Further: Beyond the Threshold (34 page)

::Keep quiet, will you? We’ll talk later.::

I turned my attention back to Radon, trying not to glance at my signet ring, which I’d forgotten was still on my finger, and thinking about ways having Amelia on our side might work to our advantage.

“The people of the Entelechy are weak and complacent,” Radon went on. “There is neither fire nor passion in them. And only a hand that can grasp a sword may hold a scepter.”

“Is that why you attack the first people you see after five thousand years of isolation?” I said, keeping my voice level. It was too early to say which Interdiction Negotiation strategies might apply in these circumstances, if any, but I saw no reason to aggravate matters until I had a better picture of what we were dealing with.

“The first people? Oh, no, my dear boy,” Radon said, smiling broadly. “We might not have had any contact with the Entelechy before now, but we’ve encountered countless other outposts over the millennia, cultures scattered out like seeds during the Diaspora. And all of them have either come to accept the wisdom of the Divine Ideal or paid the price for their misbelief.”

A pair of Iron Mass entered the room, carrying trays of food. As they set them down at the center of the table, one of the servers started coughing and didn’t stop as he retreated to the corner of the room. Finally, he stopped and, at a glance from Radon, muttered a sputtering apology.

“W-what price is that?” Bin-Ney asked.

Radon ladled a mound of grayish-green gelatin off one of the trays onto a plate before him, and smiled wistfully. “Death, of course. Though, some serve their purposes, even after their life is terminated.” Radon glanced to one of the two servers, a woman, and said, “Fluorine. Do you recall the stories of our forebears launching the severed heads of their enemies as missiles against their brethren?”

The woman—Fluorine, evidently—smiled and nodded. “What about Oxus, Commander-of-the-Faithful?”

Radon clapped his hands, almost gleefully, like a kid opening a present to discover precisely what he’d ask for.

“Oh, Oxus,” he laughed, slapping the table’s surface with the palm of his hand. He turned to me and grinned, as though eager to share a favorite joke. “On the planet Oxus, you see, a woman begged to be spared when her colony was put to the sword for refusing to accept their place in the divine order. She told my brothers that she had swallowed a data crystal and that the information on it would be invaluable to them. After ripping her open and removing the crystal with his own two hands, the leader of the house ordered his men to disembowel every captive to see what they might have secreted away.” He guffawed loudly. “What do you think of that, eh?”

The male server coughed again, a long series of convulsions wracking his chest.

“You seem very powerful,” I said, applying a bit of Interdiction Negotiation technique, trying to find some leverage with our captors. “I imagine most people who meet you are very frightened.”

“Powerful?” Radon shook his head. “I am merely a servant of the Divine Ideal and accrue no power to myself. Now, tell me…”

The server’s cough became much more violent, until finally he doubled over, hacking up a huge wad of bloody sputum that thwacked into the floor at his feet.

“Is he OK?” I asked.

“Psht,” Radon said dismissively. “He merely has the sickness—or one variety of it, at any rate. The ships of the Iron Mass use fission engines, leading to high rates of radiation-related illness among us, but since members of the Iron Mass seldom live longer than one hundred years anyway, we don’t consider it a major cause of concern.”

He glanced over as the female server helped the other, first to his feet and then to stagger out of the room.

“Besides, we live for the world that is to come, not the world of the moment.” He leaned forward on his elbow and looked from me to Bin-Ney to Jida and back. “Now. Are you prepared to accept your personal role in the evolution of the divine?”

Nine Precession Radon rambled on, talking about the glorious plans of the Divine Ideal, the god who waited for humankind at the end of time, and how every living being—excluding those who didn’t fit the Iron Mass definition of “living”—had a place in the grand scheme, if they so chose.

I could tell Jida was not weathering all of this terribly well, but she managed to keep quiet through most of it. Bin-Ney, for his part, looked like a deer caught in headlights, his mouth hanging open, his thoughts on something terrifyingly unpleasant. I’d been trained to resist any number of different varieties of torture as part of my Interdiction Negotiation instruction, but listening to Radon, I was reminded of nothing so much as the four days I spent ferrying a pair of religious missionaries to Mars; they’d seen the
Cutter 1519
, with its close quarters, as a perfect opportunity to refine their proselytizing skills before spreading the good word among the red planet’s colonists.

Radon had the same manic zeal, the same true-believer glint in his eye. That he had red horns instead of hair, and wicked spurs on his elbows and knuckles, and wasn’t dressed in a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and black tie were about the only things that differentiated him from them—that, and the fact that the missionaries hadn’t, at any stage, held my life in the palm of their hands.

