A Matter of Oaths (11 page)

“If you don’t let go of me, I shall be sick over you. Ma’am.”

“Nonsense.” She released him anyway. “You’ve got too much
pride, and the self-control to support it.”

And I have been sick so many times since escaping from the
web-room that my stomach is empty, Rafe thought ruefully; the only thing I have
left in it is the urge to be sick. “There was something else you wanted to ask,”
he prompted.

“I came for your thoughts about that raider,” she said,
taking the empty chair. “Did you notice anything that isn’t on record?”

“Their cannon range.” Rafe seized the change of subject. “The
estimates I’ve seen were twenty percent too low.”

Rallya nodded agreement. “Must have been a third of their
mass just powering those cannon,” she commented. “And if they were intending to
carry another ship through jump with them, they’d need another third for the
tractors. Not a lot left for drive, is there? Either they had no margin for
error, or they came from somewhere just one or two jumps away.”

“They may not have intended to hold the ship with tractors
during jump,” Rafe speculated. “If they cast a wide enough jump-field, they
could carry it through in their wake. That would have allowed them to get away
with half the power for their tractors.”

“They’d have to be hellishly confident about their jump
capabilities. Get that stunt wrong and you lose yourself for good.”

“The F’sair used it regularly,” Rafe pointed out. “Took a
lot of ships before the cargoships learned to flick their own jump-field on to
turn the jump wild. That stopped the raids within half a year. For the F’sair,
dying in battle is a lucky death: their gods carry them straight to heaven; but
if they get lost during jump, their gods can’t ever find them and they’re
condemned to hell.” He balled his fists in his pockets, forcing fingernails
into palms, a futile effort to drive away the vivid images of the interior of a
F’sair warship, of a meal shared with a F’sair war-leader. Impossible.
Imagination, not memory, he told himself desperately.

“Useless set of gods they’ve got,” Rallya commented. “I
doubt our Outsiders share the same ones, but the thought about the wild jumps
is worth passing on. Buhklir had you taught well.” She raised both eyebrows. “Did
you know that you turn a fetching shade of grey whenever I mention his name?”

“I’m glad you find it amusing, ma’am,” Rafe managed.

“Interesting, not amusing,” she corrected him. “Is it part
of the conditioning that goes with identity-wipe?”

Rafe shrugged. “I presume so, ma’am, although I haven’t
experienced it before.”

“You haven’t had any knowledge about your past before,” she
pointed out. “And it has to be something that operates very infrequently, or
you’d be useless as a webber.” She rose to her feet. “You’d better get some
sleep. You look like death, and you’re due back in the web in five hours.” She
grinned. “I’ll send Joshim down, shall I? In his capacity as ship’s surgeon, of
course. The shape you’re in, you’ll have no other use for him.”

* * *

 
“Into bed with
you,” Joshim said firmly, as soon as a ash-coloured Rafe closed the door behind
him.

Rafe gave him a tight smile. “What for? We both know I won’t
sleep. Or only long enough to wake up yelling.”

“Bed,” Joshim repeated. “This is your Webmaster speaking.”
He gave Rafe a gentle push in the right direction. “Is it just nausea?”

“What did the Commander say?”

“That I should come and hold your hand while you threw up.”
Joshim frowned. “Are you fit to web your next shift?”

“If I’m not, the Commander has got a lot to do with it,”
Rafe said sourly.

“I was assuming that.” Joshim put both hands on Rafe’s
shoulders and pushed him down to sit on the bed. “What else is wrong beside the
nausea?”

“It’s quite enough on its own,” Rafe admitted, resting his
head against Joshim’s forearm. “You’d think they could come up with some more
dignified way of reinforcing the identity-wipe,” he complained. “At least they
had the sense to put a delay mechanism in. If this had hit me during combat…”
He shivered.

“Was that the trigger?” Joshim asked, alarmed.

“Yes,” Rafe said miserably.

 
Joshim took a deep
breath. Rallya had attributed it to her reference to Buhklir. If it had been
the encounter with the raider, the experience of being in the web during
combat… He had a clear vision of
Bhattya
as a sphere of debris spreading in the wake of the convoy because of a lapse in
Rafe’s concentration or in his web control. As Webmaster, Joshim thought
unhappily, he might have to bar Rafe from the web for this. As Rafe’s lover…
that had to be a secondary consideration, he chided himself.

