Marada said, “Yes,” quietly, calmly, as if he had known all along.
The captain answered the consul’s question: “Suicides, sir. The . . . Labaya’s daughter went first, then her father when he discovered it, then . . . well, you’ll see it, sirs. They’re the only two that matter, aren’t they?” The question was rhetorical, the captain’s eyes were ice. The blood of Selim Labaya flowed in his veins, as well as showed in his face. He was polite, restrained, dignified as best could be under the circumstances, trying to pave the way to later negotiate good terms of surrender for his people.
“When?” Marada asked, sharply.
“About the time your ships entered tracking range, sirs.”
Marada Kerrion whirled on his heel and looked Chaeron Kerrion up and down very slowly, his fingers lacing and unlacing behind his back. No word was exchanged that the captain heard in that interval punctuated only by the
crack!, crack!
of the arbiter’s knuckles.
More than knuckles would crack before this day was over, someone of the guard whispered too loudly. In their ranks there swelled an explosive scuffling which quickly subsided, so that by the time Kerrion eyes disengaged the one from the other and turned back upon the collected guard, no sign of disturbance was visible.
Disturbance was exceedingly visible some little while later, as Marada and Chaeron Kerrion stood alone in Shechem’s vast funerary hall, the only living creatures under its fan-vaulted ceiling, surrounded by plinths on which a dozen Labayas lay in cold, pale state.
The chill was palpable, befogging the ceiling’s height and wisping in its corners.
“Life is fleeting; death is mist,” Chaeron muttered, and from the same poet: “My fine words are full of barbs.”
“Get out of here,” gritted Marada.
“My duty is clear: to support you in your grief. I would not want to come back and find you have chosen a vacant bier for yourself.” It was meant as humor, a teasing reminder that Chaeron knew that no love had sprouted between Marada and his newly departed spouse, Madel.
But Marada snarled a wordless sound, sending a stare with it so icy that the room suddenly seemed warm: perspiration sprung through Chaeron’s mil to glitter upon his skin. Selim Labaya’s famous frigid glare was no more glacial than that blighting promissory glance.
They stood between Selim Labaya’s corpse and that of his daughter. Madel’s deformities were hidden. Supine in flowing robes, she seemed whole, if not beautiful. And whole she might be, somewhere else among the five eternities, if the mystics could be believed. One thing was sure: she was no longer in the body laid out so artfully before them. Marada had seen death before, seen how it emptied the husk of flesh. As before, he was thrown struggling into the maw of the incomprehensible: the person he had known was something different from the leavings so carefully arranged to mock life. Life, by its absence, made known its separateness from the mechanism of flesh. Madel’s slight corpse was a cast-off gown, full of nothingness.
“We fool ourselves, thinking we can rationally know the universe, when we cannot even discern the nature of being alive.” Being alive, it was inevitable that he proclaim what every man proclaims when he is confronted with an emptied receptacle of life.
“By the Jesters, Marada, you did not give a fart about her while she lived.” Chaeron’s arms opened, gestured widely, to embrace not only the dead but the fecund expanse of Shechem.
“Be silent, or get out. What is not my fault here, is yours.”
“
Fault?
I see no fault, or reason to seek to find any.”
“That is the nature of your illness, and why I must prescribe a cure.”
“You threaten me?”
“You do not mistake me.”
They stood opposed, one with hands on hips and the other with hands clenched behind, paler than the corpses flanking them like some macabre garden. Marada continued:
“You forced this, with your arbitrary ‘corrections,’ making Labaya think you meant annihilation here.”
“
You
forced it, with your shortsighted passion and your spoiled sperm.”
Marada shook his head slowly to and fro, as if he could not believe what he had heard. He stepped back a pace from his half-brother, promising: “We shall see.” Then he turned on his heel and left the hall.
Chaeron watched him go, unmoving. Then, raking a trembling hand through auburn curls, he approached Selim Labaya’s bier. “I am sorry, old tiger, for the row. My father will be saddened, to lose so beloved an adversary.” He spread his hands, wet his lips, and reached out a finger that never completed its intention, but pulled back to huddle close to its own warm flesh.
Chaeron had respected the old consul general more than anyone save his father. But the old ones all had this primitive penchant for drama, this elevation of emotion above logic. Marada had it, too, and its danger was incalculable: not even the twelve displayed bodies spread before him described its extent.
