The Phoenix in Flight (16 page)

Except it wasn’t the past that caused Osri’s retreat behind
formality. He taught navigation at the Naval Academy, but Omilov did not need
his son’s skill at spacetime calculations to understand that Brandon should not
have arrived on Charvann before the vid of his Enkainion.

Chill gripped the back of Omilov’s skull. “Brandon?” he
said. “I am delighted to see you again, but why this haste?” Omilov thought of
the social commitments attendant on a royal Enkainion: by rights Brandon should
have been feted for weeks, by the foremost Families in the Panarchy.

“Am I not welcome?” Brandon threw one leg over the low rail
and sat. His face, thrown into relief against the red ball of the sun, bore the
marks of exhaustion. “We’ll go, if you don’t want to see me.”

As if to mock him, Omilov’s own thought returned:
Love
for the sound of rules, and too little of a savor for their sense...

“What happened?” he asked, keeping voice and posture
neutral. Then, voicing his last fading hope, “You must have left just after
your Enkainion?”

“Before.” Brandon leaned over and picked up the empty
snifter, pouring a measure into it from the decanter. “I stopped here to say
good-bye.”

Omilov shook his head, uneasy for the first time in ten
years.
Unless Semion’s coverts are already converging on us, in which case
nothing we do or say matters, this can wait. He’s here. There must be a reason.
Osri’s presence will prevent him from bringing it out.

He shifted his attention to the man who had been waiting in
silent patience in the background all this time and recognized Lenic Deralze,
the bodyguard who had disappeared after Brandon’s disgrace.

Shaking his head, he said, “Take the luggage inside,
Deralze. Parraker will establish you in comfort.”
I will deal with this. It
was not for situations dictated by the rules, but for emergencies not covered
by the rules, that I made my vows—

The image of a face flickered through his mind, and his
thoughts split along two tracks, losing themselves in fragmented memory images
and impressions until recalled by Parraker, his steward, bustling toward them
with uncharacteristic haste. Parraker carried a blue and gold ParcelNet package
in his hands.

“Sir, this just arrived, marked ‘Urgent—Open At Once,’ but
the message chip scans blank.” He thrust it at Omilov with a jerky motion
unlike his usual measured movements. As Omilov took the box from Parraker’s
hands, the steward’s eyes moved past him to the newcomers, then widened
briefly. Wordlessly he performed a low obeisance.

“Parraker,” Brandon said. “How are you?”

The Steward bowed again, then turned to Omilov, stiff with
unspoken question.

Omilov said, “Thank you. Will you conduct Deralze to the
guest rooms?”

Deralze lifted his burden, sending a considering glance in
Osri’s direction before he followed Parraker inside the house.

Omilov took a step and staggered slightly as the package,
rather heavy for its size, failed to resist his movements. The odd feeling
intensified the sense of unreality. He paused, trying to calm his heartbeat,
breathing in the warm breeze scented with sandalwood and jumari. In the gardens
the leaptoads pipped and squeaked, an amphibian orchestra tuning up for its
nightly concert.

A shift of cloth, the scrape of a shoe recalled him. Afraid
that Osri might say something irrevocable, Omilov moved to set the box down on
the low table, saying, “Shall we take a look at this?” He was disturbed by the
strange dissonance of the box’s massive lightness. Once it was on the table he
straightened up with a sense of relief.

“Who is it from?” Osri asked.

Omilov peered at the address label. “‘Martin Cheruld.’
Curious. An old student of mine. I tutored him in history—he was quite good.
But we lost him to Infonetics. Odd that the message chip was blank.”

Omilov pressed his thumbs into the seal-seam and the box
gaped open to reveal an Alhaman puzzle-box, an exquisitely carved wooden case
inlaid with
kauch-
pearl on all sides
.
He hesitated, then picked
up the puzzle box and began working at the inlays, pinching and sliding them
this way and that. Osri and Brandon looked on, Osri frowning as usual, and
Brandon’s face politely blank.

Why did he not make his Enkainion?
Omilov had never
heard of such a thing happening with an Arkad—ever.

