? This planet is rapidly running out of resources,' Declan reminded them,

looking a little hurt that his altruism was being questioned. 'One asteroid contains enough
—'

'One chunk of Amyrantha, you mean,' Arryl said.

Declan turned to look at her. 'Pardon?'

'Well, let's call a spade a spade,' she said. 'That asteroid belt used to be Amyrantha. They're not asteroids floating around up there. They're gravestones. They're all that's left of a whole world
we
destroyed. You can dress it up however you like, but if you've started mining the asteroid belt, Declan Hawkes, you're basically robbing the graveyard of several million innocent people who died millions of years ago, so you could sit here on Earth and play god
...
or tycoon, or whatever it is you're doing these days.'