Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2) Page 19

  “We have enough for this one passage,” he said. “But we lack diagnostic links for most of our systems. We can’t run sleep units, life support, and surgical units all at the same time. We have enough power, but distribution is limited by the routines we can build. We must reach Praesepe as soon as possible.”

  Blackfriar was silent as they looked at the stars in the tank.

  Voss said, “There’s just no time down there for any survivors to set up anything more than a few precarious survival redoubts. And we may not be able to get back here in time to help.”

  “One step at a time,” Blackfriar said, and Voss felt an irrational anger. The Link had moderated internal states by providing a sense of personal security, a constant background awareness in the individual that there would always be enough resources and life to deal with anything. But now, as he lived with the fact that his world had all but died and another was dying, he began to think differently. The inward universe of Link and individuals, education and experience, growing like an infinitely branching tree of life, had been cut back to the danger point. For the first time in his life he had to live with an irreversible fact: these dead would never come again. Not even a new beginning would soften the memory. He explained to himself how it had happened, how a chain of events had led to this unforeseen disaster, but he could not rid himself of the suspicion that it might have been prevented.

  “Is there something very wrong with us,” he asked Blackfriar, “for this to have happened to us? Why did we not see that this could happen?”

  “One envious, despairing man,” Blackfriar said, “had the weapons to magnify his animosity toward us. Is there anything wrong with us? Yes—we are not all-knowing or perfectly rational, so we failed to foresee what might happen when we came so close to our own kind’s living past.”

  “We should have left them alone,” Voss said, “to grow out of their past in their own way. Josephus Bely trembled at the edge of death, and our arrival pushed him to strike at us, as we unknowingly showed him how backward he was.”

  “Maybe we should have given him his life,” Blackfriar said. “But then that would have changed him, made him dependent on us, our puppet, and destroyed the way of life these people had set for themselves.”

  “It was changing anyway,” Voss said, switching the view back to the ruined planet. “Anything would have been better than this!” he shouted at the red unseeing eye that gazed at him from Bely’s hell.

  “Bely might have struck at us later, when we were building the new mobile,” Blackfriar said calmly.

  Voss thought of Josepha and how the loss of her world might affect her. Would she be content never to come back here? He looked at Blackfriar sitting next to him, and the First Councilman’s apparent calm seemed to say that what had happened could not have been prevented.

  “We will have to come back here,” Voss said, “if only to help a few.”

  “We will do everything we can,” Blackfriar said, “one step at a time. Limit your thoughts to that.”

  But as he looked at the raging night face of the planet below, Voss felt a rush of desolation and loss that spoke to him wordlessly out of the human bodily past, urging him to revenge himself as Bely had done against the devils from the dark who had made him doubt his faith.

  Voss closed his eyes before the burning, shaking world and recited to himself the Link lessons of his youth:

  “An individual must deserve his society as much as his society must deserve the individual. One must not overwhelm the other.”

  He paused to remind himself that Bely’s people had not deserved their ignorance. They had not deserved the short lives to which generations of priests had condemned them.

  “Without knowledge, no people can know who they are,” Voss continued. “History alone is not enough. Without the arrayed sciences, you will not know who you are, where you came from, and will remain powerless to choose what you might be. You will be faceless beneath your masks of mythic superstition and convenience.”

  Fearing the mix of knowledge and human nature that had destroyed the Earth, Ceti’s generations of churchmen had chosen forgetfulness, and this had made them ignorant and fearful of losing power; and finally, in Josephus Bely, blindly envious and violent.

  51

  Blue-gray clouds crept in low over New Vatican. Dirty rain fell all morning. Paul Anselle sat at his desk and felt the tremors in his feet. Much of the city had been leveled by the quakes and antipodal vulcanism that Voss had warned would come, but somehow the papal palace and surrounding buildings, including the observatory, had escaped the ruinous shaking and uplifts, as if by the grace of God.

  First had come the skyshine and high winds, the quakes and the ground upsurges; but the center had survived with only minor damage, protected by what Voss had described as shock cocoons, around which the ripples and volcanic Shockwaves had flowed. At least for now. More was on the way very soon.

  Today.

  Josephus still breathed in the infirmary. Fearful, and ignorant of the meaning of what had taken place in the sky and on the far continent of their own world, the cardinals cowered in their apartments and looked to Paul to explain and lead. His very reluctance and unease in the past, which had not gone unnoticed, now made him trustworthy; yet he was still enough like them to be understandable.

  But there was no time to explain what was coming to any of them. He had told de Claves, and the cardinal had passed along the relevant information. There was no time for them to take their servants and mistresses and retreat to their country villas. The palace, especially its underground levels, was as safe as anywhere.

  They were down there, except for those who had tried to flee the city and were probably dead. But it would do them no good; the levels cut into the bedrock were not waterproof. He thought of going down to join the cowering clerics, but the thought of them on their knees, demeaning themselves in useless prayer, decided him to stay away. He would not add to the stone pickle jar of drowned and brined bony bodies below.

