Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2) Read online

  He stopped before the door to his quarters and felt a moment of sympathy for Ondro and his brother Jason. The two Avonmoro brothers had longed for something new to intrude into their world, bringing impossible changes, loosening the mortar of time and fear that had made a changeless wall around their hopes.

  The knowledge for change waited in the vast library of the ancient information storage and retrieval system below the palace. But unused skills also required teachers, and there were none. The trades passed on only much-used techniques that required minimal understanding, enabling the world to function, after a fashion, but without progress.

  He entered his apartment, closed the heavy wooden door, and turned the key in the wrought-iron lock. He stood there for a few moments, looking at the dimly lit carvings of angels in the wood, and was sick with the loss of sweet possibility that he had known in his youth. He turned away, hoping that there was still enough night left for him to find sleep’s mercy.

  6

  He was a fool to have doubted himself, Josephus thought as the anemic glow of dawn lit up his windows. When Josepha had refused to leave, he had tried too hard to explain to her why Ondro, however honestly or unwittingly, had become part of a larger threat. The revolutionary cells had to be cleaned out once in a while, because their aim was to work from within over long periods of time, threatening one day to elect a pope from their own ranks.

  He should not have admitted to her that he also blamed himself for the liberal decisions of his early years in office, among them the order to release to the schools the record of Earth’s heritage. The past’s corrupting examples had taken their toll, forcing the Church to share its control of science and technology, especially medical knowledge, with too many people. And as new students came up through the schools and were able to compare their world’s accomplishments with the record of Earth’s achievements, the taste for change could only grow, ignoring the fact that Earth had destroyed itself and that the aim of a simpler life was to insure survival of the means to attain the eternal life of heaven. If this decay continued, he had warned, then a successful revolt against the Church would become possible. Under pressure, the cardinals might even select a heretic pope to be a tool of the educated class, in the mistaken belief that they were serving the Church’s survival. Earth’s history would repeat itself as religious guidance of life slipped into secular hands and the material world became the sole object of life. Humanity would become blind to the life beyond life, deaf to the values of the world beyond the world.

  “My life will have been for nothing,” he had told her, hearing his own words as they must have sounded to her, hollow and self-important, but truthful.

  “But I love him,” she had said to him, tearing at his father’s heart with her eyes.

  “Love cannot exist for long outside of the knowledge of right and wrong. Surely your studies have taught you that?”

  She had glared at him, declaring that the substance of his words meant nothing to her, shaking his convictions as only a youthful gaze could do, because it could only look ahead.

  “It’s not such a bad place where I have sent Ondro and his brother,” he had added. She could not marry, of course, if she were to have any chance of rising to the rank of cardinal and succeeding him. Women had never risen beyond the station of parish priest, even though the Church had opened the way for them on Old Earth.

  “Where is he?” she had demanded, as if questioning a child, and he had felt the falseness of the fatherhood that he could not deny or abolish.

  “I cannot tell you, daughter.”

  “I’ll find out. Someone must know.”

  She had left the chamber before he could give her his general blessing, leaving him with the weight of her resolve. It would not help her; even if she learned where Ondro was, she would not be able to rescue him.

  As he lay in bed and looked out at the brightening sky, he remembered the generosity of his youth and the ways his own compassion had been used against him, leading him to give away too much of the Church’s authority to others. Perhaps it was still not too late to reverse the changes. But was his faith strong enough to help him apply the means?

  7

  Ondro came to the top of the hill and looked down at the makeshift village of wooden houses and grass huts. In a dozen lifetimes these islands could not grow an economy powerful enough to build a navy and invade the mainland; even if there were enough ore to develop metal-working, there would never be enough food to feed the growing population that would be needed. The power pyramid was just as rigid here as it was back home. The criminal hierarchy here was largely based on force and physical brutality, while the political prisoners paid obeisance to intellectual and rhetorical skills. There was little contact between the two camps, although there was no question in his mind that the criminals could easily overpower the politicals had there been anything for them to gain besides the occasional sexual demand. Idleness born of changeless decay maintained a stable hopelessness.

  He sat down and thought bitterly of the documents he had signed to avoid torture, deeding away his father’s land and house to blanks on paper, to nameless members of the religious oligarchy who had told him he would have no need of his property where he was going—so why suffer pain? Bely was probably just as corrupt as his authorities, or deluded about their actual behavior.

  The odor of fish reached him on the rise, telling him that a fresh catch was sitting in the shed near the shore. A small field of scrawny grain was coming up on the far side of the village. The chickens were clucking away in their fenced area. The fruit trees were expected to do well this year, but he missed the potatoes, carrots, and beets of the mainland. He would probably never taste them again. The distant hope in the thought made him smile; that he would certainly never taste them again was the truth that his errant thoughts insisted on denying with modifiers. If he had his grade school teacher’s blackboard on which to diagram sentences, then he might be able to root out all hope from his thoughts. Yet again—not might, but would root out all hope. Hope makes a man deathless, someone had once written; he should have written that it makes him a fool before the fact of death, to go forward into the abyss with any hope at all.