“All right,” he told Rafe steadily. “Lie down. I’ll go and
fetch my drug-pack. We’ll get rid of your sickness and then we’ll talk.”

He stopped on his way, to ask Jualla to switch shifts with
Rafe: four more hours to solve this. She agreed readily, and offered to ask her
team and Rafe’s if they were willing to make the change permanent. Elanis’s
news was travelling fast, Joshim thought wryly. Jualla had been in the web
during the argument in the web-room, but she had already heard about it. A
permanent change would put Joshim and Rafe on the same shift pattern, give them
more time out of the web together. He thanked Jualla and gave her permission to
ask.

Am ampoule broken under his nostrils gave Rafe relief from
his symptoms. As he regained his normal colour, Joshim wished there was as easy
a cure for their cause.

“Jualla has swapped shifts with you,” he said, sitting down
across the room from the bed. If he sat beside Rafe, it would be harder to
maintain the separation between Webmaster and lover, too great a temptation to
take Rafe in his arms and comfort him. He already knew that comfort was not
enough; he had comforted Rafe every time that he woke from a nightmare, and the
nightmares still continued. He had to offer something more specific than
comfort: a solution, or an attempt at a solution. It was his responsibility,
both as a Webmaster and as somebody who cared very much about Rafe.

“When did this start?” he asked. “Exactly.”

Rafe grimaced. “I was fine until I disengaged. Then I was
almost sick in the shub.”

“You’re sure it isn’t just the stress of combat?” Joshim
asked hopefully.

“I’m sure.” Rafe sat up and characteristically hugged his
knees. “You’re worried about allowing me in the web again.”

“Yes,” Joshim admitted. “While there’s a chance that this
will happen again, I’m worried about allowing you in the web.”

“There’s always that chance,” Rafe said heavily.

“Not if we find a way to prevent it,” Joshim pointed out.

“What? You can’t give me any drugs to suppress the sickness
while I’m in the web. If you did, the conditioning would only express itself
another way.”

“Then we work on the cause and not the symptoms,” Joshim
said calmly.

Rafe laughed harshly. “What are you going to do? Undo the
conditioning? Restore my memory? Hell, Joshim, if it were possible, do you
think I’d have waited this long?” His voice was rising.

“Have you ever tried?”

“No.” Rafe let out a long sigh. “I wouldn’t know how to
start. Or what damage it might do.” He looked away, looked back again. “Sorry I
shouted. I’m just scared.”

“What are you scared of?”

“Having my mind messed around anymore. Losing my web. Losing
you. Finding out who I used to be. It’s a comprehensive list, isn’t it?”

“Why shouldn’t it be? And I don’t have a definite answer,
Rafe, only an idea that might work, if you want to try it.”

“What is it?”

“An Aruranist technique. You know that we believe in
reincarnation?” Rafe nodded. “It’s important to us, remembering as many of our
previous lives as we can, so that we don’t waste the current one covering old
ground. I could teach you the methods we use to remember.”

“Working on the theory that, if they work across multiple
reincarnations, they might work across identity-wipe?” Rafe asked doubtfully.

“I’m not promising,” Joshim warned.

“I know you’re not. And I’m not saying I believe in
reincarnation, but…” Rafe shrugged jerkily. “How many do you remember?”

“Three. That isn’t many. There’s a woman in Jasan who
remembers twenty-eight.”

“And you remember them all clearly?”

“No. The first one is hazy, just snatches of detail. One day
I’ll improve it.” Joshim laughed softly. “Although I’ve been saying that for
years. I suspect I remember enough not to want to remember any more. I don’t
like her very much.”

“Her?”

“Yes. I was a woman last time too. A priestess in a temple
outside the Empires. Salu’i’kamai. The Hand of the Goddess is on the Earth,” he
translated.

“With my luck, I’ll end up with a complete memory of a
previous life as a night-soil porter on Rasasara, and nothing else,” Rafe
muttered. “You know we’ll be violating our Oaths if we do this?”

“Yes.” Joshim wondered exactly when he had realized. At the
time he had first wondered whether the recall techniques would work for Rafe,
he decided, and that had been nights ago, watching Rafe fall into the uneasy
sleep that followed yet another nightmare. It was suddenly absurd that he was
planning to break his Oath while sitting as far as he could from the man for
whom he would do so. He went to Rafe’s side and took his hands.

“If it works, you can’t go back to being who you were,” he
warned.

