A pinnace was the only interstellar-capable spacecraft class small enough to be carried as an auxiliary, even by a battleship. To squeeze a drive—even one which didn't have to accelerate the time-flow by as high a factor as a warship's—into so small a hull, certain nonessentials had to be sacrificed . . . like the comfort of the occupants.
This wasn't normally a problem, because pinnaces weren't intended for long-range deployment; their passengers didn't have to endure them for long. But Corin, Garth and Janille were looking at a two-week voyage to the Beta Aquilae Sector, where they hoped to find Roderick Brady-Schiavona or one of his high-ranking subordinates. Fortunately, the pinnace was intended for as many as six people. Unfortunately, its provisions were meant to last those six for less than half the time the three of them expected to be en route. They went on short rations immediately.
At least they didn't have to worry about breathable air and other environmental factors. Molecular-level recycling technology had been ubiquitous for so long that spacefarers had forgotten the concerns that had obsessed their remote predecessors. And as long as the power plant lasted—which would be years—the air would be at a comfortable temperature, and one standard Prometheus gravity would hold them to the deck. But no technology could make the cabin any larger than it was, nor could any of their improvisations confer any real privacy. After a while, when all the obvious conversational topics had run dry, they tended more and more to withdraw into themselves, three separate universes that couldn't abrade each other, floating in a continuum of increasingly meaningless time.
Under the circumstances, it was impossible for Corin to speak to Janille privately about the dreams.
They had begun as the pinnace had passed the invisible frontier of the Psi Capricorni Sector, which extended an arm across its route. After understanding dawned, Corin wanted to discuss it with Janille, alone. But it was out of the question, of course. So, after an interval of indecision, he blurted it out in the cabin.
"Janille, you've been having the dreams, haven't you?"
She started. "Why . . . yes? How did you . . . ? But of course. You would be having them too, wouldn't you?"
Garth stirred; he'd been about to doze off. "What are you two talking about?"
Corin considered him. "You wouldn't know, would you, Garth? You weren't there."
"I wasn't where?" Irritability underlay Garth's growl. He was a man who appreciated a good meal, and the rations didn't bring out the best in him. "Talk sense, will you?"
"Remember, back on Neustria early this year, the time Janille and I experienced what was publicly explained as a transposer malfunction?"
After a moment, Garth nodded. "Oh, yes. It was sort of forgotten afterwards. We didn't have time to think about it, because that was when we learned of Oleg's assassination, and things started happening fast. But yes, I remember now. You told me what had really happened . . . the Luon you encountered. . . ."
"Yes—and how we fell asleep before contacting you. Pretty surprising that we just dropped off, under the circumstances, wouldn't you say? Well, I think that Luon, underneath all its bland, apologetic bullshit, was playing a very deep and very subtle game. In fact, I think it manipulated our minds."
Garth's head jerked up, and his eyes flashed. Off to the side, Janille sucked in a shaken breath at the suggestion, which obviously hadn't occurred to her. Corin was unsurprised at their reactions. Indeed, it had been all he could do to speak that last sentence in a level, unshaken voice. For the three of them shared two millennia of cultural background.
The restructured United Nations of the late twenty-second century, seeking to suppress any innovation that might threaten its carefully nurtured global order, had faced one fundamental problem: it could only control those sciences whose existence it acknowledged. And the scientific establishment had long since accepted a twentieth-century science fiction writer's verdict that psionic phenomena, if they existed at all, must be too weak to be of any use to humans—which, of course, had been absolutely true as applied to untrained, unenhanced humans, the only sort in existence at the time. So the U.N.'s scientific police had been caught with their intellectual pants down by Antonescu's grand unified field theory, which had placed psi in context with matter and energy, and revealed the hitherto-unsuspected relationship between neural activity above a certain level of complexity and the outcomes of observed events. The practical consequences had been slight at first, even after researchers who'd finally known exactly what to look for had begun to identify the tiny percentage of the human race with psionic potential. But they'd given Earth its only serious upheavals from the twenty-third through twenty-sixth centuries, as the U.N. suppressed rogue psis who had become popular heroes and catalysts for the deeply buried discontents of the age.
Eventually, though, the U.N. had recognized the newly awakened abilities as a potential tool for tightened control. It had co-opted the surviving psis, tying them firmly to its ideology and thus making them natural enemies of the conquerors from Sigma Draconis. A low-grade covert struggle had enlivened Earth during the two centuries after the Solarian Federation's founding, and a not-entirely-unjustified concern about security was one of the reasons the Federation had kept its military headquartered on Prometheus. That struggle had given birth to new technologies of psionic suppression and amplification. In the crucible of the Unification Wars' forced-draft research and development, those technologies had produced horrors. Like everything else reminiscent of that nightmare era, psi was still hedged about with legal restrictions and popular revulsion.
Now that revulsion looked out at Corin from Janille's eyes.
