Trickster (11 page)

 
"--and Silent babies die in artificial wombs," Ben said. "I know. There's another way." He held up the black star. "This way."

 
"What do you mean?"

 
"You know where I came from, right? Mom's team found a derelict ship that had been cleaned out, probably by pirates. But they missed something."

 
Realization dawned. "That's the cryo-unit Ara found?"

 
"Yeah." Ben's voice was low and husky.

 
"All life, Ben--how did you get it? I thought Ara gave it to Grandfather Melthine once she--oh."

 
"Yeah. After Grandfather Melthine died, I helped go through his things and it was still there. I sort of . . . kept it."

 
"All life," Kendi said again. "Let me see." Ben handed it to him and Kendi turned it over in his hands. The surface was smooth and cool, with tiny controls and switches in the center of the star near the viewscreen.

 
"The other eleven embryos are still alive," Ben said. "All Silent. There were twelve when Mom found it, and it was right at about the time she was wanting kids in a bad way. She had her doctor thaw one out at random and implant it. If the doctor had grabbed a different embryo, I'd still be in that thing."

 
"And I'd be a hell of a lonely guy," Kendi added, to which Ben gave a small smile. Kendi reached over and brushed red hair off Ben's forehead. "You want to raise one or two of these as our kids."

 
"I've known about them all my life," Ben said. "I always kind of thought of them as my brothers and sisters. When I was little I used to pretend they were just asleep. Eventually they'd wake up and I'd have someone to play with besides my stupid cousins." He took the cryo-unit back and held it up. "I want to take them out. All eleven of them."

 
A pang went through Kendi's stomach and his eyes widened. "
Eleven
kids? All at once?"

 
"No!" Ben laughed again. "One or maybe two at a time. We'll have to find surrogate mothers, but I'm sure we'll find someone. I was an only child, Kendi. Mom tried to set things up so my cousins would be a brother and sister to me, but they treated me like shit my whole life because I wasn't Silent--or everyone thought I wasn't. I've always thought about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, a whole houseful of people who didn't care if you were Silent or not."

 
"I loved you before you were Silent," Kendi said, putting an arm around Ben's shoulders. "So did your mom."

 
Another small smile. "I still want a big family."

 
"I knew that, but--eleven kids," Kendi said. "All life!"

 
"What . . . what do you think?" Ben asked.

 
Kendi took his arm back and chewed on a thumbnail without looking at Ben. He knew that if he looked into those blue eyes he would say "Let's do it," and damn the consequences. A year ago he would have said it anyway. The Despair and Ara's death, however, had made him more cautious. Kendi wanted children, he knew that. But eleven of them! How would they support so many? Would it be fair to the individual kids to have such a large group, spread parental love and resources that far? Ben would make a great father, Kendi was sure, but Kendi had doubts about his own parenting abilities. Was he old enough? Wise enough? Smart enough? Imagine having almost a dozen children all looking to him for help and advice and discipline and love. How would he manage all that, even with Ben there?

 
"I don't know," he said at last.

 
Ben drew away. "Okay."

 
"No, Ben." Kendi reached over, grabbed Ben's hand. "Ben, I love you more than anyone in the universe. I love you so much that sometimes it hurts. I would do anything to make you happy--
anything--
because if you're not happy, I'm not happy. That's why I can't answer you right now. I'm scared that I'd be saying
let's do it
because you want it and not because we
both
want it. I need time to think. I'm not saying no. I just can't say yes yet."

 
Ben seemed to consider. "All right," he said at last. "I can accept that. It's a big decision. And these little guys aren't going anywhere."

 
"Do you know anything about where they came from?"

 
"Not a clue. I only know that they're all Silent and they're all healthy. And we--all twelve of us--share enough DNA to make us brothers and sisters. Originally there were eighty-seven embryos, but only eleven--twelve, counting me--are still viable. The readout says they were put into this cryo-unit thirty-odd years ago, but that's not necessarily when the embryos themselves were . . . created."

 
"Shouldn't you get a newer cryo-unit?" Kendi said, suddenly worried.

