The Dreaming Void (71 page)

“Soldiers always have to hang up their weapons in the end.”

“You don't understand. It was our ethos she rescued. She showed us that strength is a virtue, a blessing. It is our evolution and should not be denied the way the liberals of the Commonwealth do, treating it as if it were some ignominious part of us to be always denied. If we had not been strong, if Bradley had not remained steadfast, the Commonwealth would have died on the same day you did, Oscar. If the Barsoomians hadn't maintained their clarity, today's humans would be emaciated short-lived creatures.” He smiled at the portrait. “One of us had strength; the other, purpose. She saw them both and combined them into a single bold principle; she gave us a vision we can remain forever true to. There is no shame in strength, Oscar.”

“I know,” Oscar said reluctantly. “That's why I'm here.”

“I had hoped that. You said you needed help.”

“I do.” He paused. “What if it goes against your ideology?”

Tomansio laughed. “We don't have one, Oscar. That's the point of the Knights Guardian movement. We follow one creed: strength. That is what we want to impart to humanity as it grows and diversifies. It is the most basic evolutionary tenet. Those sections of humanity that embrace it will survive; it's as simple as that. We are nature as raw as it can get. The fact that we are perceived as nothing other than mercenaries is not our problem. When we are hired to perform a job, we do it thoroughly.”

“I need subtlety for this. At least to begin with.”

“We can do subtle, Oscar. Covert operations are one of our specialties. We embrace all forms of human endeavor apart from the blatantly wicked or stupid. For instance, we won't perform a heist for you. The Knights Guardians take their oath of honor very seriously.”

Oscar almost started to ask about the Cat and what she used to do but decided against it. “I have to find someone and then extend them an offer of protection.”

“That sounds very worthy. Who is it?”

“The Second Dreamer.”

For the first time since they had met, Oscar witnessed Tomansio losing his reserve. “No shit?” The Knights Guardian started to laugh. “Twelve hundred years without you, and now you bring us this. Oscar, you were almost worth the wait. The Second Dreamer himself!” He suddenly sobered. “I won't ask why, but thank you from the bottom of my simple heart for coming to us.”

“The why is actually very simple. There are too many people who wish to influence him. If he does choose to emerge from the shadows, he should be free to make his own choice.”

“To go to the Void or not, to possibly trigger the end of the galaxy in pursuit of our race's fate—or not. What a grail to guard, Oscar. What a challenge.”

“I take it that's a yes.”

“My team will be ready to leave in less than an hour.”

“Will you be leading them?”

“What do you think?”

“I was
so
sure!” Araminta exclaimed. “She was this mild scatty little thing. She did everything he told her to, and I do mean everything.”

“Face it, darling. At the time you weren't in any
position
to be the perfect observer,” Cressida said archly.

“But it was the way she did it. You don't understand. She was eager. Obedient. Like the other ones. I think. Shit. Do you think he was lying to me? Maybe she is profiled and he told her to always give that answer.” Araminta made an effort to calm down. Alcohol was a good suppressant. She tipped the wine bottle over her glass. There was none left. “Damn!”

Cressida signaled the smart-suited waiter. “Quite an offer, though.”

“Yeah. What is it about men? Why are they all complete shits? I mean, what kind of mentality does that? Those women are slaves.”

“I know.”

The waiter brought another bottle over and flipped the seal. “The gentleman over there has asked if he can pay for it.”

Araminta and Cressida looked across toward the giant floor-to-ceiling window, which gave them a stunning view out across the luminous glow of the nighttime city. The bar was on the thirty-fifth floor of the Salamartin Hotel tower and attracted a lot of tourist types who thought nothing of paying the absurd bar prices. Every room in the hotel was taken by Living Dream followers, which was why the lobby was besieged by protesters. Araminta had forced her way through the angry chanting mob to plead with the doorman to let her in. She had been frightened; there was a strong threat of violence building up on the street. Cressida of course had the authorization code to land her capsule on the executive rooftop pad.

The man smiling at them from a table in front of the window was dressed in natural fabric clothes styled as only a Makkathran resident would wear.

“No,” Araminta and Cressida chorused.

The waiter smiled, understanding, and started pouring.

Araminta watched morosely as her glass was filled. “Do you think I should go to the police?”

“No,” Cressida said emphatically. “You do not go down that road, not ever. He sat you next to the Prime Minister at dinner, for Ozzie's sake. You know how powerful he is. Besides which, no police force on the planet would investigate him, and even if they did, they'd never be able to prove anything. Those girls—if you were right, and I'm not saying you're not—wouldn't ever be found, let alone analyzed to see if their brains were wired up illegally. Forget it.”

“How about the Commonwealth government? Don't they have some kind of crime agency?”

“The Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate. So you take a trip to their local office, which is probably on Ellezelin, and you walk in and say you think some of his wives might be psychoneural profiled because of how they behaved while you were all having sex together, an orgy during which, incidentally, your macrocellular clusters were running a sexual narcotic program.”

“It wasn't a narcotic,” Araminta said automatically.

“Point in your favor, then. That should do it.”

“All right! What if I told them about his commercial plans? The way he's built up Albany's capacity?”

“Tell whom?”

Araminta pouted. For a friend, Cressida was not being very helpful. “I'm not sure. The industrial association of Ellezelin or whatever it's called.”

“Do you think they don't know? Albany isn't something you can hide. And exactly what has that got to do with psychoneural profiling?”

“I dunno.”

“Sounds more like vengeance than justice to me.”

“He's a shit. He deserves it.”