"Oh, I don't think our free will was compromised—not really. I don't think mine could have been; you know about my faculty of telepathic resistance. I think it was more a matter of insinuating a suggestion while we were asleep and malleable. That suggestion has lain dormant for all this time. But now it's awakening." Corin drew a shaky breath. "Janille, let me see if I can accurately describe the nature of the dreams you've been having. I'll venture a guess that they involve the image of a Luon . . . but not so much the visual image as the essence, understood on a level that can't be verbalized."
"I check you," she said quietly.
"All right. Let me further guess that the dream always concludes the same way: with a starfield, as viewed from a ship, and a strong nonverbal indicator of some kind pointing to a particular yellow-white star, a little off to starboard."
She nodded mutely.
"Well, this last sleep, I made a conscious effort, for which I'd prepared myself in advance, to wrench myself awake during that part—don't ask me how I could do that while still asleep and dreaming, but I did. Afterwards, the first thing I did was study the viewscreen before the memory had faded. And I'm certain the starfield in the dream is that one." He pointed a not-altogether-steady finger toward the screen at the forward end of the cabin, beyond the piloting console. "I believe it was the sight of that particular configuration of stars that triggered the dreams."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" Garth protested. "Let's assume that this Luon did, in fact, leave some telepathic suggestion in your mind. How could it have known that you'd someday be traveling along a particular course? In all the crazy stories I've ever heard about the Luonli, nobody's claimed that they can foresee the future!"
"But we know they have some psi abilities," Janille argued. "Telepathy, teleportation and levitation, at a minimum. Why not precognition as well?"
"Come on! Even if precog exists at all, about which there's some doubt, it doesn't confer a detailed future itinerary! It's just a matter of briefly glimpsed visual images, mostly useless."
"That may be true of humans. But we're talking about aliens! Who's to say—"
"It doesn't matter how the Luon did it," Corin cut in. "The fact is that it did. Janille, remember I was talking to the Luon just before we dozed off, thanking it for its help?"
"No. I must have already been asleep."
"Well, then, you won't recall its reply. But I do. Let me see if I can remember the exact words. . . . Something about how I'd be able to pay any debt I felt I owed, `At a star on the outskirts of what your Empire calls the Beta Aquilae Sector.' So one way or another it knew we were going to be here. Speculation about how it knew is pointless until we have more data. That's not what we need to be doing."
"Just what do we need to be doing?" Garth challenged.
"Isn't it obvious? We've got to change course for that star."
Janille spoke into Garth's flabbergasted silence. "But Corin, do you even know which star it is?" She indicated the screen, with its masses of unwinking little points of light, far more numerous than any dweller at the bottom of an atmosphere can ever see, even on a moonless desert night.
"I believe so. That was something else I made myself concentrate on." Corin turned toward the screen and advanced like a sleepwalker until he could almost touch it. He pointed at a bright yellow-white star, off to the lower right. "That one."
Janille walked slowly forward and stood beside him. She gazed at the screen for several heartbeats. "Yes . . . I think you're right."
Garth stared at their backs, feeling excluded in a way their sexual relationship had never aroused in him. "Uh, wouldn't it be a good idea to check this star out—see if it's really anywhere near us?"
"You're right." Janille sat down at the pilot's station and lowered the neurohelmet over her head. She hadn't used it in piloting, not having felt sufficiently familiar with the pinnace. But now she gazed at the star, and the image flowed directly from her brain to the vessel's computer, which began to produce information. She recited it in the expressionless, rather distant voice of one linked in a direct neural interface. "DM -17 954. Only about three standard light-years from us. It's a G1 star, technically main-sequence but exceptionally massive . . . Believed to have undergone some fairly catastrophic fluctuations in energy output in the not-too-remote past . . . No colonized, or habitable, planets . . . One brown dwarf . . ." All at once she stiffened and listened in silence for a while to the voice inside her head. Then she raised the neurohelmet into its overhead niche and turned to Corin, face alight. "This system is somehow linked with the legend of Basil Castellan. In fact, there's anecdotal evidence that he fled here after his last battle."
"What? But I thought nobody knew where he went after that. His mysterious last message to his followers said nothing about where it was being recorded."
"It's just a rumor. Seems that after the battle, one of Lothar Medina's cruisers came here, following up what they thought was a lead as to Castellan's whereabouts. It suffered some kind of accident, and took some losses—including Medina's Inspector General. After it limped back, there was naturally a board of inquiry. The captain—who testified that they hadn't found Castellan—was cleared, and most people forgot the whole thing. But the whispers never quite died out."
Garth's throat-clearing broke an extended silence. "Let's talk about practicalities for a minute. Even assuming that we really do want to go to this godforsaken star, we can't. In case you haven't noticed, our food supply is just barely adequate to last us to our destination. We can't afford any side jaunts!"
Without replying, Janille brought the neurohelmet back down. She was only in communion with the pinnace's brain for a short time. "It's still far enough ahead of us for an economical course change, Garth. The computer assures me that the food can be made to last long enough for it. Of course, we'll have to cut our rations still further—but not below the starvation level."