 
"Not really. I've checked this one several times and it's perfectly sound."

 
"Okay." Kendi stretched restlessly. "I should take a nap, especially if I'm going to do a pilot shift later, but I'm still wired. Pulling a con always revs me up. Fooling Markovi like that, yanking Bedj-ka out right from under the bastard's nose. All life, it's almost better than sex."

 
"Yeah?" Ben set the cryo-unit back on the table and ran light fingers down the back of Kendi's neck. Kendi shivered deliciously at the sensation. Then Ben kissed him.

 
"I did say
almost
better," Kendi pointed out several moments later.

 
"Let me show you the exact difference."

 
Four days later, Father Kendi Weaver leaned against the railing on the roof of the Varsis Building and stared out across the city of Felice. The Varsis was the tallest building in town, and Felice's thin skyscrapers and artificial spires moved out to the horizon in all directions beneath him. Ground traffic oozed over streets so far below that Kendi couldn't hear the sounds. Like Klimkinnar, Drim also put severe restrictions on air traffic, so no aircars buzzed between the buildings. Up here was just the sun and the wind and the quiet voices of the other sightseers who had come up for the view.

 
Kendi looked down at the dizzying drop. The talltrees on Bellerophon had nothing on the Varsis Building, but height wasn't everything. Bellerophon was a city among the trees, built to merge with the treescape and blend with the beauty. Felice grew from the ground like a glassy cancer.

 
And somewhere out there were two members of his family.

 
It seemed to Kendi that he should be able to see them from up here, get their attention if he shouted loud enough. The old longings came back, more powerful than ever. His last memory of his sister, brother, and father had been of them weeping as he and his mother were led away by Giselle Blanc. He could still hear punishing electricity crackle, smell the ozone in the air as Rhys Weaver reached out to touch his wife's hand one more time.

 
"Find us! If we all keep looking, we'll find each other. Don't give up!"

 
They were the last words Kendi had heard his father utter. And three years later when Kendi had been sold away from his mother, he had vowed to obey them. Despite many hours spent with counselors and therapists, consuming fury still snarled inside him like a rabid dingo whenever he thought about what the slavers had done to him and his family. He wept and worried about them, too, sometimes in Ben's arms and sometimes curled up by himself. And still he searched. How many false leads had he come across over the years? Now, at long last, he had a solid one.

 
It was a lead he had almost lost, too. During the Despair, the twisted children of Padric Sufur had pushed almost every person in the universe out the Dream. Without the subconscious connection provided by the Dream, all empathy and caring vanished. Some sentients had fallen into a deep depression. Others had been driven insane. All of them showed a total disregard for the lives and feelings of other sentients. If Ben hadn't freed Kendi from a self-imposed Dream prison, if Kendi hadn't managed to delay the twisted children in their attempt to destroy the Dream, if Vidya and Prasad Vajhur hadn't managed to put the children's solid-world bodies into cryo-chambers--if any of these things hadn't happened, the Dream would have been destroyed forever and all sentient life in the universe would have ended within a single generation. The thought still made Kendi sweat.

 
After the Despair, Bellerophon had been thrown into turmoil along with the rest of the universe. The Children of Irfan had responded to the crisis by falling back and retrenching. All field teams and operatives were to return to the monastery immediately. Some of the teams returned on their own, but many of them didn't, meaning someone had to go out and find them. Kendi, newly appointed to a command position despite the fact that he had only achieved the rank of Father, had run himself and his team ragged tracking down Child after Child. Some were assigned on planets or on stations. Others were members of teams like Kendi's and had ships of their own. The findings of Kendi's team hadn't always been pretty. Losing touch with the Dream had affected the Silent more strongly than other sentients, and several Silent plunged into homicidal rage or suicidal despair. Twelve Children with long-term off-planet positions had killed themselves, and twice Kendi's team had found empty ships floating in space, the crew's dessicated corpses floating in corridors and quarters. Through it all, however, Kendi couldn't stop thinking about what Sejal had told him just after the Despair. Every word was burned into his mind:

 
I felt every Silent in the galaxy. It was weird. We were a group, but I could still feel individuals. Two of the minds felt similar to yours, Kendi. I can't describe it better than that. One of them was a man, the other was a woman, and they're both slaves on a planet named Drim.