  Jason waved to him from their hut, then started up the hill. His brother was still losing weight, Ondro noted, and he was taking more frequent naps. He had given up inside himself, and there was no way to call him out again. Together they had planned great waterworks, had dreamed of redesigning cities, and that was one reason they were wasting away here. Too much change would have rearranged the world, taken power from its masters; change could only be slow, conserving the positions of the powerful, preserving against the evils of revolution. But occasionally, some secret violence had to be done to internal enemies.

  As he watched his brother struggle up toward him, Ondro found it hard to believe that Jason had been the vocal theoretician of the cadre. “That’s why we’re both here,” Jason had confessed one day, admitting guilt but showing no repentance. “I should have known they wouldn’t have let us change the world so easily. They don’t need new cities and more people. Too hard to control. There’s enough herd to keep the masters on top.”

  That Jason was gone.

  “Hello, Ondy,” Jason said as he came up to him, smiling for a moment as he had when they were boys, and sat down next to him. Together they surveyed what world was still theirs.

  After a while Jason smiled at him. It was the second time today. Ondro felt a jab of hope.

  “I wonder if we had it in us,” Jason said with a show of energy, “to carry through with our plans.”

  “You seemed ready enough,” Ondro said, ready to play along.

  “We would have risked poisoning our ends with necessary killing, as the old historians say. Or is that just another bit of preventative teaching, to keep us quiet in our chains?”

  “Who knows,” Ondro said. “We might have sacrificed a whole generation to reach better times. Maybe slow changes are better,
no matter how long they take.”

  “What if they never come?” Jason asked, his voice reaching for strength.

  “Single generations, facing death, are never patient,” Ondro said. “We lacked the belief in the life to come, to make us patient.”

  “We had our belief in the future,” Jason said, “in what was possible. And we held that belief with clear knowledge of how we were being held back. We had no time, no chance, to make our own mistakes, to commit our crimes, to try new ways.”

  Ondro said, “You might as well say it. I got too close to some cleric’s daughter, and that got us here. She may have even led them to us.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Jason said. “Who could have known that she was the small hook with which they would pull us out into the open? Who knows, they may have arrested her, too.”

  Ondro glanced at his brother in surprise. Jason had only rarely speculated about Josepha’s role in the arrests. There had been no word from her or about her after the arrests, not even a rumor among the prisoners about what had happened to her. Ondro was relieved that she wasn’t here—but where was she?

  “What did you see in her, anyway?” Jason asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ondro replied without any of the emotion he expected to feel. “With all the show of fervor she put on, she still seemed innocent of politics. Just a theological student with no future except the one that her nameless father might one day give to her.”

  “You felt sorry for her,” Jason said, but without the reproach that might have asked, “We’re here because you felt sorry for her?”

  “Maybe I did,” Ondro whispered, hoping for a physical blow from his brother as a sign of his improving health.

  Jason laughed. “She was beautiful. I’ll admit that much. If you had to get a leg up, she would have been a painless way to go. You might have achieved a position of some use.”

  Ondro looked at him and didn’t know what to say, thinking that his brother was getting confused in his argument.

  Jason saw his questioning look and said, “You think now that you might not have been of much help to us if you had married her, that you would have deluded yourself with the idea of slow change, of leaving things as they are. Oh, I admit we might not have been better than Bely. We’re all the same inside, but Bely’s hereditary hierarchy added worse to bad from the start. Just look at their rules. They stand justified by the story of a crucified god who rose from the dead—and one of their rules is an injunction against doubting that yarn. How’s that for self-serving convenience?”

  Ondro took a deep breath, feeling reassured.

  “The simple human trust in experience and health,” Jason continued, “which is all that faith is—a kind of shorthand—is made into a cosmic system of trial and redemption in a life beyond this one.”

  “I’m not surprised that we all try to make something of the abyss around us,” Ondro said. “Goodness brings life and evil inner death, does it not? And are we not judged, whether we admit it or not, by our motives and our deeds? And then do we not have to live with what we have made? I’m not surprised that we dream of a place beyond life where all wrongs and sorrows stop, and where every question is answered.”

  Jason’s wasting face smiled at him and said, “Well, yes, but I don’t have to believe it’s all true. I’ll sit here and judge motives and deeds, and I’ll grant you that we are what we have made of ourselves, at least to a degree—but beyond life there is nothing that will damn us or save us, and Bely rules here, with promises he cannot keep, with fears that only serve him and his. Maybe we should have played his game and waited for slow changes—but for our impatience we’ll die here. With patience we would have died in our father’s house, still being patient.”

  “You’re probably right,” Ondro said.

