Sword of the Lamb (35 page)

“Richard the Lamb lies dead before you, his body still warm.
Have you forgotten him so soon
?” He paused at the ripple of cries of anger and shouted demands. “The way of the Blessed is peace. As all people are children of the All-God, they are all brothers. Who lifts his hand in wrath against any person, lifts his hand against his brother and reaps the harvest of doom! Have you forgotten him who lies here? He who showed you the way of the Blessed? The immortal soul of Richard the Lamb is in the gentle hands of the Mezion. His mortal remains will be done with as the Mezion wills!”

The silence was palpable. An equilibrium had been struck; the scales rested at an uneasy perfect balance. A call to action from one of the Bonds or a single aggressive gesture by any of the guards would tip the scales to disaster, but Zekiel spoke not another word.

Alexand counted the seconds, waiting for the scales to shift, and perhaps the wordless longing within him was a prayer. When he reached twenty, he felt, rather than heard, a collective sigh, and at the edges of the crowd first one, then another, then groups of three and four, began moving away. The tight-packed agglomeration loosened, fragmented, and the exodus was under way. The only sound in the wide white Plaza was the soft shuffle of footsteps. Alexand felt the tension slip away with the retreating footfalls, felt the black lines sag. The captain lowered his transceiver, his hand fell away from his holster.

Alexand’s gaze moved down to the lifeless, emaciated body on the stretcher. He steeled himself, putting yet another lock on that chamber within his mind.

They had not failed Rich; he could not fail them.

He switched off his face-screen as he strode toward the center of the platform.

“Captain!”

The guardsman’s head jerked around, eyes going to impatient slits, then widening.

“My lord?”

The men of the burial detail had been bending over the stretcher, but now they retreated a few steps, making tentative bowing motions, but Alexand’s level gaze never left the captain’s face as he closed the distance between them.

“Captain, dismiss the burial detail.”

“Dis——but, my lord . . .”

“Dismiss them.” He didn’t wait to see the order carried out; it would be. He turned to the retreating crowd. A few had stopped to watch this new development, among them Zekiel and the acolyte.

“Zekiel—” He saw the Shepherd stiffen, and softened his tone. “Zekiel, bring your acolyte and another man and come to the stand.” He turned to the guards at the steps. “Let them pass.”

Again, he didn’t wait to see his order carried out; he fixed a cold eye on the captain.

“You are aware, Captain, that you’ve broken a cardinal law of the Concord?”

He went white. “I—I don’t understand, my lord.”

“The Galinin Rule, part of the Civil Standards Code formulated by the Lord Benedic Galinin. No agent of the Concord will interfere with Bond religious practices and rites unless they constitute a threat to the security of the Concord. I fail to see that giving them the body of this unfortunate man presents any kind of threat. It would normally be surrendered to anyone who claimed it without a thought.”

Alexand didn’t look down as he spoke of the body; he hadn’t allowed himself to look at Rich from the moment he made his presence known. He heard Zekiel approaching with the acolyte and another Bond, but he didn’t turn.

The captain’s eyes shifted uneasily. “I—I didn’t realize—”

“You didn’t
think
. This is exactly how the Alber uprising in Canadia began, and you almost had another here. It was this man—” He glanced back at Zekiel, “—this man whom you treat with such contempt, Zekiel—a Bond—who averted a disaster here, not you.” He paused to give the captain a few seconds more to consider his fate, then, “Ignorance is no excuse, Captain, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, assuming you’ll take a lesson from this experience. Clear the guards from the Plaza; they’re hardly necessary now.”

“Yes, my lord.” It came out with an audible sigh of relief. He hurriedly took out his transceiver, and Alexand turned away. Zekiel was gazing at him as if he were witnessing a miracle. No doubt they would call it that, this unexpected intervention. The will of the Mezion.

And, finally, Alexand looked down at the motionless figure on the stretcher. He heard again the echoing rattle of locks.

Like a sea bird lying on some forsaken beach with the seeking edges of the waves, embroidered with foam, curling around its sand-burdened wings. Yet even in this ruin—the
remains
—that ugly and bitterly accurate word—of Richard DeKoven Woolf, there was an echo of the beauty he wore in life, as the graceful contours of the sea bird’s wing echoes a remembrance of flight.

“Zekiel, who was he?”

“He is called Richard the Lamb, my lord. He abides now in the Beyond Realm with the Blessed. Perhaps he’s only gone home.”

