Vortex (30 page)

"And I told him the same thing I'm going to tell you. You're too close to the situation, Sten. Can't see the forest for the trees, as they say.''

Sten knew there was probably truth to this. He was not privy to the big picture. Unlike the Emperor.

"I still don't think I'm the best man for the job, sir. Although, I thank you for your faith in me."

"We've been through a lot together, Sten," the Emperor said.

"I know what you can do. And what you can't do. In fact, I believe I'm the better judge of your capabilities.

"Also, the matter with the Altaics has grown even more critical. If I were to pull you out, the bad publicity would be devastating. Now, maybe I was hasty bringing in Iskra. Although I still think he's the best of the poor lot of options I was looking at. Regardless. I've hung myself out with this man. It's vital that I am not embarrassed."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm counting on you, Sten," the Eternal Emperor said. "Perhaps more than I ever have before. Make it work. Do whatever you have to—but, make it work.

"Those are your orders."

"Yes, sir."

"And Sten?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Smile. Be happy. It's all going to come out just fine."

"Yes, sir," Sten said. He made his best salute, as the Emperor's image vanished.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

S
ten couldn't sleep. Every time he drifted off, the Emperor's face floated into view. He was haunted by those eyes. Eyes that were never still. Eyes that swept the edges of his conscience, netting Sten's secret doubts and hauling them in as evidence.

In Sten's nightmare the Emperor would pile up all those doubts into a writhing, eel-like mass. He would turn to Sten, face dark with anger. And those eyes would swivel for him. Sten knew if they ever came to rest, he was through.

Here they came now. Turning. Turning. Cutting a smoking path along the floor. Then they rose up, searching for his own eyes—to burn them out.

Sten gasped awake. His body was sheeted in cold sweat. He stumbled into the lavatory and dry-heaved into the toilet. He knelt there for a long time, feeling stupid for having such a silly nightmare—but frightened of returning to bed for another bout with the dream.

A soft rustle and the perfumed warmth of Cind.

"I'm okay," he said.

"Sure, you are. I frequently find perfectly healthy and happy people crouched on the bathroom floor choking up their guts."

"I'll be fine… in a minute."

"I know you will. Now, don't argue, bub. Or you'll be in for some real trouble."

She hauled him up, stripped him, and shoved him into the shower. Cold spray needled down, shocking him into full awareness. The film of sweat came off like old grease. Then the cold water turned to hot, steam billowing in clouds. Cind's naked form came through the clouds. She was armed with soap and a rough-surfaced sponge.

"Turn around," she said. "I'm going to start with your back."

"I can do it," Sten said, reaching for the soap.

"I
said
, turn around." She rasped the sponge across his chest.

"Ouch! Okay, okay. You win!" He turned around.

"In case you haven't noticed," Cind said, "I always win."

She wet down the sponge, soaped it up good, and started scrubbing away.

It felt good. He forgot the eyes.

Later, propped up on pillows and tucked into fresh bedclothing, Sten sipped at the hot spicy tea Cind had ordered up from the embassy kitchen. Outside, he could hear wind howling through the streets of Rurik. Oddly, he felt peaceful. Cozy.

Cind perched on the bed next to him, a soft, colorful robe pulled around her. Her normally smooth brow was furrowed as she considered Sten's dream.

"Did you ever wonder," she asked, "what it would have been like if the Emperor had never come back?"

Sten shook his head. "Sounds like a worse nightmare to me," he said. "Things were pretty messed up, if you recall."

"I remember all right. And, yeah, it was messy. But the point is, we were
doing
something about it. Everybody had a lot of hopes. Some idea of a future."

"Don't you think we have a future now? Things are tough, I agree. But, once we get over this hump—"

"We'll be back to normal?" Cind broke in. "Tell me what normal is, Sten. I'm young. I don't know about all those wonderful days before the Tahn war."

"Don't be sarcastic."

"You're evading my question."

"Okay. So, it wasn't a paradise."

"What was it, then?"

Sten made a rueful face. "Pretty much like now, I admit. Except… there was more of everything."

