The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (3 page)

The King looked down at his son and chuckled. “Bishop Dominic is an impatient man. Occasionally, it is good for his character to make him wait.” As he said this, he lifted his nose and adopted a distinctly nasal and fatherly tone, imitating the highly affected form of speech familiar to the clerical class. Removing his hands from his hips, he started walking and said, “However, it is time that we get back. After all, we want to finish our hike just at sunset. That’s the whole point, and it wouldn’t do any good for the second prince and his father to wreck it for the others.”

Jonas laughed, fell in behind the King, and looked down at the sixty or so people standing below them. Nearly all of them looked back at him or his dad. Most took quick glances and looked away when they realized the prince was watching them. Used to this response, Jonas stared back brazenly and wished again that he could have done this without them.

The religious rite of the Pilgrimage of the Sun had been practiced on planets and moons across the galaxy by sixteen-year-old boys and their fathers for hundreds of years. The rite intended to teach each boy humility by showing him how small he was compared to the vastness of space. It also represented a passage into adulthood. However, as with most religion, it had become something different for the majority of Athenians—in this case, a simple excuse for male play.

The rite consisted of a pilgrimage hike laid out in advance by the local priest or bishop in each parish. Over the course of several hours, the pilgrims traced out a scale model of the local star system. The hike was meant to take some time and end at sunset. Traditionally on Athena, a large bonfire was lit at the end. The fire became a thing of play for boys, and most often sons and dads consumed some small quantity of alcohol, just enough to make the sons feel like men but not enough to cause trouble. Then the fathers and sons slept out under the stars.

However, for Bishop Dominic, religion remained serious business. The bishop for the royal parish was an Apollonian, a group which took its religion seriously enough to once again renew the practice of celibacy among its priests. Skin and bones, he reminded Jonas of a pith spider. The bishop was a weak counselor at court, but a man who had the ear of the King in matters of faith.

He had hand-picked the parishioners who would be privileged to accompany the king as he hiked the pilgrimage with his second and last son. Most of them were important contributors to the sect. A few were charitable cases. On the whole, they were an austere group, and Jonas found himself both attracted to the boys and simultaneously repelled by their coldness.

As Jonas and his father joined the back of the group, a nod from the King sent the thin man into full priestly mode. Using a deep reedy voice which Jonas knew he reserved only for the pulpit, the man lifted up his arms and intoned from memory, “In his deepest mind the fool says there is no God....”

Jonas’ thoughts wandered. When he again picked up the thread of the priest’s speech, he was holding up what looked like a large ball on a stick. The ball was approximately a meter in diameter. “All right, boys,” he said in his normal, high, effeminate voice. “This will be our sun....”

Jonas looked at the orange colored ball on the stick and wrinkled up his face in a puzzled expression. Interstellar ships sometimes passed near the mainline star which lay at the center of the Athenian system on their way to the Hadris gates. Twice in his sixteen years, Jonas stood on the command deck of his father’s ship while the vast bulk of the star Metis grew until it filled all vision.

Jonas leaned over to his father and, looking up, whispered, “I thought this hike was supposed to take all afternoon?” His father looked down and nodded. “But with the sun so small we are going to be done in no time. I mean, it only takes at most six days to reach one of the Hadris gates.”

His father smiled and with a hand on his son’s back, leaned down and whispered, “You have no idea how fast we were traveling. Mass bending technology does incredible things for our acceleration curves.” The priest gently shook the ball loose from the top of the pole and watched as it rose approximately twenty feet in the air and began to hover. Soon after, the hike began.

Jonas was to remember that afternoon often in the years to come. All of the boys, and many of the fathers, found themselves in a perpetual state of awe as they walked. Balls no larger than a fist stood in for gas giants and nearly disappeared as they floated up into the air. The three inhabited planets of the Athenian system fit together in the palm of the priest’s hand. But it was the vast distances between the sixteen planets which left an impression on Jonas. Hundreds of paces divided the inner planets, and whole kilometers passed by between the outer ones. By the time they reached the realm of the dwarf planets of the outer rim, they were walking for what seemed like hours between them.