The prospect of combat had never made Garth look as alarmed as he did now. He smoothed out his expression and spoke gruffly. "Let's put that aside for a minute. The question is, even assuming that we can go to this star, do we want to?"
"Why, of course," said Janille in a surprised voice.
"There's no `of course' about it," Garth said firmly. "Have these dreams given you any clue as to just what you'll find there?"
"No."
"So it's a wild goose chase, then. How do you even know it's in your best interests, as opposed to the Luon's? They might not be the same, you know. The Luon must have its own agenda."
"Come on, Garth," Janille smiled. "Admit it: you just don't want to go on shorter rations."
Garth was not about to be jollied. "I can't believe you two! Have you considered the possibility that you may be acting under a compulsion to seek this star out? And that this Luon might have put that compulsion into your minds along with everything else?"
"That may be true, Garth," Corin acknowledged. "But I don't see how it changes anything. It's pretty obvious that we're dealing with something out of the ordinary here—something important. And I can't believe the Luon is sending us into anything harmful. If its intentions toward us were malign, it would have been a lot simpler to just let us rot in those caverns."
"I'm opposed to it. Our first and only priority is to get to Beta Aquilae and make sure there's a place under Ivar Brady-Schiavona for what's left of the Deathstriders. And last time I looked, I was in command of this outfit, which makes my view official. End of discussion."
Corin didn't answer at once. Instead he held Garth's eyes, his expression unreadable. Then he spoke quietly. "There's really no conflict between this and our obligation to reach Beta Aquilae, Garth. You heard what Janille said: we can afford the detour. As soon as we've . . . fulfilled whatever purpose we're being directed toward this star for, Janille and I will take this vessel wherever you want it to go."
After a moment of speechlessness, Garth drew in a breath that filled his casklike chest with air. He started to open his mouth . . . but then the thunder died aborning, for he had belatedly caught the odd emphasis Corin had placed on the words "Janille and I." And he understood that which Corin had left unsaid.
Corin was a qualified pilot. Janille had some training at it. But he, Garth, did not. Like Janille, he had the aptitude for direct neural interfacing. But a spacecraft was a very different proposition from a suit of powered combat armor. He could link with the pinnace, but he couldn't give it the necessary commands to get back on the correct heading.
He could, of course, order the craft to maintain its present heading. Indeed, it would do that anyway in the absence of a contrary command. And he could physically impose his authority on the other two, if it came to that. But there was no way he could possibly prevent them from surreptitiously changing the course. He had to sleep sometime.
These thoughts chased each other around the inside of Garth's mind, in a closed circle from which there was no escape. He finally released his breath and looked from Corin to Janille and back again. He saw nothing in their faces but respectful attentiveness. Anything less like the usual idea of a mutiny would have been impossible to imagine.
"You know," Garth finally said, in a conversational tone, "the Deathstriders who are still alive followed us to Sol willingly, believing—God knows why—that we knew what we were doing." Corin's wince showed him his instinct had been accurate. "Don't you think we owe them something? Like a chance?"
"Certainly we do, Garth," Janille said quickly. "We're with you on this. We just need to resolve this first. What harm can a short delay do?"
"How can you know it's going to be `short'? You don't even know what it is you're looking for! And you don't know where to look for it! Remember, we're talking about an entire planetary system. It's easy for us to lose sight of just how big that is, but—"
"Actually, Garth, I think we do know where to look." Corin's voice held a quiet certainty which stopped the other man in mid-sentence. He turned to Janille. "You know the rest of the dream, don't you?"
"Yes. I've had it too." They looked at each other, but what each was seeing, as though from orbit, was the harshly orange-banded curve of what had to be a gas-giant planet of barely substellar mass.
DM -17 954 V, viewed at first hand as they approached, looked remarkably similar to their memories of dreams. But the panorama in the screen held a quality absent from those memories—a sense of seething, roiling, dynamic energies, altogether at variance with the serenity of the rings and the stateliness of the orbiting moons beyond. Perhaps it was their knowledge that the mammoth globe below—over four times as massive as Sol's Jupiter, massive enough to produce its own heat and light by gravitational compression—was flooding these nearby spaces with radiation that would have struck them dead if the pinnace's deflector screens had failed for even a moment.
"Well," Garth said in the smallest voice of which he was capable, "we're here. I don't suppose your dreams have also provided a glimpse of whatever it is we're looking for?"
"No." Corin shook his head without taking his eyes off the spectacle. "Just a non-visual, non-verbal impression. The essence of Luon-ness." He remembered it vividly, but couldn't have described it in any intelligible way. A kind of soaring aspiration, ambitious for infinity, streaking upward against a backdrop of Stygian tragedy . . . and faltering, falling short and sinking downward into an infinite night, but still coruscating with an intricate interplay of light as it descended. Yes, Corin thought, I can remember it clearly. So clearly it's almost as though it's not a memory at all, but something entering my mind right now. . . .