Chaeron would have gladly surrendered his honor, wherever it happened to dwell; his Kerrion heritage; thrown his tongue and right hand into the bargain, for even an additional day between him and a cold slab in anyone’s morgue. He could not comprehend choosing death, since death offered man no choice. He peered long into Selim Labaya’s sleeping countenance, wondering what had prompted the man to give the customs of life so much meaning that he would die to serve them, when death acknowledged no custom nor life, let alone choices.
He was shivering when he left there, shuddering so that he locked his jaw tight to still it. It was not the physical cold that shook him like a child, but the lack of breath in Selim Labaya’s nose, the failure of his chest to rise and fall. Chaeron had never loved his life so well as then. The affection for his own flesh which welled up in him obscured almost all else. But not quite everything else: he worried the possibility of being incriminated by Marada’s unbalanced passion for justice, and though his scrutiny was exhaustive, he could not find any glimmer of blame that he might own. Selim Labaya had committed his suicide upon the suicide of his daughter, at about the same time Chaeron had been forming up his four cruisers behind their mask of chaff. Or earlier. It did not matter which: he was inculpable by long, salvational minutes. This was not his doing, not caused by his improvisation on Parma’s battle plan. Probably, it had nothing to do with Parma’s dispatch of cruisers to Shechem. Probably, it was what he had said so impoliticly to Marada: the girl’s inability to face the imperfect nature of her child, magnified by postpartum depression and the flight of her husband from her side.
Who could blame her? The child was defective; her husband had deserted her; her father had launched an attack on the father of her child. . . . Women, Chaeron well knew, lived in a separate reality that only occasionally merged with that experienced by men. There was one thing to be said for Madel which no one had said, but which Chaeron—exiting the vault into warmth and light and the company of his intelligencers and the Shechem Guard but not his brother—found somehow mitigating when he said it to himself: she had not involved her child, nor decided for it; there was no tiny sepulchre, no eleven-day-old corpse swathed in interment robes.
Chaeron shrugged death aside, asked the young Labayan captain where Marada had gone, though he knew the answer.
“To see his son, sir.”
“Take me there.”
“He left orders to the contrary, sir.”
“He is my subordinate,” Chaeron snapped. The man had no choice but to obey.
What they found upon reaching the Labayas’ residence was a melee of green-uniformed men running hither and thither, which wiped away Chaeron’s awe of the botanical gardens and the wide-stepped residence as if it had never been.
As crisis quickened his thoughts, throwing off the languor in which morbidity had draped them, Chaeron called for Valery.
An intelligencer answered: “He had to go back to the
Danae
, some minor malfunction. You know those relief pilots, they don’t want to touch anything if they don’t have to . . . bad protocol, or something.”
“Umn. Get him back here. What’s going on?”
No one knew who could be found to question. As quickly as the flurry of men had blown out of the residence hall and down its steps, they had vanished.
When the last step had been climbed and two men, one Kerrion, one Shechem staff, had been dispatched to find the cause of the commotion, Chaeron found out.
It was the captain who had first greeted them who came rapidly down the elegant hall, who stopped at Chaeron’s sharp order but did not approach, who answered laconically when Chaeron strode up and demanded to know what was amiss: “Sir, I am not sure how to tell you this. . . . The arbiter has relieved you of your command, and—”
Deep in his throat, Chaeron growled that he did not recognize his brother’s authority, was himself empowered by his father to assume full control of any situation which might develop here.
The captain, who looked more like Selim Labaya as a youth than Selim Labaya probably had, waggled his head, a sour grin on his fat, full-featured face: “I thought as much. Well, sir, you and your brother are putting me in a difficult position.” The captain paused, provisionally enthralled by the possibility of using the division between the two brothers against them. But it was not to be; there was no hope. No ship had escaped the debilitation of Kerrion particle beams, aimed unerringly. All were docked that were close enough to have been called in for the funeral. “However, I can take you to your brother, and perhaps you two can decide who it is between you that I am supposed to consider my commander pro tem.”
There was a twinkle in the slitted, pale eyes that Chaeron did not understand until he saw Marada Seleucus Kerrion sitting on a bed of pink silk, toeing furrows in a plush, white rug. Beside the bed, by his black-clad knee, was a bassinette fitted with an intravenous feeder and elimination tubes. Like Marada’s black-and-reds, the life-support capabilities of the tiny bed were dissonant to the pastel repose of the suite.