"Everybody was happier then, huh? The people here on Jochi, for instance, were happier, right? Sure, they had the Khaqan hammering on them, but they had more in their bellies. Which made it all very nice. A veritable heaven for the oppressed."

"You're being cynical again."

"You're evading again."

"It's just the way things work," Sten said. "Somebody has to be in charge. Make things go. Unfortunately, once in a while that somebody is a bastard. A tyrant."

"Like the Khaqan?"

"Yeah. Like the Khaqan."

"Like Dr. Iskra?"

"Especially Dr. Iskra. At least the Khaqan had the excuse of being a senile old fool."

"But we're under orders to shove Iskra down these people's throats," Cind said, "even though we know he's probably worse than the Khaqan. Does that make sense?"

"Not unless you look at the big picture," Sten said. "In the best of times, the Empire is a delicate balance of some pretty hard-case personalities. And these, you will agree, are not the best of times."

"No argument there."

"Good. Anyway, Iskra may be a son of a bitch. But, he's the Emperor's son of a bitch. And he helps the Emperor keep things from going to hell."

"In other words, it's expedient? It's right, even though we're going to make all these people miserable for many generations to come?"

"I wouldn't quite put it that way. But, yeah. It's expedient. Besides, there are billions of other beings in the Empire to think about."

"And how many of them are run by someone like Dr. Iskra?"

Sten opened his mouth to answer. The answer stuck. His jaw snapped shut.

Cind pressed on, not sure herself what she was getting at. "What makes a good tyrant, Sten? A good dictator? A perfect supreme ruler? Or is there such a thing?"

"Probably. For a while, at least. A lot of times people desperately want to be commanded what to do. And they'll squabble and kill each other until a Man on a White Horse comes along to save them. And they'll gladly hand over all their rights to this person.

"If they're lucky, the new ruler will be young, a person with a strong vision. It doesn't really matter what that vision is, just as long as everyone agrees it's worth going after. The actual doing tends to put the rest of the house in order.

"The problem is, I've never heard or read of a case where entropy doesn't apply. Like the Khaqan."

"Explain, please."

"When the dictator is on the job too long, he gets sloppy. Distant from his people. Starts assuming his powers come straight from God on high. He gathers a group of sycophants about him. Jackals who will do his bidding, in return for a share of the carrion.

"Finally, all rulers—absolute rulers, that is—reach a point where they depend on the jackals more than the people. And that is the beginning of the end. Because, they lose sight of who
really
gives them power. Which is, simply, the people they rule."

"Nice lecture, Professor Sten."

"Didn't mean to lecture."

Cind was quiet for a moment. She fussed with the tie of her robe. Then, real low: "Sounds like a pretty good description of the Emperor, to me."

Sten didn't answer. But, he gave a small nod.

"You didn't answer my first question," Cind said. "What do you think would have happened if the Emperor hadn't returned?"

"No point in thinking about it," Sten said. "The crude fact of the matter is, without AM2 we'd all be barbarians. There'd be almost no communication beyond the smallest planetary system. Interstellar travel would either be with the old killer longliners or, if it was under stardrive without AM2 power, would bankrupt a system's resources. No progress. Clot, progress! We'd all regress. To complete ignorance. And the Eternal Emperor—those jokers on the privy council learned to their dismay—is the only one who controls the AM2."

"What happened to it?" Cind asked. "I never really did understand."

"It just stopped," Sten said. "Near as anyone can figure—and the council did a damned great heap of figuring—the AM2 supply stopped the moment the Emperor was killed… or whatever it was that happened to him."

"Where
does
the AM2 come from?" Cind asked.

"What?" Sten was truly puzzled. But it was the kind of puzzlement that made a being feel as if IQ had been sadly lacking for a long time. A stunned-ox kind of sensation.

"If it stopped, it has to start from some place," Cind said. "I don't mean a great big secret depot of AM2, or anything. Because even that would eventually be emptied. And have to be filled up again. Which means, somebody—or thing—has to go fetch it. Where is it fetched from? Or is that a stupid question?''

"Not stupid at all," Sten said.