 
After six months of scrambling around the galaxy retrieving other Children and relaying emergency messages through the Dream, Kendi had finally had enough of waiting. What if someone sold his family? What if they escaped and vanished into the post-Despair chaos? What if they died? Every day brought a greater chance that this precious lead would dry up. Eventually, Kendi had gone to the Council of Irfan. They had been reluctant to loan him a ship, despite the fact that most of the missing field teams were accounted for and most of the Children, bereft of their Silence, had little or nothing to do.

 
"Everything is too chaotic," replied Grandmother Adept Pyori. "Governments and economies are collapsing. We need all our people close to home in case something happens."

 
"That makes this the best time for me to go," Kendi shot back. "It takes a lot of time for galactic governments and mega-corporations to collapse. I need to get out there before everything falls apart completely and my family vanishes forever."

 
The blank faces of the Council, however, said they were still unconvinced, and in the end Kendi fell back on emotional blackmail.

 
"I saved the lives of every single person in this room," he said. "I saved the lives of your family, your friends, and every living creature in this universe. All I want in return is a single ship and a crew to go with her. How can that be too much to ask?"

 
The Council had agreed, but with limitations. When they laid down the time limit, Kendi wondered what he would have had to do to get a ship for longer than two months. Create a new universe from scratch?

 
"We are not doing this to be difficult, Father Kendi," Grandmother Adept Pyori said, as if reading his mind. "Every Silent who can still reach the Dream is precious beyond measure. Have you considered what will happen to us in the next fifty or sixty years? The danger we are in?"

 
"I don't understand, Grandmother," Kendi replied.

 
"No new Silent are entering the Dream," she said solemnly. "And one day the remaining Silent who
can
enter it will die."

 
A cold chill slid over Kendi's body at her words. He had been so busy over the last six months that this hadn't occurred to him. The Children of Irfan was an organization that existed only because of the Dream and the communication it provided. If no Silent could enter the Dream, the Children would disappear, swallowed by history.

 
"
Father?
"

 
Kendi tapped his earpiece. "I'm here, Lucia. What's going on?"

 
"
Ben's found something on the newsnets that you'll want to see. Can you come down to the suite?
"

 
"Is it something you can upload to my implant?" Kendi asked, already heading for the elevator doors at the other end of the observation deck.

 
Pause. "
Not really
."

 
Kendi's stomach tensed as he entered the lift and told it he wanted the eighteenth floor, one of eight floors that made up a hotel within the Varsis Building. The lift obediently dropped. Was the news good or bad? Had to be bad. Otherwise Lucia would have told him something about it.

 
The Varsis Hotel hallways were plushly carpeted and thickly wallpapered, hushing every sound. A holographic waterfall rushed over stones at an intersection, filling the air with the sound of gushing water. It even smelled of moss. The hotel was on the expensive side, but Kendi saw no reason not to get comfortable digs. Ara would have told everyone to live on the ship, but Kendi found it annoying to go through the spaceport every time he wanted to do something in the city, and had decided the Children could pay for a hotel. He was glad to have insisted on a huge purse of hard-currency freemarks from the exchequer. Without Silent to handle the transactions in the post-Despair galaxy, very little interplanetary banking was taking place, and the population of a fair number of planets, including Drim, was in the middle of a "don't trust the banks" frame of mind. There was also a very real dread that some currencies would collapse. Many financial institutions had closed their doors, fearing bank runs. As a result, physical money had quickly become the norm again. Kendi liked that. It used to be that the decent hotels and restaurants looked askance at anyone offering hard cash instead of electronic transfer, meaning undercover Children either had to set up electronic accounts under false names--risky--or patronize the sort of places that didn't care how you paid as long as you paid--distasteful. Nowadays, Kendi could pay hard freemarks to the fanciest place in town and be just another cautious socialite.