Even more dissonant was the soft wailing coming through a closed door. The keening was not yet resigned, but punctuated with moans and soft screams and grunts like wounded animals’, and of such profusion that Chaeron was sure that more than one throat provided its source.
He moved closer, across the thick carpet, his steps soundless. He sensed rather than saw the captain fall back and station himself near the closed door. Still he approached his brother, who did not look up, but studied his boot toe furrowing the carpet.
Chaeron wondered why Marada’s shoulders hung so dejectedly, why his chest rose and fell so shallowly, why his eyes never raised.
Then he saw, as he came close, that there was no infant lying in the pink and white cradle, that the glucose mixture meant to sustain life dripped slowly onto satin sheets, turning them grayish yellow.
His toes must have come into Marada’s field of view. The arbiter looked up. His teeth bared like a silent-roaring lion, bright among the dark hairs of his beard. The grin of hatred faded slowly, but above it dark eyes promised Armageddon.
“You have heard?”
“That you think you can supplant me, I have heard. Nothing more.”
“What use can you make of my son?” Marada leaned back, then, on his elbows, speaking tonelessly. “You are wrong if you think I can be influenced.”
“Lords, you are a true lunatic. What are you talking about? Where is the boy?”
“Don’t play innocent with me.
Hassid
was not powered down, you know. We have film of your pilot going aboard the
Danae
with a small, swaddled bundle. We have slated records of Valery’s orders to the other Kerrion cruisers . . . your orders, so he proclaimed, and so it was slated. We have all we need. You are under arrest.”
Chaeron sat down, very slowly on the floor, folding his legs around him like a deflating doll. “What are you talking about?” But by then his reason had begun to function. “The ships are gone?”
“What I am talking about is your complicity with the guild. Yes, as you know very well, the ships are gone, all but
Hassid
, who insists on my verification. And my son is gone. What I want to know is
where?
And
why?
”
“Look, dear brother, I know you are grieving, and I know you and I don’t get along. But for the family’s sake, will you not put this blame-placing aside for the moment? I can answer both of your questions without trouble, though I was not involved. So could you. I will maintain my command of this situation until a less-prejudiced authority than yourself examines the data, at which time I will not demand that your license be pulled, using these misjudgments as sufficient cause,
only because you are my brother.
“Where
they have gone is to the same place the
Marada
went when it disappeared. Why this thing has occurred is to lure you after them. If you are a fool even greater than I think you to be, you will follow. They left you a ship for that reason. Even I, no pilot, know that if Valery wanted
Hassid
, he could have taken her out of individual mode.
Then
you would not know
where
, or
why
, or even
who
. That you do know, means that Valery wants you to know; that you can pursue, means that he invites pursuit. If I were you, I would sit right here in Shechem.”
“I imagine you would. I am going.”
“Then I am going with you.”
“You are under arrest.”
“
You
are likewise under arrest.” Chaeron grinned. “I release you into my parole. Do the same for me.”
Marada pretended a dull smile as he rose up. “There is no way we can both go.”
“There is no way one of us can go if the other is relieved of his authority.”
A discreet but unhappy clearing of throat reminded both men that the Labayan still waited by the door.
“How long,” snapped Chaeron over his shoulder, rising, but not taking his eyes off his brother, “until you can give us four sponge-ready cruisers?”
“Ah . . . three, four days, sirs, once I find out whose instructions I’m supposed to be taking.”
“You’ll be taking mine,” Chaeron said flatly, still not favoring the man with a glance.
“Arbiter?”
Marada waved his hand, as if it were a matter of no import. “Go ahead, do what he says. But continue to call in all the ships you have out, and to spread news of what has occurred.”
There was a shuffle, a closing of the door.
Marada let out a long, trembling sigh, and sank back down on the bed’s foot, his face in his hands. Out from between his fingers came the words Chaeron would most clearly remember of all that passed that day in Shechem:
“You know what the worst of it is, little brother? The worst of it is that Selim Labaya had dispatched no retributive force to Draconis; not one ship went from here to Lorelie armed and filled with despite as we came here. And do you know why he did not? Because of Madel, because of her wretched state, because of what
I
had done, because she begged her father to work no violence upon my family—in hopes that I would return upon my own, someday.” Marada’s hunched form quivered, but did not straighten. “It’s slated into the record.”