Extremis (92 page)

“I’m surprised Cyrus even wanted that command when you offered it to him,” said Mags, suddenly serious. “Of course, his role as the commander of Second Fleet is no longer relevant. But by now the problem on the Tangri front has become less one of fighting than of military administration.”

“Nation-building, as it was once called.” Trevayne nodded. “It’s not just a matter of telling the
zemlixi
and the subjugated non-Tangri races that they’re free and then moving on.” He took on a brooding look. “Remember I once said that the Tangri had, for reasons connected to their environment and biology, taken an abnormal historical path, as though Genghis Khan’s Mongols had conquered all of Old Terra? You have to imagine not just a conquest but a wholesale leveling and blighting of the higher cultures—the Mongols really did do that in the Islamic heartlands and in Kievan Russia, with some very unfortunate long-term historical consequences in both cases. So the
zemlixi
have nothing to fall back on. Any highly developed political societies they may ever have had have been forgotten for centuries. Fortunately, I think Cyrus understands this.”

“That may not be the hardest thing he has to adjust to,” said Mags with renewed mischievousness.

“Tha
t’
s right! If anything comes of this idea of the Baldies taking part in the Tangri campaign—”

“The Arduans,” Mags corrected him primly.

“Yes, we have to call them that now, don’t we? Well, at least Cyrus isn’t without experience in dealing with diverse allies. In Second Fleet he’s had Orions—even though he’s miserably allergic to their fur—and Ophiuchi and Gorm and—”

“And even rebels,” Mags finished for him dryly. “A situation we can identify with, can’t we?”

“Oh?” Trevayne sat down on the bed—a double one, specially installed—and reclined back on his elbows to listen.

“Well, considering the physiologically youthful body concealing your evil middle-aged mind, and the fact that I’ve had access to the full anagathic regimen from youth, we probably have a long future to look forward to—”

“Yes,” he interrupted her with a sigh. “And neither you nor anyone else can imagine what it’s like for me to be able to savor the sensation of having a future.”

“But consider the complications!” She perched beside him on the bed. “You’re a citizen of the Terran Federation—which, strictly speaking, no longer exists as an independent political entity—”

“Actually, I think that makes me automatically a citizen of the Pan-Sentient Union. Although I suppose you’d have to call me a very well-established naturalized citizen of the Rim Federation, whose citizens have a kind of ill-defined dual citizenship in the PSU. To tell you the truth, I’ve never puzzled out just exactly
what
my current citizenship status is.”

“Well, you
must
be a citizen of the Rim Federation, considering that you’re its military commander-in-chief! I, on the other hand, am a citizen of the Terran Republic, a senior officer in its navy, and the daughter of rebels against the Federation.”

“And your point would be?”

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse! You must admit it’s not exactly a recipe for a conventional marriage!”

Trevayne’s eyes took on a look with which she’d become familiar. “Conventionality is the last refuge of the small-minded,” he intoned.

She glared at him. “As with at least two-thirds of your quotes, I can’t identify the source. Who came up with
that
one?”

“I did,” he admitted blandly.

This time it was her fist that went into his rib cage. There followed a wrestling match whose most conspicuous feature was the eagerness of each party to lose. It concluded with her on top, finalizing her victory with an extended kiss.

“Actually,” he said when he’d caught his breath, “there’s a very simple solution to the problems you’ve raised.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I can resign my commission with the Rim Federation—some would say it’s about time—and become a citizen of the Terran Republic.”

She rolled limply off him and stared, her almond eyes as round as nature permitted them to get.

“Well, well, well!” He smiled. “I’ve finally succeeded in flooring you. Figuratively, that is, as opposed to literally.”

For once she didn’t rise to the bait. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were serious.”

“But I am.” And all at once she could see he
was
serious. “You see, I’m one of the few people left alive who remember what the Fringe Revolution was really like. And even those other few—your godparents, Miriam Ortega, Cyrus—don’t have the fresh recollection I do. What I was really fighting for was the ideal of human unity, which I identified with the Terran Federation to which I had given my oath. This, even though I was—as nobody seems to remember these days—sympathetic to the Fringers. Bloody hell, my first wife was from Novaya Rodina! And my children…” All at once, he couldn’t go on.