No! It's not possible!
But Janille's face told him it was, for she wore an expression that he knew must be a twin of his own. Garth's face showed bewilderment, and something that on anyone else would have looked like fear.
(Grave courtesy.) "Greetings Commodore Marshak, Colonel Dornay. You are expected. As are you, General Krona, although I perceive that you are somewhat puzzled—understandably so, inasmuch as you, unlike your companions, have never experienced telepathic contact by a Luon." (Solicitude.) "Do not be alarmed! Your mental privacy is secure, as has been explained to Commodore Marshak and Colonel Dornay. And you are in no physical danger."
Corin found his voice—or at least a broken, stammering remnant of it. "Who are you? Where are you? How can you be communicating with us out here?"
"You are correct in your suppositions about telepathy's inherently limited range, even for a very powerful and artificially amplified talent. So, as you may infer, I am no great distance from you. Do not be concerned at your inability to detect me, for my privacy has some rather sophisticated protections. But turn your attention to your viewscreen, somewhat to the lower left."
Even with the telepathic pointer, they probably wouldn't have noticed it if the curving edge of the brown dwarf below hadn't been directly behind it. One by one, they became aware that a segment of that otherwise knife-sharp line between the glowing burnt-orange and velvety black was wavering as though seen through rippling water. Once they knew what to look for, they could see the same shimmering in the stars above and the hydrogen clouds below, within a well-defined circle.
Janille, seeming to shake herself awake from a too-intense dream, turned to the sensor readouts. "There's nothing there," she said in a small voice.
"Nothing your sensors can detect," the neuter "voice" inside their heads corrected. "What you are seeing is the outer surface of a spherical field which bends light around itself, conferring invisibility on everything within. Normally, it encompasses only my . . . physical plant. But I have expanded it to its maximum volume—several hundred kilometers in diameter—so that you can locate it. Please shape a course for that sphere."
"Uh," Garth said hesitantly, "what's going to happen when we pass through the boundary of this `field'?"
"Nothing harmful, I assure you. It has no effect on material objects." (Impatience.) "The maintenance of the field at this volume imposes a serious energy drain, so if you would be so kind as to proceed without delay. . . ."
The three looked at each other for a moment. Unspoken agreement was reached, and Janille turned without a word to the controls. The pinnace's impellers awoke, and the circle of slight visual distortion began to grow, gradually filling the screen.
True to the assurance they'd received, there was no physical sensation whatever. One instant they were outside the field, the next they were inside it. But the silence somehow deepened, for there were no words.
The universe beyond the field was still visible, but through a murky veil, and everything in it—the cloud-swirling curve of DM -17 954 V, the glowing moons—had gone gray, as though turned to ash. A moment passed before they even noticed that which lay dead ahead, at the geometrical center of the field's zone of effect.
A silvery bead grew in the viewscreen as they approached under a control that Janille's mental discipline had not allowed to lapse. At first it seemed featureless, and when details appeared they were too alien to be helpful in estimating its size. But Corin was nevertheless certain it was huge—a certainty which deepened as it filled the screen.
(The equivalent of a human's throat-clearing for attention.) "If you will permit, Colonel Dornay, I will handle the rest of the approach. Please be good enough to disengage your impellers." Janille complied wordlessly, and they felt the faintest of bumps as a tractor beam took hold. The distraction almost made them miss what happened to the featureless surface in front of them.
It had been a smooth, seamless expanse which, like the rest of the orbital station (or whatever) they were approaching, had an organic look strangely at variance with its obviously metallic composition. Then, in less time than an eyelid took to blink, it held a rectangular opening that revealed a brightly lit interior. They didn't trust themselves to speak as the pinnace floated through that impossible portal and entered a vast space whose architecture was too alien to fully register on their minds, a titanic silvery cavern whose walls bristled with spires of the same crystalline metal. The pinnace came to rest at the end of one of those spires, nestling its airlock against the spire's tip.
"Please enter," the pseudo-voice invited, continuing to address all three of them. "You need take no special precautions—the air is suitable for you. And directions will be provided."
From the first, those mental "words" had held an undercurrent, beneath even the level of the nonverbal emotions that accompanied them. Now it intensified to the point where the three humans became consciously aware of it. But it had been subliminally present all along, and they wondered if it was the reason they had followed that telepathic voice so willingly into an unknown that should have been terrifying. While they couldn't describe it, even to themselves, it filled them with an absolute, incontrovertible certainty that the intelligence with which they were dealing meant them well—meant it with an intensity that had to be held tightly in check lest it become consuming.
They didn't recognize it for what it was, because none of them were parents.
After they'd spent a while walking through vast spun-silver passageways, Garth's impatience finally overcame his awe. "Hey! When do we get to see you?"
(Embarrassed realization that an unpleasant topic can no longer be avoided.) "The fact of the matter is that, contrary to your expectations, you will not be meeting a Luon here."