“Not without getting us both wiped,” Rafe agreed grimly. “And
I don’t want to go back. All I want is to be able to live comfortably inside my
own head.” He squeezed Joshim’s hands hard. “You’re crazy to even think about
this,” he said fiercely. “I won’t let you involve yourself.”

“It’s too late to stop me.” Joshim traced Rafe’s cheekbone
with a kiss. “And I don’t let anybody make my choices for me.”

“I won’t let you break your Oath for me,” Rafe insisted. “Emperors,
Joshim, I may be called an Oath-breaker but I haven’t broken my Oath yet and I
never will!”

“Would it be Oath-breaking?” Joshim queried. “You’re not the
person you were ten years ago. Even if you remember who you were, you won’t be
that person. You’ve no intention of bolting back across the Disputed Zone. What
harm will it do if you remember who you were?”

Rafe shook his head firmly. “I don’t know, Joshim, but… If
we did this, how could we ever know again what was Oath-breaking and what wasn’t?
If I’d sworn false allegiance to the Old Emperor ten years ago, then contrived
to cross the Disputed Zone again, would that have been Oath-breaking? Or would
it have been all right, because nobody knew I’d sworn falsely, because no harm
had been done?

“And if we can justify this to ourselves, what will we be
able to justify next? And how could we object if the Guild changed its
interpretation of the Oath it swore to us? If the Emperors changed their
interpretation of the Oaths they’ve sworn to the Guild? Those Oaths are too
important, Joshim. If we break our Oaths, we can’t hold them to theirs. And if
we can’t hold them to theirs, they’ll plunge the Twin Empires into full-scale
war. We have to keep our Oaths, Joshim. We haven’t any choice.”

Joshim took Rafe’s hands in his again, raised each one in
turn to kiss it. The vehemence of Rafe’s reaction had shaken him, left him
ashamed of the ease with which he had proposed that they break their Oaths.

“When you put it like that, we don’t have any choice, do we?”
he agreed reluctantly. “It shouldn’t have been necessary for you to convince me
of it.”

“Convince you? I was convincing myself,” Rafe said bitterly.
“Hell, Joshim, do you think I’m not tempted? Do you think I don’t dream about
waking up one morning and knowing who I am? But if I break my Oath now, I might
as well have broken it ten years ago and spared myself all this!” He made an
angry gesture. “You’d better bar me from the web. I’m a danger to everybody
else in it, and that’s Oath-breaking as well.”

“Stop taking the Webmaster’s decisions for him,” Joshim
said, deliberately lightly. “You can stay in the web on two conditions. One:
you don’t take the key-position. Two: you disengage if you suspect your
conditioning is beginning to operate. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” There was only dull resignation in Rafe’s voice. “I’d
better get some sleep. Can I have a sleeper?”

“I’ll get you one.”

There was nothing else he could offer Rafe at the moment,
Joshim realized, watching him take the drug. A few hours of unbroken sleep, and
Rafe’s place in the web, and Joshim was not certain that he had made that
decision solely as a Webmaster. This was why you never involved yourself in the
web-room, he reminded himself: you always doubted your own ability to make
decisions about the people you love, rightly doubted it. He ruffled the
sleeping head fondly. It was too late to pull back now, even if he had wanted
to.

Jalset’s World (Aramas Zone) : a
lightly settled agricultural world, sole source of the recreational drug
blissdream; a typical frontier backwater, with no features of physical,
biological, or cultural interest. Passage can be obtained on cargoships
departing from Aramas station.

Rallya breathed in the spice-ridden air of Jalset’s World
and gagged.

“How the hell does anybody live in this?” she demanded.

Lilimya grinned. “The dirtsiders will probably tell you they
couldn’t live anywhere else, ma’am.”

Rallya shaded her eyes to watch
Bhattya
’s shuttle lift off with the returning liberty party, then
turned to address the party that had come down with her.

“You’ve got ten hours,” she reminded them. “If you can find
anything to do with them down here — you could spit from one side of this town
to the other. Keep out of trouble, and if you can’t keep out of trouble, don’t
bring it back to the ship. The Webmaster has better things to do with his time
than treat the local variety of sexbug — ask Rafe if you don’t believe me.” She
glanced around the inattentive faces: they had heard it all before, even Fadir,
and were impatient to be on their way. “Go on, vanish,” she urged them. “Anybody
who isn’t back here in good time for the shuttle will forfeit their next ten
liberties.”