Infinite Day (31 page)

An angel of the Lord! I cannot stand against him
.

Nezhuala turned and, now careless of the form he bore, took flight, flinging the doors wide as he fled. Bruised, shaken, and tired, he withdrew himself back to the Dominion with all the speed he could.

For a long time, Nezhuala sat on his throne, pressed against the back of the seat, aware of the sweat seeping into his robes, staring into emptiness and recovering his strength.

I have failed
. The thought was bitter.
I had hoped to overhear plans, but I heard only snatches of debate
.

He suddenly saw that his voyage had not been fruitless. He had seen much: the Assembly was indeed prepared, and that was a cruel blow. There must have been fifty ships around Earth. Somehow they knew of his existence, and somehow they were preparing defenses, however feeble, against his own.

He replayed in his mind the snatches of conversation that he had picked up in the few moments he had been able to listen to the conference. As he did, he saw again the faces around the long wooden table and realized that he had sensed something very important.

They had been arguing with each other! And he had felt emotions of annoyance and irritation! Instead of a seamless, terrible unity that he had expected and feared, he had found an Assembly divided.

Militarily, their strength grows. But elsewhere, at their heart, they are already divided. And that is where it really counts
.

12

E
ven in the dreary grayness of Below-Space, time passed, and on all three ships—Merral's
Star
, Lezaroth's
Comet,
and Clemant's
Dove
—the days slipped into weeks. And although on each vessel all the passengers and crew were affected to varying degrees by the strange and unnerving extra-physical manifestations, the ships continued to make unrelenting progress on their voyages between the worlds.

On the
Star,
as the journey's midpoint came and passed
,
Merral found that life had become a routine as drab as the lighting.
It is as if we never did, nor will do, anything else.
Yet the routine worked; everyone had defined tasks and did them. Every day, Merral went to worship, made a host of minor decisions, trained with weapons, practiced his Saratan, exercised, and spent some time talking at length with the crew or the soldiers. For him—as the others—the high point of the day was the evening program of music, drama, and film, and the low point, the perpetual intrusion of ghost slugs and other manifestations that were, by turn, irritating or alarming.

Merral continued to spend some of his spare time with the castle tree. Despite the grayness of the simulation, he found it increasingly attractive. He never forgot that what he saw was utterly artificial, yet he found it some sort of living world where plants grew, insects took wing, and animals crawled. Here, unlike inside the steel gray walls of the ship, there was life, with seasons and trees that blossomed and seeded. Merral, who found himself grappling with the age-old paradox of space travel that in the infinity of space the greatest pressure comes from claustrophobia, also found in his simulation a release from the confining walls.

One day, as he put the castle tree egg back in the drawer of his cupboard, he noticed that his cedar cone had opened up. He carefully lifted it out, turned it upside-down on a piece of paper, then tapped it several times. A dozen or more thin seeds, each barely big enough to cover the nail of his smallest finger, slipped out. Tenderly, he folded the paper into an envelope to hold the seeds and put them safely away.
They remind me of a life that is long gone. Will it ever return?

As their destination loomed and Merral's Saratan improved, he practiced dialogues with Azeras, and in the spontaneous question-and-answer sessions he found he was able to converse fluently. Yet his fluency was within strict limits. When he tried to run through a day of what he now called his “old life” and imagine how he could talk in Saratan about trees or music or friendship, he found he did not have the vocabulary. He wondered whether any existed in Saratan.

But his progress was praised by Azeras, and after one session the man gave him a wolfish grin. “Good! You are beginning to think like a Dominion captain.”

The thought did not entirely please Merral.
I hope I can take off my role as easily as I put it on.

Midway through the voyage, Anya came to him privately. “Merral, it won't have escaped your notice that I've been doing a lot of training with the snipers. When it comes to a fight I don't really want to sit around. I want to be on their team.”

Merral stared at her. “You have a task helping Abilana with surgery. Helping supervise the robo-surgeons.”

“But others can do that too. And I can still nurse when I come back.”

“Assuming you aren't a casualty yourself.”

“But I want to fight.”

Merral heard himself sigh.
Why don't I want her to fight? Because I care for her or because I don't think it's right for her?

“Anya, that's understandable. But is it what you are supposed to do?”

She gave him a look that was close to a glare. “It's what I think I have to do. I just wanted to ask your permission.”

“In theory, I have no objection, as long as you don't get yourself killed. But I need to talk to the soldiers.”

Sometime later, Merral caught up with Helena and told her that Anya was interested in joining her group.

Helena looked hard at him. “Boss, I don't know.” She had taken to calling Merral “Boss,” and although Merral wasn't enthusiastic about it, he couldn't bring himself to correct her.

“Why not?”

“I know she's wanting to get involved, but I think she's trying to prove something. That's not the best basis to join a fighting unit.”

“Is that a refusal?”

“
Hmm
. Boss, we're building a team of people who can rely on each other under the very worst circumstances. And I'm just not convinced that Anya's ability is proven. Sorry. But if you want me to take her on . . .”

“I would like that.”

The heavy pause that followed said much. “Okay, Boss. But she gets no favoritism.”

“Thanks.”

Troubled by the matter, Merral mentioned it to Luke in his office. The chaplain frowned. “And Helena agreed to take her?”

“Yes. You don't think she should have?”

Luke leaned toward him. “Are
you
happy with your decision to put her on the sniper team?”

“Well . . . ,” Merral began and, hearing the hesitation in his voice, stopped.

The chaplain shook a finger in warning. “Let me be blunt, Merral. I don't think you should have ordered Helena to take her.”

“Why not?”

Luke seemed to think for some time before answering. “I feel Anya is driven by what her sister did. I didn't know Perena well, but she and Anya are very different people. And courage is an odder thing than we imagine.”

“I can imagine that. I just didn't want to refuse her.”

Luke shook his head. “Well, it's too late now to pull her from the team. We must just pray it works out.”

Merral made a point of talking daily to Betafor and treating her as one of the team. He analyzed his action as, in part, politeness, but also a mechanism to try to bond her in with everyone else.

One day he was on the bridge with Lloyd when, on impulse, he said, “Betafor, you seem to spend a lot of time on your own. Are you okay?”

Her response was almost shrill. “Commander, you are making the same mistake again. You are seeing me in human terms. As an Allenix, I am self-sufficient; I do not need you or any other member of the crew.”

“What about other Allenix?”

“They would be largely irrelevant. We might trade data, but we are individuals. We exist on our own.”

Behind her, he saw Lloyd raise a pale eyebrow as if to say, “I told you so.”

Vero seemed to spend every spare moment examining data.

“You look like you are drowning in information,” Merral said, trying to analyze the growing concern he felt for his friend.

Vero looked at the pile of notebooks and the three separate computer screens around him. “A valid observation, my friend, I am—shall I say, preoccupied?”

“Is it worthwhile?”

“‘Is it worthwhile?'” Vero repeated the words as if the question was outrageous. “
Yes.
Because knowledge is power. Because if you can understand where someone has come from, you can predict where they want to go. Maybe.” He rubbed eyes that Merral thought in normal light would be red. “That's why I—
we
—need all these data sources.”

“What have we got so far?”

“I now feel I have something of a more complete history of the Rebellion of Jannafy.”

“Our histories surely didn't
lie
?”

“No. But they were overhasty in deciding that the Rebellion had ended. There was an unseemly eagerness to sweep the whole matter under the carpet and get on with rebuilding the Assembly. That is why the sentinels were founded.”