The 97th Step (30 page)

Unfortunately during the legal battle, somebody forgot to pay the Confed its triple-tithe tax. Somebody got quite heated about it, somebody essentially told the Confed to go away and leave them alone, this was serious business.

So, the Confed decided, somebody needed a lesson, and it was one of which everyone should be aware.

The recorded images were very sharp. Troopers gathered up the arguing factions, maybe five hundred people who were either directly involved or working for those who were. The soldiers were not gentle in their work. Pen watched a close shot of a man's head being smashed by a carbine's butt, thoughtfully done in slow motion so no viewer could miss the effect of heavy plastic on scalp and skull. Blood sprayed, and the camera was close enough so that the red mist fogged the lens. An artful image, they must have thought.

There were other such scenes. Boots driven into stomachs or groins, elbows into noses, weapons used to batter heads. No one was shot—they were saving them for the grand finale, and needed them alive for that.

Cut to a Confederation Dreadnought hung against the starry pinprick of space. The Fourth Fleet's flagship, the voiceover explained, the
Indomitable
. Mounting (classified number) banks of (classified) gigawatt laser weaponry. The camera held the shot long enough to show a ten-passenger lighter arc from under the belly of the mothership, to give it scale.

It was a big ship, all right. Bigger than a couple of the smallest wheel worlds.

The camera pushed in on the ship, and faded through it, back to the five hundred people on Wu. The shot was high, from a flitter or thopter, but a zoom showed a remarkable close up. Those who were still able to run did so. Panic flowed from those people like their screams, the sounds of which were produced with clean fidelity despite the camera's distance.

Pen felt his stomach churn. He knew what was coming, even though the announcer tastefully avoided speaking it aloud.

They cut to the
Indomitable
. The camera held it a beat.

They resumed the crowd, but long. Pen could see they were people. Then, of a moment, they weren't people anymore. The scene was washed out in red, boiling clouds of red, reaching even to the camera so high above.

There was a time-dissolve to a glassy landscape of muddy brown green, glittering under a clear sky and bright sunshine.

Pen recognized it as laserglass, and a big patch of it. The camera pulled back, way back, and added in a scale on the screen to show just how big it was. Two kilometers by almost three. What used to be the center of the wine country in contention. And the tomb for five hundred people.

Pen turned away from the screen. It didn't track for a moment. How could anybody be so—so—
insane
!

To kill that many people, to destroy that much valuable property, just to make a point? Insanity was too gentle a term. It was screaming madness, foaming and gibbering. It was hammering a tack with a piledriver. It was—was—fucking crazy!

From years past came the memory of Wall Eye, and the day the two of them had watched Confed security smash the face of a man whose only crime had been to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And what Wall Eye had said to the boy who called himself Ferret:
The lesson's there, boy. Don't fuck
with the Confed
…

Pen shook his head. That hadn't changed. Maybe it wouldn't ever change. Something was wrong about that.

On an entire planet whose reputation had come to be intertwined with the supernatural—and one could argue about the natural or magical etiology of various gods until the local sun burned out—the highest concentration of seekers and believers was in Shtotsanto, the Holy City. The place sat inside a ring of mountains, a protected valley accessible primarily by air. For those who didn't mind a two-week hike followed by a climb and descent of a moderately tall mountain, there were foot caravans leaving the port daily. The terrain was mostly high desert along the Shtotsanto Road, the better part of the climb was through year-round snow, and the reward was a greened plateau with mild temperatures and several large freshwater lakes. The town ran to single- or double-story buildings, mostly, and the reason given was that no one wanted to block the sun from his or her neighbor. According to the information Pen had read, the population generally numbered about half a million in the Holy City, but that figure was largely transient.

Many people took the walk, it being considered a good way to calm one's spirit before achieving the Holy City.

Pen took the airbus.

Two weeks of eating dust did not particularly appeal to him, and he doubted that such a hike would do much other than strengthen his legs and give him a few blisters. He was in a hurry. Something was missing in his life—what he wasn't sure of—and he wanted to find it as quickly as possible. He had fair physical control, and a hard-earned humanistic outlook, but he needed more.