The hike, which Jonas had thought would be over quickly, went on for nearly eight hours, and Jonas was forever grateful for the time. Years later, he found out that, through the priest, the King had given the other participants strict instructions to leave them alone. That day would become one of the rare instances in Jonas’ life where he had his father to himself. For a few hours, he was simply a boy who finally had the full attention of a busy dad.

By the time Jonas and his father finished, the hike had covered nearly thirty kilometers, and the deep, violet blue sky of Athena moved on to hues of fluorescent green, orange, and purple. For the last couple of kilometers, the hike had been tough, even for the adults. It ended with a five-hundred-meter climb up a steep trail to a bluff which had a commanding view of the surrounding country. Here the priest placed the last marker in the sky. The Hadris space gates were represented by a tiny prick of light. It was as if the priest had let go of a faerie or a firefly. As the point of light sparked above his head, the priest explained to the boys what they already knew. This gate and its twin represented Athena’s only connections with other star systems, their kingdom, and the empire. Located near the edge of the heliosphere, it also marked the end of the Athenian system and the beginning of interstellar space.

The sweaty, hot boys and their fathers took some time to enjoy the view. Placed in between rolling hills and occasional fields, small lakes dominated the surrounding countryside below them. Herds of slowly moving multicolored trees gathered in the remaining patches of sunlight in order to photosynthesize the last possible drops of energy before night set in. Jonas watched as they turned their many, long limbs to the sunset. Soon the quiet of the hilltop was broken by the cries of boys at play. Jonas and his father sat apart from them, hardly noticing the noise.

Not to be outdone by noisy boys, the priest raised his voice above the crowd and called attention to the point of land below them where the hike had begun. There, a prick of light began to glow in the falling darkness. The orb representing Athena’s sun lit itself from within, showing how far they had hiked that day.

At this distance, its light looked no greater than that of a bright star. Soon after, a flash lit up the sky from the first planet followed by flashes in order from each of the fifteen others. Although the priest said that they were all glowing like their scale model star, only a few of them were visible to the naked eye unless they flashed, which they all continued to do at regular intervals.

Using his priestly voice, the cleric sang, “All the stars and galaxies tell of God’s beauty and power. Skies declare his artistry.....”

Tired of the priest’s interruptions, Jonas didn’t bother to listen. Instead, he looked down on the tiny points of light which represented Athena’s planets and tried to pick out Athena Six where he stood right now. Then he looked above him at the tiny prick of light that stood in for the Hadris gates. Suddenly, he felt the weight of the vast emptiness which surrounded him. A soul-ripping loneliness overwhelmed him. There was so much space between each point of light. Worse yet, he was just a single person on a very large planet with five major continents and two billion people. Jonas felt like the hill was beginning to pitch forward and tip him into the abyss in front of him. He reached back to steady himself.

“Father?”

“Yes?”

Jonas almost whispered, not wanting his question to be heard by anyone else. “Do you believe we were made by God?” Having asked the question, he regretted it almost instantly. His doubt felt too personal, almost sacred, and he wasn’t sure how his father would respond. Afraid he had wrecked the moment, Jonas winced internally as he waited.

Sitting next to him with his arms wrapped around his knees, the King’s lips hinted at a smile. Looking at his son, he answered with equal discretion. “Yes, I do. What makes you ask, Jonas?”

Seeing that his father didn’t seem disturbed, Jonas decided to unburden something which had bothered him for some time. “I don’t know. It just seems so impossible to believe in God when there is so much space out there. I mean, we only walked out the Athena system today. Our Kingdom has nearly seventy stars, forty-eight inhabited planets, and over four hundred planets in all, and we only walked out one star system, and we are only one kingdom in the Empire. The Pax Imperium has over three hundred members, and they all have star systems with planets and vast distances between them.”