  Josepha’s last radio messages had pleaded with him to accept rescue, but he had refused.

  Even if help came from Praesepe in the near future to save the unlikely survivors who might still be clinging to life three months from now, he could not imagine trying to outlive his shame over his failure to act against Bely. He might have said yes to Voss and Josepha’s offer of rescue—and he might have taken a few of the younger palace officials with him—but this would have meant living in the prison of his rescuers’ eyes.

  Silence invaded his recriminations, convincing him that he had told himself the truth and was ready to accept the punishment that he deserved. He rose from his desk, knowing that he should go to Bely’s bedside, because the friend of his youth might need him.

  But it was not the friend of his youth who was dying, Paul told himself as he tried to open the top right hand drawer of his desk. The drawer stuck. He pulled at it roughly, and it slipped out and crashed onto the floor.

  At once he knelt down, afraid that his prized possession, one of Galileo’s original telescopes, had been damaged; but the instrument that had been brought from Earth by the starship captain who became Peter II appeared to be intact. Josephus Bely had given it to Paul to mark his appointment as prime minister.

  As he was about to lift the drawer, Paul noticed that there was some writing inside the desk, carved into the wood where the words might be seen only with the drawer removed.

  Kneeling closer, Paul read:

  Angels and Devils and Snakes!

  Vehes stercoris!

  —Jacob Kahl

  Paul laughed at the old Latin, which translated as “What a load of crap!” It was not idiomatic Latin or slang, but perfectly grammatical, and Paul wondered whether this might be Jacob Kahl’s judgment of his own work, or of the subjects he had been given to depict, or maybe both.

  Paul picked up the drawer and slid it in halfway, then stood up and took out the telescope. As he examined it more carefully for damage,
he remembered that he had seen examples of woodcarver Kahl’s writings twice before, many years ago on the backs of old work orders. It was easy to remember the man’s fierce words:

  “With all his great power to make a universe, I wonder how God failed to get us right. I think he gave up and started over somewhere else!”

  “The sin of intellectual pride is a charge made by the stupid people who needed a smart man to invent it.”

  As he saw that the telescope was undamaged, Paul thought sadly that the centuries of church rule on Ceti IV had seen no Galileos, Leonardos, or Michelangelos—only mad Jacob Kahl, the secret apostate.

  Paul became aware of a distant roar outside the tall, tightly shut windows behind his desk.

  Today.

  He turned, stepped over to the windows, and gazed out into the noonday brightness.

  Beyond the ragged city stood a massive wall of water more than a kilometer high. Paul raised the telescope to his eye, and the sight produced an involuntary growl in his throat. He smiled, realizing how far he had grown from the miraculous—yet here it was.

  The wave was not breaking. The water stood like a wedge, with fingers of foam reaching forward and upward as it brushed the clouds.

  And behind this wave, he knew there were several others…

  Josephus Bely opened his eyes. His mind was clear, his body free of pain, and he wondered whether he was in the hands of God or the devil.

  But as he looked at the cross on the wall in the palace infirmary, he knew that his church had been taken from him. A new heaven had stolen his sky, but it was not the heaven of God, but of man—of hell.

  He turned his head, expecting to see Paul sitting by him; it seemed that he had done so; but there was no one.

  “You turned a heaven into a raging hell,” Paul’s voice seemed to say, “and that hell has descended to consume us.”

  “Paul!” Josephus cried, suddenly afraid once more that all his years of faith had been only a pleading with a nameless infinity that he called God to give him eternal life…

  Only a simple need…

  He heard a roaring sound, drifted off, and dreamt that he could not feel his feet.

  And awoke in time to die…

  52

  Josepha glanced at the timer in the cramped quarters she was sharing with Voss and saw that departure was now only a few hours away. As she sat on the edge of the lower bunk and looked around at the drab metal walls and floor of the small cabin, she realized that she might never see her world again.

  Voss’s people no longer offered a better life, at least not any time soon; too much of their power was gone. Her father had seen to it that both planet and habitat had been wounded, perhaps beyond recovery; but she still wanted to believe that the people of the mobile had a better chance for the future than the long, probably doomed struggle that was beginning on her home world. She had to believe that; it was all she had left.

  In all likelihood, Paul and Josephus had been drowned along with everyone in the city by the huge waves that had swept across New Vatican. Voss had offered to show her a visual record of the event, but she had refused, clinging to a small girl’s hope that Paul, at least, had managed to sail away somewhere before the waves arrived.

  She thought of her tour through the lost habitat, the paradise in which she had begun to glimpse her new life, and wondered if the mobile had always been too good to be true, even for its own people.

  She felt like an orphan taken in by an ambivalent uncle, and she saw herself becoming Voss’s handmaid, his Sister of Martha, aboard this makeshift, shabby vessel of survival. After all, laundry and food would be needed, and she had no idea how his clothing would be washed or his food prepared.

  The door buzzed. She got up, steadied herself in the ship’s half gravity, and went over to the narrow entrance. She touched the release plate and the door slid open.