It would be his ticket back to Moon, he knew that much.

While he wasn't sure, he felt that what he lacked was the holy fire, the Finger of God, that sense of purpose some of the siblings seemed to have. People in the godlike state always seemed to know precisely what to do, there never seemed to be any doubt for them. And kicking up sand seemed unlikely to be a part of it. Better he should get straight to the city and start studying. Getting to God was a big project.

If a place might be said to feel holy, Shtotsanto did. The local season was either later summer or early fall, and the air was crisp with impending winter and expectation. People smiled at him on the sidewalks, waved and nodded, and seemed to take no notice of his garb. No, that wasn't the problem. The problem was in finding a proper instructor.

The city was an interesting mix of old and new, and laid out, it seemed, for pedestrians. There was no lack of wheeled or air-cushioned vehicle traffic, but a lot more people walked.

It was not as though there was any lack of teachers. Pen found that out when he stopped at a public compucom booth and tapped in a request for information on religious instruction. The holoproj lit and began scrolling names at fastscan speed. He watched for a minute, fascinated, before he stopped the scan and requested a total of the names.

Twelve thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine, the holoproj informed him.

Twelve
thousand
? Damn! How was he going to come up with the right choice out of that number? There were supposed to be many paths up the mountain, but this was absurd. He might spend years moving from teacher to teacher before he found one who had what he wanted.

He was staring stupidly at the pulsing holoproj when a voice behind him said, "Lost, pilgrim?"

Pen turned. The speaker was a tall black-haired man, gone gray at the temples, who wore crinkly smile lines and a matching grin. He was maybe forty T.S., dressed in loose-weave pale blue orthoskins and dotic boots, and from his carriage, looked to be in good shape.

Pen returned the smile, then realized the other probably could not know he did so under the shroud. "I guess I am," he said. "I'm looking for a teacher and it seems there are more than a few around."

The man laughed. He held his right hand palm forward in greeting. "To be sure," he said. "I've been here awhile. Perhaps I can help. I'm Armahno Vaughn."

Pen regarded the man. There was something familiar about him, but Pen knew he had never seen that face before, he'd remember it. What did he want? Pen felt no fear, not with the Ninety-seven Steps at his call, but this character might be trying to set him up for some kind of con.

After a beat, Pen decided that wasn't likely. His street-senses were rusty, but Vaughn tripped no alarms.

No sense of menace or malice came from the man. This was the Holy City, after all, and people here were more apt to be helpful, weren't they?

"I'm looking for God," Pen said.

Vaughn did not laugh at this. He said, "Yes." He paused for a few seconds, then added, "You're one of the Siblings of the Shroud." It wasn't a question.

"I am."

"A priest."

Pen nodded. "A title. Our order concerns itself more with the redemption of man than the seeking of his Creator. Assuming there is such a thing."

"Doubts are good," Vaughn said. "If a belief can't stand questioning, it isn't apt to be much."

"You know something of these matters?"

Vaughn smiled again, and the smile lines showed that it was something he must have done a great deal of over the years. "Something. I am a teacher, of sorts."

"Would I find your name listed here?" Pen waved at the holoproj.

"Near the end. The listings are alphabetical."

Pen looked at the three-dimensional image floating before him. Well. He had come to learn, and here was a teacher. Coincidence, likely, but he had to start somewhere. And a man who smiled that much either found a lot of humor in life or was spacing with a damped drive. He didn't seem crazy. What the hell.

"Will you teach me?" Pen asked.

"Of course."

As easy as that? Well. Maybe not. But it was a place to begin, wasn't it? It was time something came easy to him, Pen thought. It seemed like everything he had ever learned had been with sweat and blood and emotional pain. Maybe he should search for another teacher, but, to hell with it. He could always do that if this guy didn't work out. And who knew? Maybe this character had some answers.

Pen certainly had enough questions.

Thirty

PEN SAT
seiza
, his eyes closed, meditating.