As Omilov tried several solutions to the puzzle, the odd
feel of its contents making his hands clumsy, he remembered Brandon as a boy,
who used to concoct elaborate practical jokes without regard to the inevitable
retribution that even Krysarchs could not evade—especially when the target was
Anaris, the son of Eusabian of Dol’jhar. But that brooding, bullying hostage
had not always been the target. A certain newly-knighted, irritatingly pompous
Chival had—too late—found a stench-puff in his chair at his accession banquet.

Omilov smiled; his fingers ceased their movement.

“Well?” Osri said. His gaze went briefly to Brandon’s face,
then flickered away again, as if by not seeing his presence he could deny what
had happened. “Can you not open it, Father?”

Omilov recalled himself and examined the box more closely. A
slender wedge of light at the horizon was all that remained of the sun. The
shimmering lines of the inlay patterns glinted softly, reflecting the overhead
lights that were slowly replacing the diminishing light from the sky. There
were subtle signs of wear... thus... so...

The top of the box sprung open with a subdued click. Inside
was a small, mirror-surfaced sphere, about half the size of a man’s fist.
Understanding crashed in upon him; a twinge of alarm surged down his left arm
to his ring finger.
What is
this
doing here?

Omilov put the box down hastily, remembering the echoing
spaces of the Shrine, reflected a thousand-fold in the ageless eyes of the
strange being at its center. He smelled the strange, dry incense-like odor of
the Guardian and heard its rasping speech, like a huge stringed instrument
played with a rough bow. He felt again the awe engendered by the dispassionate
gaze of a being whose life had begun when his remote ancestors were chipping
stone tools at the feet of receding glaciers on Lost Earth.

“It’s just a ball,” Osri said. “A metal ball.” But Brandon,
his eyes narrowed, watched Omilov’s hands as he picked up the sphere and placed
it on the table.

Just as the first time he’d seen it, Omilov found his eyes
crossing slightly as they tried to focus on the sphere—it was such a perfect,
smooth reflector that it was visible only as a distortion of its surroundings.
He began pushing it about the surface of the table, trying to collect his
thoughts.

The Guardian would never have relinquished this; any ship
that tried to land on the Shrine Planet would be vaporized.
The faint
memory of a poem echoed...
Something vast and pitiless is stirring...

He met Brandon’s watchful gaze. The Krysarch’s presence here
was almost as unsettling as this forbidden artifact. Could they be related?
Impossible.

Unfortunately, it was equally impossible that there would
not be terrible consequences to Brandon’s choice. Omilov was certain that
Brandon was well aware of what he’d done. It amounted to a cut-direct, the
highest insult, to all the leading lights of Court—and it would never, ever be
forgotten. Even his father the Panarch would be helpless to intervene against
the depth of feeling this would arouse.

And, thought Omilov, considering the way decisions were so
often made in the Thousand Suns—by careful, formal social maneuvers among the
Service Families—Brandon’s flight amounted to a disruption of the machinery of
state. His father would probably not even make the attempt, despite his very
real love for Brandon. Gelasaar would put the welfare of his trillions of
subjects first.

And Brandon knows this.

“Is it some sort of toy?” Osri asked. “It looks like it
stops itself from moving somehow. What is it?”

“I don’t know
what
it is, or what its purpose was,
but it is at least ten million years old,” Omilov replied.

“The Ur?” Osri did not seem to believe him; not surprising,
since private possession of an Urian artifact was treason.

Omilov handed the sphere to his son. Osri’s hands dipped
toward the table. As he hefted it, his heavy eyebrows shot toward his
hairline—his hands moved too fast for the evident weight of the sphere.

“Throw it to Brandon.”

As Osri hesitated, Omilov added, “Don’t worry, it’s not at
all fragile. In fact, I doubt that any force we have available to us could
damage it.”

Osri tried to throw it underhanded to Brandon, who had his
hands up and slightly separated, but the little sphere refused to leave his
hand—it almost looked like it was glued there, except that it rolled about
freely.

“Throw it overhand,” he chortled. Shock had faded, leaving
the sense of unreality that Brandon’s appearance had first caused.
Brandon
has flung away his life, Semion may close his gauntlet around us at any moment,
and here we sit, playing with an artifact created by a galaxy-spanning race
that was utterly destroyed ten million years ago.