“Was he in truth a holy man?”

“Yes, my lord. It is said the holy light of the Mezion burned in him. Too much of a burden for a mortal man, I think; it took all the strength from his body.”

Alexand swallowed against the searing dryness in his throat, his eyes moving again to that silent flesh. He pulled off his cloak and knelt by Rich’s body and carefully crossed his frail hands on his chest. There was none of that paradoxical strength in those hands now.

Rich—dear God, Rich, I loved you
. . . .

He unfurled the cloak, black side outward, scarlet flashing briefly, and draped it over that still form, feeling the dull snap of yet another lock closing on the chamber in his mind as he drew the black cloth over his brother’s face.

“My
lord
! What are you—”

Alexand rose abruptly, silencing the captain’s perplexed objection with a cold look. Then he turned to Zekiel.

“I suffered a loss of my own only a few days ago. There’s grief enough in that to share.” He felt his mental focus shifting dangerously and squared his shoulders. “Take him, Zekiei. Take . . . your saint.”

“Yes, my lord.” The Shepherd nodded to the other Bonds, and they lifted the shrouded stretcher, the acolyte pausing long enough to gaze at Alexand, amazement vying with gratitude, before they moved away hurriedly.

Alexand watched them, the gulf of loneliness widening with their every step, and he was entirely unprepared when Zekiel, his eyes glistening with unnoticed tears, sank to his knees and took his hand, then pressed it to his forehead.

“You are of the Blessed, my lord. Peace be.”

Alexand stared at him, past comprehending that gesture or the words, shaken and literally shaking, as the Shepherd rose. Finally, he found his voice.

“Peace be, Zekiel.”

The old man turned, following in the wake of Rich’s body off the stand and through the silent, awed remnants of the crowd. As the spare procession worked its way out of the Plaza, the last of the guards filed back into the Hall of the Directorate.

And at the other end of the Plaza, the Fountain of Victory came to life, a renascent tracery of white against the blue winter sky.

I’ve just returned from a pleasant hour spent on the observation deck on Level 14. I wonder that the Communications personnel don’t get weary of seeing me pass the camouflaged antennas (and how much like prehistoric creatures they seem, stranger to my eyes than the inhabitants of this alien world) to reach the deck where I can look north, east, south, and west for such a long and refreshing distance from the lofty apex of Fina.

Yet it’s a rather limited view, really, confined almost entirely to water. Our island makes up the foreground, and if weather conditions are right, you can see the nearer islands off the West Pangaean continent to the northwest, the Comarg Archipelago to the south, with fiery little Orifel spewing impatient sparks on its southwestern extremity. But the Selamin Sea makes up most of this vista, and I’d be satisfied with that if no land were visible at all.

A scrap of a poem has lodged in my memory, while its writer’s name is forgotten.

Our mother sea, fair mother sea
,
Cradle of life, inventor of death
,
Who makes no ceremony for either
. . . .

I always think of those lines when I look out at that vast, flat panorama—flat, yet sometimes I think I can discern the curve of the planet—and I always think of the Pacific Ocean on Terra as I remember it from a similar high vantage point looking east toward the Barrier Reef.

And sometimes I wonder if a large percentage of the other members who seek out this vantage point aren’t Terran. I think it must be especially true when Fina is in Pollux’s night. Then the subtle differences of color in the sea and atmosphere are masked; then only the scents from the island foliage and one’s consciousness of the lighter gravity are all that makes this sea alien, and one becomes accustomed to the scents, and the body adjusts to the slight difference in gravity within a week.

Tonight our arbitrary Terran Standard Time night was in phase with Pollux’s night, and the sky was clear with only a few billowy clouds to make shadows and reflections on the immense, shimmering span of the sea, silk and silver all in one, never in two instants the same, yet profoundly constant. On the island’s shores the surf breaks in long sighs, each comber trailed by a lacy train of foam.

There, indeed, is comfort for the displaced children of Terra. Until we look up at the sky.

If humankind had been bom on Pollux, I wonder if we’d ever have voyaged to the stars. They’re so rarely visible here, except as a vague powdering, with Alpha Centauri B dominating the night sky half of every year. That’s a sight my Terran senses still balk at: a pinpoint that lights the entire sky, making the nights dim imitations of day. Even when B is in Pollux’s day sky, it’s “moon” Castor brightens a good part of the remainder of Pollux’s nights. I find myself longing for clear Terran nights when the sky is a well of incredibly distant suns, and you feel that if you look into it too long, you’ll fall upward into that glittering abyss, and the thought holds no fear, only vaulting elation.