The word "easy" might as well be stricken from his vocabulary. Pen thought. And that thought was a mistake—he wasn't supposed to
be
thinking, he was supposed to be following his breath in meditation—

Vaughn brought the bamboo cane down to lightly touch Pen's shoulder. Ah, shit. Pen leaned forward in a bow, then resumed
seiza
. It seemed like hours before the strike came. Whack! The sound and force of it jolted Pen. Damn. How does he
know
when I lose my concentration? He never seems to miss it!

Even with his eyes closed, Pen was aware of Vaughn moving away. The man walked like a ghost, and it was not Pen's ears that gave him Vaughn's location, only that slippery sixth sense he'd developed over the years of training on Earth. Were it not for feeling Vaughn's
ki
. Pen would never know where the man was. Higher sensory perception, indeed. It seldom worked as it had when Moon was—no, don't think about that.

Zen meditation, the sitting practice of which was sometimes called
zazen
, was but one more method Vaughn used in his teaching. The system was called Zendu, and it was, as nearly as Pen could tell, a kind of mish-mash of Buddhism and Hinduism, with assorted odds and ends thrown in. Eclectic was the term Vaughn used to describe it, and it was certainly that. Some of it he had heard and dealt with in his training on Earth.

Sure, Pen had studied religions, but that had been academic, had been intellectual. Reading about that goddamned bamboo stick was altogether different than feeling it sting your, trapezius when your monkey brain wandered off through the trees, chittering stupidly. It was not the pain, it was the embarrassment of being found wanting.

The stick touched his other shoulder this time. Pen bowed, and the
thwack!
came again. Hell of a time concentrating today.

Maybe it was because there was trouble in paradise.

In the months since he'd been studying with Vaughn, the Holy City and Koji in general had been peaceful. There was a kind of quiet, but intense atmosphere that permeated the air here, an attitude of learning that seeped into everything, filling virtually every act with a kind of optimism and good cheer. It was everywhere—walk into a restaurant, and that man working behind the counter might well hold multiple doctorates in assorted philosophies; the woman sweeping the floor might be wiser than a college full of scholars; the mue repairing the room heater could be a potential saint.

People in the Holy City were seldom what they seemed at first glance. But lately, there had been unrest amongst the teachers and learners. Confed spies lurked about, so the rumors went, and while nothing overt seemed to be happening, the stories had it that the Confederation was up to something on Koji. And if the Confed was up to anything, it certainly meant no good would come of it.

The status quo that was the Confed had altered somewhat over the years. There were always the small repressions, of course, the swaggering petty officials everywhere one looked. The military boot did not stomp down all that often, but when it did, it came down hard. Pen could not forget the splash of laser-glass on Wu.

Meanwhile, here on Koji, Babaji Ananda, one of the shining lights of the local Zendu contingent, a human spiritual lamp who lit the darkness for more than a few followers, had disappeared. True, Babaji sometimes wandered off if not watched, he was less than adept on the physical plane, what with the Light of Truth shining through him the way it did, but he was not a man who could be misplaced for long.

According to those who knew such things, Babaji would be harder to hide than a thunderstorm in the desert. And according to those who claimed the ability to sense psychic power, Babaji was not in the Holy City. Not alive, anyway.

Based on his own mental ability to locate Moon when she was within his range, Pen believed that others could do the same. It would be foolish to deny something that worked simply because one did not know
how
it worked. One did not need an advanced degree in physics to push a button.

Then again, a holy man was missing—so? It might be unusual, but even here there was some crime.

Maybe the man had been waylaid and stretched out by some hardstick thug for his credit cube, or that expensive pulsestone timepiece his followers had given him as a sign of their devotion. Babaji had a drawer full of expensive trinkets, so Pen had heard. People were sometimes robbed of such items—stranger things had happened. But while one part of Pen was willing to accept that, another part of him believed the stories. The Confed had some nefarious plan working on Koji, and woe to those who dared get in the way. Not that anybody could figure out how Babaji Ananda could get in anybody's way.