  “I hate how they separated you and Josepha,” Jason said sadly, suddenly drained. “I wonder if she even knows what happened to you.” His voice trembled as he said, “It was just your luck to be my brother. They might have let you off more easily if I hadn’t been such a firebrand. I could have left you out of it.”

  “I’m more like you than that,” Ondro said, “and that would have prevented me from just going along to get along. Sooner or later…”

  “I know, I know,” Jason said feebly.

  Ondro gazed at the sinking sun. Something of his brother’s fading rebelliousness entered him, and he resented his own humanity—the flesh that was doomed to die, the mind that struggled toward the light and never quite attained it. There was no help anywhere, despite the longing that reached out and pleaded with the nameless, irredeemable fact of living that seemed to be both wake-fulness and dream.

  “Storm’s coming,” Jason said, and lay back where he sat. “Feel the drop in pressure?”

  This one will finish us, Ondro thought, and a part of him welcomed it. A blind rage readied to break across the sea and drown the island exiles; yet it would still be a crime, committed by Bely with nature’s innocent hand. We’ll be dead forever, Ondro thought, thinking of his bones rotting in the sea, where in a million years he would still be dead, still counting up to forever.

  “You know,” Jason said in a whisper, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  8

  “Paul,” Josepha said in a sad, trembling voice, “are we still friends?”

  She had come to his quarters very early in the day and had been admitted because she still had the pass he had given to her. He gazed at her as she sat before his desk in the dark, heavily curtained study, and remembered the young girl he had visited regularly at the convent school so he might report back to her father. For some time she had imagined that he was her father, despite his denials. Well, now she knew, and the critical look on her face sent a chill into him.

  “Of course we’re friends,” he said, “and I hope we will always be.”

  “You know why I’m here,” she said sternly.

  He sat forward and put his hands on his desk, under the green shaded light. “Do you care for him that much?”

  She nodded. “This should not have happened.”

  Paul sighed and sat back. Like her mother, Josepha was a good Christian, and her ethics were a reproach to her father. “But what do you imagine I can do?” he asked.

  “Free him.”

  The trembling was gone from her voice; she was determined to have her way.

  “And who else? His brother, his friends? Would you abandon them? If it’s right for one, then it’s right for all to go free.”

  Her eyes squinted at him. “How many are there, Paul, and where are they?”

  “Too many for me to be just. And you would wish me to be fair?”

  “That’s just a clever argument for doing nothing,” she said coldly, and the intonations reminded him of her father’s voice. “You could get him out. I don’t ask you to be fair if it means abandoning him. One thing at a time.”

  Paul sat forward slightly. “So I get him out. Does he then take up where he left off? Not likely. Are you two then prepared to live in obscurity, just to be safe? That wouldn’t be much better than the life he has now. Keep in mind also that his release would be traced to me. I would have to send a ship, with armed men, to separate him from the others, and I could not conceal any of that.”

  “Then you won’t help me,” she said softly.

  He was silent, trying to control his feelings, to seem kind when he could not be kind. “I’m sorry,” he said, hating the effort, watching her hands grip the armrests. “I know what I can and can’t do,” he said as she got up, turned her back to him, and stood very still.

  There was nothing she could do. She was the last of her group, free and powerless. But he asked the question anyway. “What will you do, Josepha?”

  She turned and faced him, and the look of fury on her face dismayed and frightened him.

  “Whatever it takes,” she said. “With your help or without it.”

  And my help can only be nothing at all, he did not say, fearing
that he would not be able to save her from suffering. No one would listen to her now or help her, because this generation of rebels had been dealt with. Bely would officially deny that she had been one of them, but he would not help her. No one would help her.

  “Is it worth being a swine, Paul?” she asked. “Is it worth what you get for it? What do you get for it, Paul?”

  It was a good question, and he didn’t have the stomach to try answering it. As with all the best questions, it had no easy answer, and perhaps no answer at all. How could he tell her that rebels either joined the regime and did what they could or were exiled or killed? God, whether he existed or not, had only creatures to do his work; and if he was not, as was likely, then the creatures had only themselves to do what had to be done—and they were left an even smaller arena of power: what could be done. The window of human freedom had always been too small for any man’s liking; but it was better to see through it, better to reach out and do what could be done, than to miss the chance completely and do nothing.

  That’s what I get, he wanted to say as he looked up at the woman who was killing the girl he had known.

  “This is what you get?” she asked. “This study, these quarters? A little food? Someone to serve it to you? Someone to clean your rooms and do your wash, like my mother did, so you can hide from everything and lie to yourself about the good you are doing? Jason and Ondro were right. It’s all for holding us back from a better life, to keep you and the others at the top.”

  He had no strength to answer her, but finally he said, “Leave your pass with me, and don’t come here again. I don’t want to hear from you or know where you are. That will afford you some safety.”

  She stepped closer and dropped her pass on his desk. “You’re just a coward!” she cried, fixing him with her gaze.

  He looked away and started to say, “If it helps you to think that of me,” but was unable to continue and covered his face.