"What?" Janille shook her head emphatically. "You can't tell me you're not a Luon. Remember, I've been in mental communication with one before. The . . . quality, or tenor, of the thoughts is unmistakable."
"Nevertheless, the fact is that except for yourselves there is not a single organic being in this facility."
"What kind of nonsense is this?" Garth demanded. "What do you mean nobody's here? You're here!"
(Patient explication of the obvious.) "Please recall the precise thought I expressed: no organic beings."
They had all completed one more step before the concept penetrated the walls of unacceptability their culture had erected around their minds. Then they jarred to a halt, breaking into sweat and darting glances around the corridor that had suddenly become alien and frightening.
Artificial sentience had been possible for just over a millennium. But like so many things that were possible—nanotechnology, bioengineering, direct man-machine interfacing, and everything else with the potential to distort the human condition into something no longer recognizably human—it was used sparingly and subjected to rigid controls. This was axiomatic, and had been for so long that few men of this age had any idea of the axiom's origins. If they thought about it at all, they thought—fleetingly and shudderingly—of the Draconis Empire. The Cliometric Society had gone deep underground—not for the first time in its history—as the old Solarian Empire had finally collapsed into a chasm of flame; its centuries-long covert molding of human attitudes was not even a folk memory among the inheritors of those attitudes.
Corin, Janille and Garth were educated rationalists. They were also military professionals, and the military, as ever, had special latitude in utilizing the dangerous and the distasteful. So they could deal with AI. They could even deal, briefly and on a strictly defined basis, with psi. But faced with the two in combination, they recoiled as though from an obscene wrongness. They held their tongues, but their revulsion came roaring up so close to the surface that it might as well have been verbalized.
(Resignation.) "Such a reaction was only to be expected. I have encountered it before—over four hundred of your standard years ago, in fact—on the occasion of my first encounter with Basil Castellan, which was my first encounter with a human."
Astonishment purged their minds of fear and disgust, so thoroughly that it never occurred to them to wonder if that effect might have been intended. "You mean," Janille finally breathed, "it's true, that old story that he came here after his final battle?"
"That was his second visit here. His first, the one to which I am referring, took place twenty-three years before that. You see, he had been captured by the self-styled New Humans who were in rebellion against the Empire, and—"
"Yes!" Corin broke in excitedly. "I remember now. He escaped, and joined his friends Sonja Rady and Torval Bogdan. Together, using information he'd obtained while in captivity, they smashed the rebel fleet and saved the Empire. Or so the story goes. But there have always been some uncertainties about that part of his life—like how, and where, he made contact with Rady and Bogdan."
"The three of them were always deliberately vague about the circumstances of that meeting." (Didacticism.) "You must understand the age in which they lived. It was an age of lethal power struggles; the military strongmen the Empire had summoned up to suppress the rebellion had proven a cure worse than the disease. Among those warlords, the preeminent predator was Yoshi Medina. The three comrades fought for him against the rebels, but had few illusions about him. Their true loyalty was to the idea of the Empire itself, and they weren't saving it merely to turn it over to a ruthless intriguer. Sensing that they would eventually break with him, they carefully husbanded their every source of strength for the coming conflict, including knowledge. And they had obtained some very valuable items of knowledge—notably, my location and nature. For it was here that Castellan's two friends found him."
"So all three of them were here?" The skepticism in Garth's voice didn't last to the end of the sentence.
"Yes. Castellan arrived first, in flight from his pursuers." (Amusement.) "I reminded him of certain popular-fictional megacomputers, with cliche designations like `Alpha Prime.' After learning my background, he bestowed on me the name `Omega Prime,' which suits me as well as any other."
"What `background'?" Janille tried to ask. But Corin's voice overrode hers.
"You mean Castellan came here for refuge in the course of his escape? But how did he even know you were here? What would have induced him to come to this lifeless system? And once he did, how did he find you?"
"The answer to your last question is that I enabled him to find this installation, as I did you. As for the rest . . . it is rather a long story. For the moment, suffice it that he came here for refuge, and that subsequently Rady and Bogdan arrived in this system and destroyed his pursuers, after which he contacted them." (Briskness, as though changing the subject.) "While they were here, I took the liberty of making a holographic recording of them without their knowledge."
The three drew a breath in unison. They had all seen images of Castellan and, less often, of his almost equally legendary friends. But . . . Omega Prime must have sensed the emotions they were feeling at the prospect of spying, as it were, on the past. A curious eagerness appeared on the subverbal level of the thoughts entering their minds. "Would you like to see it? If so, there is a chamber equipped for such a viewing, a little way further."
"Why . . . yes I would," Corin said. "I imagine we all would."
They resumed walking, and presently an opening appeared in the smooth silvery wall to their left. They entered a chamber that must have been small by Luonli standards, for it was only auditorium-sized for them.
"This was recorded in the docking bay of this facility, just after Rady and Bogdan had arrived," Omega Prime explained. Then, with no more warning than that, the other half of the chamber came to holographic life, and they were looking across four centuries.
