This Day All Gods Die (99 page)

"Warden Dios was unable to endure the prospect of failure.

"Our committee believes that his actions were unconscionable. We also consider them profoundly realistic. Instead of offering a relatively small and premature challenge to the most powerful man in human space, he chose to risk the dangerous path of complicity. By participating in Holt Fasner's crimes, he gained the CEO's vulnerability. And when those crimes at last became large enough, heinous enough, to sway even this dependent Council, he took steps to expose them.

"In this way his own crimes became the weapons with which he put a stop to Holt Fasner's larger wrongs."

Oh, Warden. Morn groaned aloud without hearing herself.

His name clogged her throat. Became the weapons—

In her

own, smaller way, she'd used the same argument to justify accepting her black box from Angus.

"Most difficult to forgive," Punjat Silat admitted, "is the former director's decision to instigate an act of war. There, however, my fellow Members and I believe that events ran beyond his control. His inclusion of the Amnion in his manipulations is clearly culpable, justified only by a desire to ensure that any challenge to the UMC would not be allowed to weaken the UMCP. However, he could not have known that Morn Hyland would give birth to a son in forbidden space—

or

that Davies Hyland would be a prize for which the Amnion would hazard an assault on Earth. He could not have known that Captain's Fancy would learn Amnion secrets while Morn and Davies Hyland were aboard.

"And he did everything in his power to pay the price of his culpability. He went to Calm Horizons alone in a desperate and valiant attempt to negotiate for our survival. Remember this. He absolutely could not have known that he would be rescued, or that Calm Horizons would be destroyed, by the very people who had suffered most for his actions."

Measuring out his words with the heavy tread of a funeral march, Silat concluded, "Our committee acknowledges the malfeasance of the former UMCP director. We recommend a full and complete pardon. If our mortality permitted us to truly honor the dead, we would drop to our knees at Warden Dios'

feet."

It was too much. No longer sure what she did, Morn stumbled away from the screen. As the session ended, Len spoke of commendations for Koina Hannish and Sixten Vertigus; but she wasn't listening.

A full and complete pardon. For a man who hadn't known her at all—

and yet had understood her well enough to abuse her to the core. Understood her so well that he could abandon her to Angus and Nick, and yet believe that she would act on the ideals he'd betrayed. That she would keep those ideals alive for him.

You're a cop, she'd once told Davies. From now on, I'm going to be a cop myself. And she'd kept her promise. We don't do things like that.

We don't use people.

In the end Warden had put a stop to it.

Through a blur of tears, she found her way to a seat in front of her terminal. Her hands shook as she tapped keys to access his last message. Hugging herself to contain her distress, she picked his words out of the phosphors on her readout.

Two days ago he'd written:

WARDEN DIOS TO MORN HYLAND:

Morn, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you in person. There's so much I want to say, and I have only a few minutes left. This message will suffice because it must.

Most importantly, I want to assure you that it wasn't personal. I didn't pick you for your ordeal because of who you are. I picked you because you were available at the right time—

aboard Bright

Beauty, in Angus' power, when I needed you both.

I would have used any UMCP officer in your position. Then I simply prayed that you would find it in yourself to meet the challenge I'd placed in front of you.

And you did. You did everything I could have asked for—

if I'd had the right—

and far more. First

you raised the stakes beyond anything I dared imagine. You went to Enablement, gave Davies birth—

and brought Calm Horizons down on my

head. My fault, of course. You're completely blameless. My only point is that my plans went awry there. Events became too great for me to manage them.

But you managed them for me. As the stakes went up, you grew to meet them. You took a problem that I would have called unequivocally insoluble, and you dealt with it.

Don't sell yourself short about this, Morn.

Don't tell yourself that Angus did the real work, or Davies took the real risks, or Min held the real authority. You dealt with it. You kept Davies alive.

You freed Angus from his priority-codes when Holt forced me to betray you. You commandeered Punisher and came to Earth in the only way that allowed humankind to survive my mistakes.

I didn't hear it, but I'm sure your testimony before the Council changed everything.

Do you understand what I'm saying? I didn't pick you because of who you are. I'm not wise enough. You picked yourself. Or perhaps I should say that you picked yourself up after I'd hit you hard enough and often enough to pulverize a concrete bunker. You picked yourself up and became more than any man or woman I've ever known.

In the end humanity's future depends more on individuals like you than it does on any organization like the GCES—

or the UMCP.

Sobs rose in her chest before she finished reading. Hungry for comfort, she hugged herself the same way her father had held her when he'd told her about her mother's death.

And tell her I told him to say good-bye.

Angus had suggested this?

Straining against her grief, she finished Warden's message.

I don't really know you, Morn. I can't begin to guess how much pain and fear you've borne, or what they cost you. But I knew Davies and Bryony Hyland well. You were raised by two fine UMCP

officers. Most of your family served with courage, distinction, and honor. And I suspect you've always thought you were unworthy of them.

The tragedy of your gap-sickness must have hurt you terribly. You may have imagined that it demonstrated your unworth. But your parents would have grieved over your illness, not condemned you for it. And I'm sure they would have been desperately proud of you.

As I am.

Morn Hyland, you saved my dreams for what the cops should be.

I hope you'll give yourself a chance to heal.

Min will help you as much as she can. So will Koina.

Whatever you do, you have my blessing.

Farewell.

Message ends.

There her last restraint broke, and a storm of tears swept through her; carried her out of herself into shattering and unanswerable sorrow. Wailing like a child, deserted and bereft, she battered her hands on the board of her data terminal; pounded on her upper arms and thighs. For her this was the reality of being human and mortal, undefended by zone implants: utter pain; the opposite end of the universe from the clarity of gap-sickness. Sobs poured from her so hard that they seemed to tear her throat; seemed to cramp the muscles of her chest like spasms of nausea.