Now that he had started, Jonas found himself unable to stop. “That doesn’t consider the fact that there are uncountable kilometers between each and every star. I mean, even the light from Metis takes four and a half years to reach Padran, our closest neighbor star. The light we see from Apollos is nearly three hundred years old when it gets here.”

Jonas picked up a small rock and absentmindedly threw it off the precipice where they sat. “I guess, it just seems impossible to think that in all of this vast space a God could even exist. It seems even more ridiculous to pray to such a God, or think that he… or she, or it, had anything to do with my creation. It’s like a whooping ant praying to me or worshiping me. If God exists, he has no idea I exist and has little or nothing to do with my life.”

Jonas looked again at the void in front of him, now almost completely black, and paused for a few seconds before he went on. “I mean, it just seems so impossible with all of that space. We are so small and insignificant. Think of the history, Dad. Think about it. We have been exploring other star systems for over a thousand years. Dad, there have been almost a trillion human beings who have lived in this universe. How could God care about any of us or even know us? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Jonas’ father laughed quietly as the bishop continued to sing. “And that, Jonas, is why we do this. The bishop would be proud.” He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a small crystal flask. “Here, Jonas,” he said. “Have a swallow. It will relax your mind.”

Anna Prindle blinked. Tears clouded her vision. She felt her cheeks burn.

He tried. Jack tried so very hard. After a show in one of the royal boxes at the Caripathium and a dinner at an exclusive club in the imperial capital, this man was down on one knee holding open a small box with a blue emerald and diamond bracelet asking for her hand in marriage.

How could she explain her feelings to the man dressed in a brocaded gray tuxedo with the gray streaks in his thinning hair? How could she articulate the complexities when she didn’t fully understand them herself?

Jack shifted uncomfortably. Never one to miss a beat when it came to people, he hurriedly got up off the floor, quietly closed the box, and returned to his place across the white linen and dinnerware which divided them. It might as well have been a whole ocean. Anna couldn’t hope that those at the tables next to them hadn’t noticed the scene. The security personnel standing nearby would be discreet as ever, but Anna wondered what they must have thought of her at that moment.

Jack’s voice caught a little as he said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

A tear dripped from the corner of Anna’s eye. She reached out for his hand and took it in hers. “I wish you wouldn’t say that to me any more. It doesn’t help.”

Jack had probably apologized to Anna a thousand times in the last two years. He was often quite sincere. Apologies never seemed to cover the wound.
Because the wound of the moment isn’t the real wound
, Anna thought.

She had arrived home from work earlier that evening to find their fourteen-year-old foster son Theodore hard at work tutoring his younger sister Josephine. This wasn’t so unusual. Teddy wasn’t really a child any longer. She knew he didn’t fit in at school. It wasn’t just that he was a refugee. There were plenty of other refugee children there, as well. It was the particular circumstances which wouldn’t allow Teddy to stay a child. He was as much Josephine’s surrogate father as Anna’s lover, Jack. Teddy and Little Jo had lost both their parents and their twin brothers
when the Unity brutally crushed a workers’ revolt on one of its own little moons, Aetna
. Teddy was all the family eight-year-old Josephine had left, and he wore the weight of his burden in the hunch of his shoulders and the perfection he demanded from his studies and behavior.

Even before the door had slid closed behind her, Anna had known something was up when Little Jo bounded from the table, knocking her tablet on the floor, and while jumping up and down, proclaimed, “Jack bought you something. It’s upstairs on your bed.”

Jack—the gorgeous man sitting across from her now, stalwart and crushed—worked surreptitiously for the Ministry of Information. Officially, there were no refugees from the Unity in the Imperial Capital. The Empress of the Pax Imperium, Her Greatness Christiana IV, was not supposed to take sides against any state under her protection—even if they were a despotic corporation—and until a couple of months ago, it appeared her government was following the spirit of that tradition, if not the letter. Jack had been merely a low-level functionary at the Ministry, shunted into a dead end position and ignored, but then the old minister of information got sacked. The new minister had taken seriously Jack’s insistent warnings that a war with the Unity was a growing possibility.