The vast docking bay filled the background, with its array of spirelike piers. In the foreground, a shuttle with Fleet insignia had nestled against the end of one of those piers, and two people were emerging to greet a third with unmistakable joy. They were talking animatedly, but no sound accompanied the life-sized images. The man they were greeting was recognizably Basil Castellan, though his was a younger face than the one which generally gazed out of the history books. He wore a nondescript gray coverall that his New Human captors must have issued him. Rady and Bogdan wore the space service uniforms of the old Solarian Empire—Fleet deep blue, white and gold for her, Marine black, white and silver for him. The hair styles had the same period quality; in those days men had worn it full on top but very close-cropped on the sides and back, in contrast to the present day's smoother tapering, and women in the military had worn it longer than was now considered suitable.
But still . . .
At first they didn't recognize what they were seeing. It was too preposterous to be recognized. But their puzzlement gradually deepened into something else.
Janille's nervous laugh cracked the brittle silence. "Ha-ha, you know, it's almost as if . . . Well, the three of them . . . I mean, if you didn't know any better . . ." Her voice died a slow death.
Omega Prime's mental "voice" was carefully expressionless. "I can provide sound, if you wish."
All at once, the image of Sonja Rady was speaking to Castellan, while brushing back a lock of auburn hair and ostentatiously not noticing something Bogdan had just said. Her speech was perfectly understandable; language didn't change much in this epoch of long lifespans and ubiquitous recorded sound. "Then the message from your drone arrived. I managed to get myself put in charge of a rescue expedition out Aquila way. I'm still not quite sure how this oversized cargo item got himself included." She grinned fondly at the massive Marine, whose chestnut beard looked newly grown. "It's—"
"No," Janille gasped. It was hard to tell where one voice took up and the other left off, for they were exactly the same voice.
A strong shudder ran through Garth. He brought it under control and whirled around, shouting to the surrounding air. "All right, what kind of unfunny joke is this? Talk to us, damn you!"
The sound recording abruptly ceased, and the holographic images from the past froze. "Yes, I owe you an explanation." (Seriousness of a kind that precluded interruption.) "Let me begin at the beginning. As you have doubtless surmised, I am a creation of the Luonli. Indeed, I am their last creation—their bid for a kind of immortality. This is their home system; their birthworld is one of the lifeless rockballs of the inner system, scorched clean by a sun turned traitor. They wished to preserve all their knowledge, all their philosophy, here in the safety of the outer system. In the end, nothing short of effectively infinite data storage capacity would serve. I am the result. By techniques involving physics that extend into the tachyon domain, I can access any data that I ever held—or will ever hold. From my creators' standpoint, the practical significance of this is that whenever I run out of storage capacity I can simply erase data, without losing the ability to access it. But the corollary—which never occurred to them, and which I myself took a long time to grasp—is that I can also access data which I have not yet stored, but will store at some time in the future.
"Actually," Omega Prime continued, calmly ignoring their stupefaction, "the ability is less useful than it might seem. It is only `foretelling the future' in a strictly limited sense; I can have no knowledge of anything except those matters of which I will at some point learn. And even those exist in a contextual vacuum, from my standpoint. There can be no question of a systematic study of the future; I can only collect data and try to piece them together as my background knowledge grows sufficiently to enable me to make sense of them." (Complacency.) "I am, however, improving."
Corin finally found his voice. "Uh, Omega Prime, if what you're telling us is true, the philosophical implications are rather staggering. But it still doesn't explain . . ." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the three motionless holo figures.
(Mild annoyance.) "I was coming to that. Before Basil Castellan's birth, I had a conversation with a surviving Luon from his homeworld. That Luon had been instrumental in concealing an infant Imperial heir on that world, lest he die at the hands of a usurper. This enabled me to understand certain future references to Castellan which had previously puzzled me—for he was descended from that heir, a fact which I myself was to reveal to him. You see, by then I had come to understand that, by virtue of my limited foreknowledge, I had become an active player, as it were, in the events I foresaw. It is basic information theory, known to humans for two and a half millennia, that observers cannot help but influence that which they observe. This is especially true in my case—one of the `philosophical implications' to which you just alluded. In fact, those future references were ones that I myself later recorded after the fact, to be discovered by my own earlier self." (Concern.) "Ah, are the three of you quite well?"
Corin ordered his head to stop spinning. "Yes, I believe so. Please continue."
"By these means, I knew of an encounter the Luon would later have with the youthful Basil Castellan. I instructed the Luon to take advantage of that incident to mentally influence Castellan to seek out this system when the opportunity to do so arose—as it did in the course of his flight from the New Humans." (Dryness.) "I perceive your distaste. But, as I pointed out to him at the time, he had no valid cause for complaint, inasmuch as he thereby gained an avenue of escape from his pursuers. At any rate, he came here, and I made him aware of all the foregoing facts. Rady and Bogdan then arrived, as I had known they would. The three of them remained here for one sleep period after the reunion you have been witnessing." (Hesitancy, as though anticipating their reaction.) "While they were unconscious, I obtained genetic material from them, by means subsequently undetectable."