  Jason stood in the passageway. He had gained weight and did not look as tall as he had seemed after the rescue; his shoulders were slumped, his face drawn and tired.

  “I want to speak to you,” he said sternly. “In private.”

  “I’m alone,” she replied, stepping back.

  As he came in, she recalled his questioning looks of the past few weeks. He had been saving up whatever he wanted to say to her, and now the time had come for him to unburden himself.

  She returned to the edge of her bunk and looked up at him.

  “Are you with Voss Rhazes?” he asked. “I must hear it from you.”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, surprising herself with the indecision in her own voice.

  He smiled sadly and stepped back to lean against the door. “I’d like to think that I had a chance with you.”

  Again, it surprised her as she looked up at him that she was unable to say at once that he had no chance.

  He stepped forward and started to turn away, but paused.

  “It should be me,” he said bitterly. “There will not be many of us left.”

  She knew his next words.

  “Ondro’s only chance to live is through you and me, and our world is dying!”

  His words shook her, but at the same time they seemed unreal.

  “Well, say something,” he demanded.

  “We’re going to get help for our world,” she said.

  He waited a moment, then said, “So I’ve heard.”

  “Extended life waits for us at Praesepe,” she said, “so there’s no need to think of offspring, at least not now. We will grow and change within ourselves. Maybe then we’ll know what to do with living.”

  He gazed at her with astonishment. “Is that all you have to say to me?”

  “I want to believe in a new way of life,” she continued, looking away from him, “and I will try to live it.”

  “With Voss?”

  “I can achieve it myself,” she said, looking up at him, “with the help that will be given to all of us at Praesepe.”

  “There are fourteen Cetians on this ship,” he started to say resentfully, “and we may be the last. Ondro and I didn’t always agree on what changes might be good for us, but I feel quite differently now. If we reach wherever we are going, and get the help we have been promised, I will command the ship that will return. And I want you to promise that you will come back with us.”

  “And what will you do?” she asked. “Rule a ruined world?”

  “We’ll start over with what’s left,” he said with strained conviction, “and make it the world Ondro wanted.”

  “There will be nothing left,” she said.

  “Then we’ll begin with what we bring,” he insisted.

  “I won’t want to come back,” she said, thinking of the new habitat that would be built.

  “But you’re one of only four women in our group,” he said. “Do you know what your refusal will mean?”

  Anger flooded into her. He had dreamed of remaking their world, yet he still seemed only too ready to bind her and the remaining Cetian women to lives dominated by the needs of men and children. She thought of Avita Harasta and the other women of the mobile, how free they had seemed, how unlike the women of her world. Even now, in the face of disaster, Josepha could not imagine Avita calmly assenting to what anyone else thought she should do; Avita would always choose for herself, reasoning her way to decision.

  “A few of these people who wanted to settle on our world may wish to come back with you,” she said, suspecting that this was now unlikely.

  He said, “If Ondro meant anything to you, then you must plan to come back with us.”

  She could not answer.

  “You must decide,” he said fearfully, oppressing her with his disappointment and agony.

  “There’s nothing for me to decide.”

  He rubbed his forehead and said, “Help me understand.”

  “The life of these people,” she said, “as it was before my father destroyed it, appealed to me. When they have it back, I will be part of it.”

  “Y
our father?” he asked with surprise. “What are you saying?”

  “Josephus Bely was my father. He may already be dead. To go back to his kind of world, if it survives, would mean physical and spiritual suicide. It would be actual suicide to refuse extended life. Is that what you want?”

  “Your father?” Jason asked again. “How do you know?”

  “He told me himself,” she said, “and so did Paul.”

  Jason took a deep breath and leaned back against the door again, looking defeated. “We knew you were a cleric’s daughter, but this—why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “It has no meaning for me now,” she said. “Think instead of all the people he has killed, and all our people who will die.”

  Jason took a few deep breaths and seemed to be struggling to control himself. “But we can bring all this help back…to our people,” he managed to say. “If, as you say—“

  “Then you do it,” she said.

  He looked down at her with a sudden calm and asked, “Do you love Voss?”

  “I love him,” she said, unsure but hopeful of her growing feelings.

  Jason stared at her, overcome with unbelief, and for a moment it seemed to her that Ondro was looking at her through his brother’s eyes, accusing her of mistaking gratitude and desperation for love.

  “Accept my choice, Jason,” she said. “Ondro would have wanted me to be freer, as he would have come to appreciate and understand the life that had rescued him, and which he would have embraced. My father also took that from him. The only victory you and I can ever have over Josephus now is to live the kind of life he denied to Ondro, and to so many others.”

  Jason swallowed hard and looked down at the floor.

  “You’ll find your own way,” she said, feeling some sympathy for his disappointment and confusion.

  He looked up. “You don’t understand,” he said with a face that had set into a mask.

  “But I do,” she answered, grateful for the resolve that came into her voice. “I am not your inheritance from Ondro. I hate the world that made me. It has destroyed itself, and I will be free.”