Tonight Castor set early near Orifel, but B still lighted the western sky. I searched for Proxima, and I’ve been told where it should be, but I’ve never been able to find that dim, red dwarf with my unaided eye. I’ve never been able to find the Sun—
my
Sun—either in Pollux’s bright nights.

But all that is the mewling complaint of a homesick Terran. I wish sometimes I’d been bom on Pollux so I might appreciate it properly.

I remember my first glimpse of Pollux when my ship emerged from SynchShift and hurtled toward the twin crescents of Pollux and Castor. Our course was such that for a while Pollux seemed to rise over Castor, and it was one of those awesome images that fix themselves indelibly in memory. Then, as we left Castor behind and approached Pollux, I thought how beautiful it must have seemed to the men who first saw it nearly two centuries ago, a blue world with its white calligraphy of cloud. Like Terra.

It’s so hard not to think of it that way. Like Terra. I remember thinking of it from a cartographer’s point of view, thinking how convenient it was that all its land masses were in one hemisphere except for a finger of the West Pangaean continent and three plume series of islands in the huge midst of the Polluxian Ocean. And I remember thinking of the two continents of East and West Pangaea as echoes out of Terra’s geologic history, megacontinents not yet split by the massive shifts of internal convections, but showing incipient rifts in the Pangaean Straits, the Caucasias Mountains, and the Sahra Rift, with the Selamin Sea indicating a rift already accomplished. But obviously the men who named the two continents “Pangaea” had the same thought, and that, like so many of Pollux’s place names, demonstrates the Terran proclivity for drawing parallels with Terra.

Yet this is an extraordinarily beautiful planet in its own right, and as unique as Terra. The stellar explorations beyond Centauri taught us that. To be sure, I’ve seen very little of it except for Fina and views from the cities where my work takes me. Via MT. That’s one thing I fear about the MT, it tends to isolate us from awareness of our physical world. But I’ve seen enough of Pollux and its flora and fauna to delight me: the singing trees, the delicate airriders of netvines, the flying blossoms of floroptera, the iridescent glory of glassgrass in the spring in the Paneast Deserts, the solemn groves of rockwood on the Comarg Peninsula that dwarf even the huge karri trees of Conta Austrail. I’ve watched the migration of sporowhales through the Comargian Straits, the phosphorescent breeding frenzy of the spidery seanova on Fina’s beaches, and the homing flight of flocks of dipnoptera from sea to mountain forest. I’ve seen the awesome tidal bores in the Pangaean Straits and the black, wind-honed monoliths of the Needles rising out of the endless white saltpans near Omega, felt the ground tremble at the Cataracts of the Amazonia near Riollegro, and walked in the lacy shadows of the fernarbor forests around Hallicourt. It’s a beautiful planet, and I can only hope those born to it will feel for this new Eden what I feel for Terra. It is as much a home and sanctuary for humankind as Terra, and those who live on it should feel the same reverence for it.

Terra’s children didn’t always show that reverence, and I hope Pollux’s children won’t forget Terra’s history, won’t forget the cost of irreverence. That’s also part of my ambivalence for Pollux. I look at it and see the Eden that Terra once was, and I remember the hideous scars on her fair face left by the Disasters and the century preceding them: the scars of war—the least of them, really—the scars of exploitation, the willful fouling of what was then our only nest; the dead rivers and lakes, the poisoned plains, the sterile valleys, the razed forests, the numberless species—entire
species
—indifferently or rapaciously snuffed out; the mindless multiplication of population with no concern for its demands on the planet, or for the suffering of the billions of human beings thus condemned to die horribly of disease and starvation.

Terra rid herself by the cruel processes of nature of the worst of the burden imposed on her by human ignorance and avarice simply by ridding herself of most of the human population. Terra is still our blue, watery, fertile mother world, but she’ll never be the same. Pollux is figuratively still a virgin, and I hope her human inhabitants Won’t forget Terra’s history, or forget that planetary rape is a crime that will, inevitably and inexorably, be punished.

Thus I looked out over the Selamin Sea tonight, sought in vain in the twilight night sky for my Sun, and longed for Terra, for a scarred Eden, and I thought, Oh, you children of this new Eden, honor your mother. She deserves your reverence, and in the end will tolerate nothing less.