Corin suppressed his queasiness. "And why would you have wanted to do that?" he asked levelly.
"By then I had puzzled out still more of my messages to myself from the future. I knew that my duty to the future extended beyond lending Castellan the aid that would enable him to complete his legend."
"Your `duty to the future'?"
"An awkward verbal interpretation your brain places on a difficult concept. For the moment, don't trouble yourselves about my motives. The point is, I learned that Castellan's part in the Empire's eventual restoration would extend beyond merely serving as a legend to inspire the restorers. In a sense he himself, and his friends Rady and Bogdan, were to play a direct role in later events. Not really themselves, but exact genetic duplicates of them."
"You mean you cloned them?" This time Corin was unable to keep the distaste out of his voice. Humans had begun cloning lower life forms only a few years after they'd sent their first feeble probes beyond Earth's atmosphere—first microorganisms, followed in a remarkably few decades by large mammals. By then, it had been clear to anyone willing to face facts without flinching that the only barriers to human cloning were cultural, not technological. But those barriers had been strong ones, and in today's culture they were even stronger, reinforced by battlements of restrictive statutory and customary law.
Garth shook his massive head. "But I still don't understand." The other two made noises of agreement.
The voice inside their skulls took on a tone that sent shivers down their spines in a way the concept of a psionic computer hadn't. "That is only because you're not letting yourselves understand."
For a moment longer they remained suspended in bewilderment.
Then a sound from Janille caused the two men to glance at her. She was staring fixedly at the frozen holo display, at the auburn-haired woman from out of folklore. And the sound continued to build—a low, half-strangled, animallike sound that began low in her chest, emerging in a wail of inarticulate denial. That sound somehow shattered the barrier that had stood between them and the obvious-but-unacceptable, and Corin and Garth stood in a paralyzed silence within which their thoughts raged.
Somehow, from within the calm eye of that hurricane of emotion, Corin was able to observe his own feelings as he stared at the image of Basil Castellan. Incredibly, ludicrously, the one clear question that emerged above the tumult was: My God, is my nose really that long? And his sense of the ridiculous brought him out of shock before either of the others.
"How could we not have known?" he heard Janille ask nobody in particular. "I mean, we've seen pictures of them all our lives!"
"But generally portrayed at a more advanced age than ours," he responded dully. "And with old-fashioned clothes and haircuts. And besides, nobody ever looks at historical pictures with this in mind. We just weren't looking for it." He turned away from her and spoke plaintively. "Why, Omega Prime?"
"As I pointed out, history requires it." (Gentleness.) "I perceive your emotional distress. It is to be expected, in light of your civilization's attitude toward cloning of humans. But you must not let your new knowledge of your origins affect your self-worth. You are human beings in every biological sense. And all your accomplishments, values and beliefs are as valid as they ever were."
"But we aren't ourselves. We're . . . copies."
"That is a fallacy. The three of you are not Basil Castellan, Sonja Rady and Torval Bogdan, even though your genetic makeup is identical to theirs. You are distinct individuals, products of very different life experiences. Your genes do not dictate the innermost essence of who you are—they only establish certain predispositions. And even where those predispositions are at their most salient, they take divergent forms. For example, Commodore Marshak, you are very much a romantic idealist, as was Castellan. But you deny it in yourself. He never did."
Janille shuddered and drew a deep breath. "Never mind the `Why' for now. What about the `How'? Granting that you produced clones from the cells you took from the three of them, and grew them in whatever kind of artificial wombs you use—"
"And kept the embryos in cryogenic stasis," Omega Prime interjected.
"—the question remains, how did you introduce them into human society?" She continued, Corin noted, to shrink from using the first person in connection with those clones.
"That, of course, required human assistance. As you know, Commodore Marshak and yourself were both adopted. So was General Krona, although he tends to be more reticent about it. These adoptions were arranged through a human intermediary whom I had identified and arranged to meet by means similar to those I've already described."
"But who—?"
"I will ask you to defer such questions for now. I have reason to believe you will be meeting the individual in question in the near future. That person will continue to be involved in your destinies. I would risk distorting the course of future events if I revealed his or her identity, for such knowledge could hardly fail to influence your behavior."
"I've known security officers who were freer with information," Garth muttered. He looked around truculently, as though searching for some visible essence of Omega Prime to glare at. "All right, on the assumption—the large assumption—that we believe you, let's talk about this `role' we have to play in some grand historical scheme of things. Or would telling us about that also `distort the course of future events'?"
"Not at all. Indeed, it is necessary that I discuss the matter with you, General. You see, I am aware of your firm belief in your destiny to become Emperor."
"What? You are?" Garth's face lit up like a sun. "So that's what you mean by a `role'? I knew it! I always knew it!"
(An axe blade's bleakness.) "No. You have a destiny, but it lies elsewhere. I know who is to restore the Empire, and you are not that person."