"I didn't think so. It just suddenly occurred to me. Then I figured, someone must have asked that question before."

"Not very loudly," Sten said. "The Emperor does not like people messing about with his AM2."

"Still, AM2 must exist someplace. In great quantities. Mountains and mountains of it. Sitting there for the taking. And whoever finds it—"

"Somebody did," Sten said as a great light dawned. And he wasn't sure the discovery made him happy.

"That's what made him Emperor, right?" Cind said.

"Only partly right," Sten said. "But you're forgetting something. It took more than just the AM2."

"How so?"

"He's also figured out a way to live forever. Or near enough as dammit."

"Oh, that!" Cind said. "Big deal. Who wants to live forever? After a while, everything would be boring. You'd never get a kick out of doing things like—"

"Ouch!" Sten yelped as Cind nipped his nipple with sharp teeth.

"And there'd be no thrill anymore when you—"

"I'll give you… a couple of hours to stop that," Sten said.

"Also," Cind said, "you probably wouldn't care a bit if—"

She wriggled her hips and pulled at his head. Sten went where she was pulling, dimly thinking that the woman had a wonderful way of proving her point.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I
t was still on the meadow's floor. But the Place of Smokes was not silent. The wind whipped the tops of the conifers in a steady roar.

Sten, Alex, Cind, and Otho stood near one of the embassy gravsleds. Their Gurkha security element had deployed smoothly from the accompanying gravlighter into a perimeter.

The poacher discovered by Alex's bottomless purse had given them nervous instructions from the rutted road down the track into the clearing. When he had seen Cind unload recording gear, he had wanted his credits on the spot. Alex had paid and asked the man if he would wait: when they were finished, they would return him to his village.

No. The man insisted he would walk home. Thirty kilometers? It did not matter. The poacher walked backward into the trees, turned, and pelted away with devils on his heels.

Sten did not know whether the man had been more afraid of someone recording his face, or of the long, shallow furrows that stretched across the meadow.

"City beings dug those," Otho said. "Rustics would have known earth subsides once it's put back. And they'd have mounded the trench when they covered it over."

No one commented.

"How many?"

Sten shook his head. He had little background as an undertaker.

"There's five thousand that people have had the guts to report missing," Cind said.

"Square thae," Alex said absently, his eyes fixed on the covered trenches. "Which'll mean thae'll be—other places yet t' find." He turned to Sten. "How d' we play th' card, boss?"

Sten thought, then walked to the gravsled and opened an equipment locker. He removed two shovels and gave one to Kilgour.

"I guess," he said, "we'll treat it like an archaeologist's dig. We'll cut a slit one meter wide across one trench. Cind, I want you recording. Make sure the film shows the ground has not been disturbed for some time. There's little plants—"

"Lichen," Alex said.

"Lichen, then, grown up. No footprints except those we'll make approaching the…" He let his voice trail off.

"Sir," Otho said. "The soldiers can do the digging."

Sten shook his head and motioned to Cind to start the recorder. Then he walked to the nearest trench and marked the limits of the exploratory slot with his shovel's blade. He started digging carefully. The sandy loam took little effort to dislodge. Alex dug with equal care on the other side of the trench.

Sten was down less than a meter when he suddenly stopped. "Otho. There's a trowel in the locker." He knelt and dug still more gently with the tool. He grunted. Then he coughed hard and threw up to one side of the trench.

Otho brought him a canteen and a breathing mask. He gave a second mask to Alex. "It is a smell you never become used to."

Sten rinsed his mouth out and put the mask on. He was glad it concealed his expression. "Two… maybe three months?"

"Thae's aboot th' right time, boss. Cind? I' y' c'd gie us a shot, straight doon int' th' crypt?"

Cind moved closer.

Through the finder, she could see a woman's back. Her hands had been tied behind her with plas cuffs. Next to it, was a man's face. The remains of his eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, the scream silenced with dirt.

Cind told her eyes to stop recording—the machine would do the work. They did not obey.

"Why," Otho wondered, "did Iskra not dump these bodies into the sea? Or burn them with his fire?"