“Yes, Ian, I know,” she said softly. “Your wife and daughter, killed by the revolutionaries. And your son—”

“Whom I killed,” he finished for her unflinchingly. “Well, for once what ‘everyone knows’ is true. I did that, in the name of my ideal of unity. I couldn’t permit myself to realize that the Terran Federation had forfeited the right to be the standard-bearer of that unity. And I didn’t understand—as so many haven’t understood throughout history—that unity doesn’t have to involve a unitary state. I think w
e’
ve proved that now, even if it took the Baldies—sorry, the Arduans—to help us.”

“But Ian,” she protested, wanting with all her soul to believe this but needing to be certain that
he
wanted it, too, “considering your historical role in the founding of the Rim Federation—”

He laughed. “I do love the Rim in many ways. But—and I’ve never told anyone this—it will be a relief to get a way from there, where they insist on putting me on a pedestal. Bloody hell, they even put me
literally
on a pedestal, outside Government House! And with that outrageously inaccurate quote on the pedestal!”

“ ‘Terra expects that every man will do his duty,’ ” she quoted before he could. “The admiral doth protest too much, methinks! Genji Yoshinaka was right about that bogus quote. You just
love
it!”

With a theatrical growl on Trevayne’s part, the wrestling match on the bed resumed. Just before it came to its inevitable and mutually desired conclusion, he paused to whisper into her ear, “At any rate, it doesn’t matter. It’s the future that matters, not the past.”

EPILOGUE

The young man and the strangely spry and ageless old man emerged from the ballroom foyer into the East Shore Plaza’s atrium skyway, a long glass tube that led from the hotel’s Conference and Banquet Center to its prestigious Executive Service Suites: a miniarcology of luxurious—and supremely secure—apartments normally assigned to visiting dignitaries and celebrities.

The old man, whose telescoping cane remained folded in his hand like an old Imperator’s baton, bumped a shoulder into his younger—and not facially dissimilar—companion. “So, have you decided to forgive me for getting you sent out here?”

“To be honest, Uncle Kevin, when I agreed, I thought I was doing you a favor. Now I realize that it was you who was doing me a favor—for which I am very grateful.”

“Grateful? Because I almost got you killed?”

“No. For guiding me to a time and place where I was really needed—and made a real difference.”

Antediluvian Kevin Sanders shrugged. “Seemed like a waste, you knocking about in the Home Worlds, Ossian. Not much to do there—not much that matters, anyhow. But now, after this, whatever you choose to do you’ll do with more insight, more appreciation, and more reverence.”

Wethermere started at the last word, a word he would never have expected to hear from his fey and ever-waggish relative. “ ‘Reverence?’ ”

“Sure. You’ve seen real life and real death—and have had a hand in measuring out both.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

Sanders nodded. “No good man wants to. It’s a bad fit, after all, the power of life and death entrusted to us frail, fallible humans. But that’s the nature of our existence, and now you’ve done more than just hear the pieties and axioms about the burdens of command. You’ve lived it. And that, my boy, will change you.”

“It already has.”

Sanders clucked his tongue, and the voice that emerged from his finely lined lips was pure Tidewater drawl. “You evah were a fast learner, nephew.”

Wethermere smiled. “You mean, like the way I figured out that we’re heading to the
real
interspeciate summit just now?”

Kevin smiled back. “Like I said, a fast learner. What tipped you off?”

“Well, first, the timing of your arrival. Once the Astria warp point was reopened, you could have come through any time in the last three weeks, but instead you chose yesterday to get here. Just in time for the formal signing of the truce—but also just in time for this little informal chat with Ankaht. So small, and so informal, that it’s just the three of us. Which makes me wonder: why me? Why not Ian Trevayne?”

“Ian Trevayne? Son, he wanted you here—in his stead.”

“What?”

“Ossian, Ian is a statesman only when he must be. He is a soldier by inclination and profession. But you—well, he saw your file, and, as he put it, you had been ‘washed by many waters.’ Meaning that while you have acquitted yourself quite well on the field of battle, it’s only one of your many gifts. Ian is a genius, make no mistake. But he knows he’s not a polymath—and when it comes to statecraft with a race as alien as the Arduans, that’s the kind of mind we need.”