Garth's features, which had fallen with an almost audible thud, firmed up into defiance. "How can you be sure? You admit your foreknowledge is limited. Why should I accept the word of a—"
"It is not necessary that you believe me," the pseudo-voice interrupted calmly, "for you know full well the fundamental Imperial law."
"What do you mean?" Garth demanded. Then, with shocking suddenness, his belligerence seemed to sag sideways and slump down into despair, for he knew exactly what Omega Prime meant. The strictures governing human cloning were motivated not just by fear of totalitarian governments force-growing armies of identical supersoldiers, but also by the danger of wealthy egomaniacs using it as a substitute for natural reproduction. So it had always been a fundamental postulate of the law that no clone could inherit anything. This principle was enforced with special rigor in Imperial succession law. . . .
"Every new Emperor or would-be Emperor has always constructed some claim—however spurious and specious—of inheritance from the dynastic lineage of the past," Omega Prime intoned. "If such inheritance is legally impossible—"
"I understand." Garth's bass was very level. Alarmingly so, for his companions had been prepared for anything up to and including a sudden assault with fists on the wall that was the only physical manifestation of Omega Prime available to be attacked. "So, who is to be the restorer?"
"That, too, leads back to what I told Basil Castellan just before his death. I told him he would reach across time and play a part in the Empire's rebirth not just as a legend and as the original of a clone, but also through his blood, transmitted through his daughter."
"Yes," Janille said quietly, "there's always been a story that his daughter by Sonja Rady was spirited out of the Empire before he died."
"The stories are true. She was taken to the Sword Clans' homeworld. She was the direct ancestor of the family to which I believe you currently intend to offer your services."
"The Brady-Schiavonas!" Corin exclaimed. "So Ivar is really going to make his claim good?"
"Actually, the family member to whom I refer is his son Roderick. The future references are somewhat confusing, but my impression is that he will be remembered as the real founder of the new dynasty, which will lead the Empire to unparalleled heights. Indeed, he will so overshadow his father that future historians will tend to somewhat underrate Ivar."
"But," Garth rumbled, "if you know all this from your `future references,' what's the point in us doing anything to bring it about? It'll happen anyway."
"And," Corin put in, "why are you telling us all this? Why didn't you just leave us alone to do what we're fated to do in this deterministic universe you're postulating?" And without the knowledge that will now haunt us every time we look in a mirror, he didn't add, though he wondered if it came close enough to the tip of his tongue for Omega Prime to detect it.
"There are several answers to those questions—some of which you may be told. First of all, the things I have described will not simply come about; they will come about in a certain way. It is my obligation to assure that they do so, for the reasons to which I have already alluded. If I do not . . . well, it remains to be proven that my future data is really infallible. I cannot be absolutely certain that all the data I am accessing come from one immutable future."
"Huh?" Corin blinked. "Are you talking about, uh, branching alternate timelines? That's always been a popular fictional device. But quantum physics has categorically ruled it out. Antonescu's unified field theory settled that in pre-Federation times."
(Faint condescension.) "I submit that your knowledge of the tachyon domain is even less complete than my own. Granted, the matter is speculative. But I cannot ignore the possibility that the course of events I have deduced is somehow contingent on my taking positive action to bring it about.
"And as for why I am telling you this, the answer should be obvious. The fact that you know these things is part of my own knowledge of coming events. It is part of the pattern."
"The pattern you feel you must preserve," Garth said leadenly, "though you won't tell us why."
"No, I will not. I have no reason to believe you will ever possess that knowledge, and it might well be counterproductive in terms of your own motivations. On the other hand, what I have told you should have a very positive effect where you are concerned, General."
Garth looked up with bloodshot eyes, jolted out of despair by sheer incredulity. "Omega Prime," he asked slowly, "just exactly what makes you think anything you've told us could possibly motivate me to do anything whatever?"
(Airy dismissiveness.) "Oh, you mean your former Imperial ambitions? You must put the matter in perspective, General. There is an old adage to the effect that it is better to be a kingmaker than a king. That is the position that . . . fate, or whatever, is offering you. Roderick Brady-Schiavona is going to be Emperor. Accept this. But you can be instrumental in establishing him on the throne. You can thus write yourself into history as surely as though by becoming Emperor yourself, and without exposing yourself to the kind of second-guessing that new Emperors commonly endure as the penalty for having taken the actions their circumstances made necessary. Later armchair historians will not be uniformly kind—or even fair—to Roderick Brady-Schiavona, I assure you."
"Hmm . . ." Garth made no direct reply as he ruminated. But his two companions, who knew him, saw that he was no longer submerged in hollow futile despondency.
(Briskness.) "And now, I perceive you need rest. I can also prepare food compatible with your species, to supplement the rations in your vessel." Garth visibly brightened, to Corin's and Janille's unspoken amusement. "After you have refreshed yourselves, I will impart certain other information. Then, as soon as possible, you must resume your journey. For you were already on the course history has set for you."