“Was he good in bed?”

Araminta hoped she wasn't blushing as she concentrated on pouring more wine. “He was adequate.”

“Listen, darling, I'm afraid this is one of those nasty times when you just have to forget him and move on. You learned a valuable lesson: just how ruthless you have to be to get on in this sad old universe of ours.”

Araminta's head collapsed down into her hands, sending her hair tumbling around her glass. “Oh, great Ozzie, I went and had sex with him! How humiliating is that?” She wished she could get rid of the memory, at least the bit about how much she had enjoyed herself. Actually, there were various commercially available routines and drugs capable of performing neat little memory edits.
Oh, stop being so self-pitying, girl.

“There, there.” Cressida reached over and patted Araminta's hand. “By now he'll have had half a dozen more girls in his bed and won't even remember your name. It never meant as much to him as it does to you.”

“And you're telling me this to cheer me up?”

“That was his deal, wasn't it? You would be the second Friday on months with an ‘r' in them?”

“Yeah, I know. Hell, I'm a big girl. I knew what I was doing.”

“With hindsight, yes, the view is always clear.”

Araminta brought her head up and grinned. “Thank you for not judging.”

“You're still a work in progress. And I think you're improving under my tuition. This was a much smaller mistake than Laril.”

“When you want to cheer someone up, you really go for it, don't you?”

Cressida pushed her glass across the table, and clinked it to the rim of Araminta's. “You're starting to understand life. That's good. So what are you going to do about Mr. Bovey?”

Araminta grimaced. “Mr. Bovey's proposal, actually.”

“What! He didn't?”

“He did. Marriage with me once I've gone multiple.”

“And you think I'm pushy! Wait a minute. Did he ask you this before you had your little visit to Likan?”

“Umm. Yes.”

“You go, my girl. So what was the Likan thing all about?”

“Trying out options while I consider what to do.”

“Wow.”

“Have you ever considered going multiple? Likan said it was purely a lifestyle choice, not a business one. I'm not so sure. Ten pairs of extra hands would be very useful in my line of work.”

“I haven't considered it, no. It's still only one mind, which is all a lawyer needs. But if you're serious about property development, then I can see the practical advantages.”

“It's self-limiting, though, isn't it? It's saying I'll always be somebody stuck doing some kind of manual job.”

“Your pride seems to be a very fluid thing.”

“I just want …” She didn't know how to finish that sentence, not at all. “I don't know. I was just shaken up by what happened on the weekend. And I had this really awful dream, too. I was like this really big creature flying over a planet when someone tried to smother me. Been having a few of those lately. Do you suppose it's stress?”

Cressida gave her a puzzled look. “Darling, everyone has had that dream. It was the Second Dreamer's dream of the Skylord over Querencia. And that wasn't someone trying to smother you; that was Ethan trying to talk to the Skylord direct. They say he's still in a coma in the hospital with his minions trying to repair his burned-out brain.”

“I couldn't have dreamed that.”

“Why not?”

“I don't have gaiamotes. It always seemed a bit silly to me, like a weak version of the unisphere.”

Cressida became very still; she pushed her glass aside and took Araminta's hand. “Are you being serious?”

“Serious about what?”

“Didn't your mother tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Araminta felt panicky. She wanted another drink, but Cressida's grasp was surprisingly strong.

“About our great-great-great-grandmother.”

“What about her?”

“It was Mellanie Rescorai.”

After all that buildup, Araminta felt badly disappointed. She'd at least been expecting some dynasty heir, maybe Old Earth royalty, not someone she'd never heard of. “Oh. Who is she?”

“A friend of the Silfen. She was named their friend. You know what that means?”

“Not really, no.” Araminta's knowledge of the Silfen was a little vague: a weird humanoid race that everyone called elves. They sang gibberish and had a bizarre wormhole network that stretched across half the galaxy, allowing them literally to walk between worlds—an ability that a depressing number of humans found incredibly romantic. Few who tried to follow them down their twisting interstellar paths returned, but those who did told fanciful tales of adventure on new worlds and the exotic creatures they had found there.

“Okay,” Cressida said. “It goes like this: The Silfen named Ozzie their friend, too. They gave him a magic pendant which allowed him to understand their paths and even join their communal mind, their Motherholme.”

“Ozzie? You mean our Ozzie? The one we—”

“Yes. Now, Ozzie being Ozzie, he broke open the pendant and figured out how the magic worked, that it wasn't magic but quantum entanglement. So humans then started to produce gaiamotes. Our gaiafield is basically a poor copy of the Silfen communal mind.”

“Right. So where does our ancestor come into this?”

“Mellanie was also a Silfen friend, which actually involves a little more than just being given the pendant. Their Motherholme accepts your mind and shares its wisdom with you. The pendant only initiates the contact. After a while, the ability becomes natural—well, relatively speaking. And like all magic, it's believed to be inherited.” Cressida let go of Araminta's hands and smiled softly.

“You just said it wasn't magic.”

“Of course not. But consider this. Mellanie and her husband, Orion, came back. They had a little girl, Sophie, while they were out there walking across the galaxy. One of very few humans ever born on the paths and certainly the first of two Silfen friends. She was attuned to the Motherholme right from the start and passed the magic on to her children. Thanks to her, most of our family can feel the gaiafield, though it's weaker with our generation. But on a good night, you can sometimes sense the Motherholme itself. I even ventured down one of the Silfen paths myself when I was younger; it's just outside Colwyn City in Francola Wood. I was thirteen; I wanted adventure. Stupid, but …”