“You mean, one like yours.”

“And yours, too, nephew. Runs in the family, I ’spect.”

Wethermere kept his profound doubts about the inheritability of such a trait to himself. “So, what’s our objective, Uncle?”

As they entered the elevator that would bring them to Ankaht’s suite—and which would electronically assess and scan every fiber of their apparel and bodies—Kevin stared at his shoes, as if searching for the correct phrase. “Our objective is to talk about the real future, about all the things that the diplomats either don’t want to mention or don’t have the imagination to foresee. And, of course, to get you established as the PSU’s covert operative inside the interspeciate Military Liaison Mission.”

Ossian goggled. “You want me to be a spy?”

“Tut, tut, boy. You use such pejorative terms. Let’s say instead that you will surreptitiously observe and report how things are progressing between our two species.”

“So you’re asking me to lie, on a daily basis, to all the people—both humans and Arduans—that I’ll be working with.”

“Oh, I didn’t say anything about lying, Ossian. In fact, one of the most important reasons for our meeting Ankaht is so that she can get a look at who she’s going to be working with.”

“Does Ankaht know that my actual assignment out here was always through Naval Intelligence?”

“Most assuredly so, Nephew.”

“And does she know that my new job is to be a sp—a ‘covert operative,’ tasked with watching her race?”

“Well, of course she does. Good grief, boy, we’d have to be low-grade morons to think we can keep secrets from the Arduans. It will be a while before we learn what they can and can’t do with their telempathy. But that’s all besides the point. It was
her
idea to set up an additional,
confidential
liaison between our upper echelons and theirs. The Military Liaison Mission serves a fine purpose on its own—but it’s also an excellent cover for whoever becomes the secure conduit between our intelligence community and the reliable Arduan leaders.”

“And I’m that conduit.”

“And so you are.”

“What a nice way to repay all my new friends in both the Republic and Federation, and establish myself as the very soul of honesty to the Arduans. My ostensible job of ensuring peace and cooperation between our races is all just a cover for me to work as Terra’s confidential agent on-site.”

“Yes, but your job involves a great deal more than that. You are also our eyes and ears upon the evolving relationships between all three of those groups, and so you’ll also be a tripwire if the relations between them become—well, strained.”

“So you can dictate policy to them?”

“So that we might be able to intercede in time, before misunderstandings escalate into war. And in so doing, save thousands, maybe millions, of lives.”

Well, Wethermere reflected, put that way, his new job didn’t sound quite so bad. Which was also, obviously, his sly old uncle’s intent. But it just might be the truth, as well.

The elevator came to a smooth stop. The doors opened. Ankaht was already waiting in the receiving room before them, a massive and very complex vocoder on the table beside her. “Welcome,” announced her voice from the vocoder as she rose and—stiffly—offered her right cluster: its ten tentacles were paired into five dyads that resembled extended fingers.

Wethermere and Sanders advanced and shook “hands” with her, Sanders adding, “Your acquisition of our traditional greeting does us great honor, ma’am.”

Ankaht made a recognizably dismissive gesture with her other cluster: the vocoder announced, “The honor is mine, esteeme—” The machine voice went abruptly silent: the small dark Arduan gave a sudden start, all three eyes opening very wide as they moved from one human to the other. “You are—related.” She said it as a statement, not a question.

“Yes, ma’am,” confirmed Wethermere.

“Most people say you can see the resemblance in our eyes,” added Sanders.

“No. No, I cannot detect that. Familial similarities are far too subtle for us Arduans to discern.”

“Then how did you know we are related?”

She looked at Wethermere carefully. “It is as if you both—but you particularly—sleep atop a mountain of intertwined
shaxzhutok’ix
, unknowing of all the lives that reside within you from the past.”

Wethermere remembered Krishmahnta and smiled. “You mean like an Old Soul?”

“Yes—the Hindu concept.” Ankaht’s attention was now not merely focused on Wethermere; it was riveted upon him. She changed color a bit, and Wethermere had the fleeting sense that she was concentrating—or exerting some other mental focus—so intently that she grew pale. He stepped slightly closer to her, feeling his uncle’s keen eyes measuring every nuance of this unexpected scene. “Are you well, Elder?”