Osri wrapped his fingers around the sphere and tossed it,
throwing it somewhat like a shot-put because of its weight, but as his hand
opened at the peak of its forward thrust, the sphere fell out of his palm with
blurring speed and hit the table—noiselessly. It fell so fast that none of them
could see it between Osri’s hand and the table, and when it touched the
tabletop it did not bounce or further move at all. Osri pushed it hard toward
Brandon, but as soon as his hand ceased its forward movement, so did the
sphere.

Osri’s forehead knit and he reached for the sphere, but
Brandon grabbed it first. He held it up, laid his other hand on the surface of
the table, and with a wince, dropped the sphere from about two feet onto his
upturned palm. Brandon grunted with surprise, Osri winced, but the Krysarch’s
hand was obviously unharmed, despite the sphere’s heaviness.

‘That’s impossible,” said Osri. “It’s inertialess!”

“Impossible or not, there it is,” replied his father. “Of
course, it could merely have immeasurable or negligible inertia, but the
Gnostors of Energetics insist that’s just as impossible as none at all.”

“If you could do that to a ship... .”
Brandon
breathed.

“Its speed would be limited only by the density of the
interstellar medium,” Osri said, taking refuge in pedantry.

Brandon dropped the sphere back on the table, picked up his
snifter, and poured himself another drink.

Osri continued, “So you know where it came from?”

“Where, I know. How, I can’t even guess at this point,”
Omilov replied. Osri touched the sphere wonderingly as Omilov continued.
“You’re familiar with Paradisum.”

“It’s one of the Doomed Worlds.” Brandon leaned against the
carved balustrade, staring up into the night sky.

“One of two orbiting the Ouroboros-Ophis binary, both doomed
to death some fifty thousand years hence in a stellar explosion, the whole
system a work of art for the delight of an alien race we can only be thankful
are long gone from the galaxy.” Omilov hesitated, then went on, “That’s how I
know this is an Urian artifact, for I have seen it—only seen it—once before, on
the other world in that system, the Shrine Planet.”

“The carvings,” said Osri. “I’ve seen pictures of them. They
cover an entire continent.”

“The Panarchy allows one xenoarchaeological expedition there
every fifty years. There have been fourteen—and all have spoken to the selfsame
being—the Guardian of the Shrine.” Omilov made an odd noise deep in his throat,
followed by a breathy trill. “N!Kir-r-r. That’s as close as I can come to
pronouncing its name.
His
name—he said that his present incarnation was
male. But I still can’t quite say it, since I don’t have chelae and a chitinous
throat patch.” He touched the sphere with his fingertip, reassuring himself
that it was real, present on his verandah.

As was Brandon.

“The Guardian was an enormous exoskeletal being. One of the
Highdweller members of our expedition had an insect phobia that was more
intense than she realized. She had to be transferred out under sedation after
entering the Shrine.”

Omilov plucked the sphere off the table. “The Guardian told
us that this was the egg of a demon, like the one that would hatch from the two
suns of his world at the end of time.”

“They
worshiped
it?” asked Osri, with faint distaste.

“Not worshiped—perhaps imprisoned is a better word. The
Guardian said it was a trust, that five hundred generations of his kind had
guarded it, waiting for it to be swallowed up in the stellar fires that would
destroy his world.”

He paused. “Five hundred generations, counted from the
disappearance of the Ur, is twenty thousand years per Guardian. That figure was
verified by the first expedition—by radio-dating of chitin traces on the
Guardian’s dais, and by genoscans. That in part is why the planet was
quarantined. No naturally-evolved being lives that long.”

During the resulting silence, Omilov breathed slowly, trying
to relax into the reassuring sensory data of a normal world. The songs of the
leaptoads in the ponds and streams of the surrounding gardens were loud,
cheerfully dissonant against the soft music pervading the terrace. The windows
of the manor glowed with light, and in the east the inner moon Kilelis lofted
its cold face above the horizon, wanly reflecting the light of the departed
sun. Faint streaks of cloud shone in the sky. The grounds of the estate were a
shadowed mystery in the moon’s purplish light.

The peace was a lie. Brandon had skipped out on his
Enkainion.
The repercussions will arrive tomorrow in waves, like a tsunami.