She wept for her parents and family. She wept for what Angus had done to her—

and for the cowardice of accepting

her zone implant control from him. She wept for the lies she'd used to manipulate Nick Succorso. She wept over the way Davies had been made to suffer by Nick's justified outrage; wept over Angus' welding. She wept for Mikka's grim courage and Min's determination. Finally she wept for the dead: for poor Sib Mackern, frightened and abandoned, whose self-sacrifice had helped protect them in the asteroid swarm; for calm, lonely Vector Shaheed, the "savior of humankind"; for Ciro Vasaczk, following Sorus Chatelaine's example to its conclusion; and for Warden Dios, the last UMCP director, who had used Morn to preserve humankind's future—

and died

proud of her.

She cried for a long time.

But when the storm finally receded, she found that she understood something she'd never grasped before.

She could bear it. She sufficed. Because she must.

Almost tottering in the aftermath of so many tears, she went into the san to clean her face. Instead of washing it, however, she immersed her head in vacuum-chilled water and let the cold baptize her until the sting had brought her back into her body; restored her relationship with herself. While she dried her hair, she stared at her reflection in the mirror as if she wanted to memorize her own face; confirm that it was hers.

Eventually she discovered that she could look herself in the eyes.

Once her hair was dry, she put on a fresh shipsuit. Then she unlocked her doors and went out to meet the future.

OF HASHI LEBWOHL,

DIRECTOR, DATA ACQUISITION

Hashi Lebwohl's reinstatement as director of Data Acquisition.

The designation "United Mining Companies Police'

is code residue.

The name of the organization had been changed: the UMCP was now the Space Defense Police.

However, many months passed before

all levels of SDPHQ's computer systems were amended to reflect the change.]

... a remarkable occasion in several ways.

Certainly it was remarkable that our esteemed Governing Council for Earth and Space, as righteous as it is august, saw fit to restore me to my former duties. I had not expected so much forbearance. I suspected that the GCES would require a scapegoat. In the absence of the most obvious candidates—

Warden Dios and the great worm—

and in view of Maxim

Igensard's manifest inadequacy to the burden, I considered it likely that I would be selected. . . .

No doubt the reasons cited were to some extent sincere. It is common knowledge that Director Donner argued for my reinstatement. And it is also known that the last message she received from Warden Dios urged her to do so. However, I am confident that the primary motivation behind my public "for-giveness" was and is concern for the functional—

as distinct

from the ethical—

integrity of the new Space Defense Police.

The Members fear a preemptive strike from the Amnion, an attempt to cripple our defenses before we can disseminate our antimutagen and attack them. Therefore my experience and knowledge have been allowed to outweigh any inaccuracies which might be laid to my charge.

Put more cynically, the Members fear that Min Donner is too honest and direct to oppose the Amnion effectively. They believe they need a man with my reputedly imprecise scruples.

. . . remarkable also was the Council's vote to pardon Warden Dios. I was gladdened by it, although it does little to palliate my sense of loss. In my view, it would be right and just to honor him as both hero and martyr. Few among us would have enjoyed the fate Holt Fasner prepared for us. I believed, however, that his self-sacrifice would be met by more resentment. His actions reminded the Members in the most overt and humiliating way of their own failure as humanity's representatives. Therefore they would seek to diminish him so that they could think better of themselves. . . .

. . . apparently Abrim Len declined to permit it. There is another remarkable aspect of the session: the clarity and unity which President Len forged from the collapse of Holt Fasner's power. I had not guessed that he could conjure so much tough-ness past the veil of his characteristic conciliation.

Nevertheless, from my own perspective one event was more remarkable than all the others—

remarkable, at least, in

the sense that I am positively unwilling to forgo remarking on it. That was young Davies Hyland's behavior toward me.

For two days between his arrival on-station and his appearance before the GCES, his actions were scrupulously correct. He answered questions as circumstances required—

principally regarding Morn Hyland and Captain Thermopyle

—

but of himself he revealed nothing. Nor did he hint at any personal emotions concerning me while he addressed the Council. Yet when the session had reached its conclusion, young Davies approached me. In full view of all the Members and their retinues, he struck me a blow which broke the left side of my jaw in three places.

"That's for Angus," he informed me. "He wanted to do it himself. But he was afraid you would fry his brain.''

Which in fact I could have done—

but would not. It is not

my custom to destroy my tools when they have served their purpose. Captain Scroyle and Free Lunch are an exception which I regret deeply. . . . Unlike Warden, I err when I attempt to direct the quantum mechanics of events.

Young Davies has caused me no small measure of inconvenience. Sadly, I could not prefer charges against him, even if I wished to do so. He is proof against me—

immunized, as it

were, by the privileges conferred by the Emblem of Honor.

... I am forced to type this record, rather than dictate it in my accustomed fashion. My mandible has not yet healed enough to let me speak without pain. Indeed, I can hardly swallow liquids without acute discomfort.

Pain, I find, is a wonderful aid to concentration.

. . . "complete probity," forsooth. I confess that I was surprised—

and gratified—

by Warden's support when I first

read of it in his last transmission to Director Donner. He spoke thus of a man who had understood him ill enough to endanger his deepest desires before they could bear fruit. I am forced to think that Warden was able to forgive me in the end. Or that he considered my subsequent service an acceptable form of restitution.

I prefer the latter. It salves the quality of ego or dedication which functions as my conscience. However, I fear that the former lies nearer the truth—

ambiguous though that con-

cept may be. I have read widely in his personal records, jour-nals not unlike my own. His last message to me supplied the codes which have allowed me to unlock his files. And the picture of him that emerges humbles me in ways I do not like and cannot answer. . . .