Given Radon’s stories about what had happened to misbelievers, I figured it was in our best interests to feign curiosity in his nonsense screed until some possibility of escape presented itself. So I nodded politely, made appropriate noises, and prodded him with questions a time or two, when he seemed to suspect our interest was on the wane.

The meal of green-gray goop was tasteless but fairly filling, and when the female server had returned—with no sight of her coughing companion—and cleared away the table, it seemed that our audience with the commander-of-the-faithful had come to an end.

Radon called for guards to usher us back to our cell.

“We’ll continue these discussions at a later hour, so in the meantime, you can contemplate your place in history. Later, we’ll test your resolve, to see whether you are truly prepared to accept the Divine Ideal as your personal destiny.”

I didn’t like to imagine what a “test” of our resolve might involve, and didn’t ask.

A quartet of spear-wielding guards led us through the cramped corridors, taking a different route than we’d previously followed. After a few twists and turns, which I imagined might have been intended to keep us disoriented about the internal layout of the dome, we came to a juncture barred by a closed hatch. Three of the guards kept us under careful watch, while the fourth went to a panel set in the wall, touched a series of flickering lights, and then the hatch opened.

We went through, and I saw that there was an identical panel on the other side of the hatch. Going down a long corridor, we took a turn to the left, another to the right, and then found ourselves back at our cell.

The guards shoved us through the open hatch and then closed it behind us. We were back in the green-tinged darkness, as far from freedom as we’d been before. Or so it might have seemed.

::RJ,:: came the voice of Amelia in my ear. ::I think I have a plan.::

The first steps of the plan were so simple, so clichéd, that I felt a little embarrassed even attempting them. But after considerable deliberation, no other options presented themselves. Besides, I figured, fads and fashions being what they were, maybe after twelve thousand years the oldest trick in the book could be new again.

I positioned myself by the hatch, leaning against the wall, looking as casual as possible in case there were cameras or other viewing devices secreted around that we couldn’t see—and since they could be virtually nanoscopic, or the walls themselves could be transparent from the other side, it was no stretch of the imagination to think that there were. Then Jida lay on the ground, her legs doubled up to her chest, and began moaning softly. Bin-Ney took up position over her.

We waited until we heard the tromp of boots outside the door, then I motioned to Bin-Ney, and he went into his act.

“Help!” he shouted as loud as he could. “I think there’s something really wrong with her! She might be”—and here he paused unnecessarily for dramatic effect, the back of his hand to his forehead, looking almost like he might swoon—“
dying
!”

I stifled a sigh. I knew I shouldn’t look to an Anachronist for verisimilitude, but I hoped his hamming wouldn’t get in the way of the plan.

The tromping boots stopped at the door, and I heard a muffled exchange. Then, with a groan of metal on metal, the hatch slid open.

“Oh,
thank
you,” Bin-Ney swooned, while Jida groaned loudly. “She’s really, really sick!”

“Quiet in there,” came the barked voice from the other side of the hatchway. Positioned where I was, hidden by the side of the door, I couldn’t see out, but I could tell from the Iron Mass’s tone, and the fact that they weren’t coming through the door, that they weren’t exactly buying it.

Jida moaned, howling loudly.

“Keep it quiet,” said another harsh voice, “or you’ll soon have something to moan about.”

This wasn’t working. I wasn’t surprised. It was time for something a bit more direct, and a great deal riskier.

“Hey, where’s the other one—”

Before the Iron Mass had completed his question, I’d jumped to one side, landing right in front of the open hatch in a crouch, and launched myself at them, barely even taking time to gauge their distance and position.

The Iron Mass were both armed with spears, as I’d anticipated, but hadn’t had them at the ready. If they had, I doubt I would have lasted three seconds. As it was, I managed to tackle one of the Iron Mass to the ground before the other had a chance to respond.

The force of my blow knocked the air out of the first Iron Mass, which gave me a split-second advantage. While his companion lunged at me, swinging his weapon downward in a wide arc, I grabbed hold of the spear of the Iron Mass beneath me. Both hands on the fully extended handle, I yanked it back and to the side, forcing the spear’s blade up behind me with all my strength.

As I rolled to the side, the spear pulled from my hands, its tip buried in the abdomen of the attacking Iron Mass. Strangely colored blood flecked the corners of the attacker’s mouth, and his own spear clattered to the ground as he looked in confusion at the weapon protruding from his belly.

The Iron Mass on the ground scrambled to get up, swinging his arm to one side, the spurs on his elbow clawing across my calf, but I kicked out and caught his jaw with the heel of my boot, and he fell back to the floor, groaning.

Shouts of alarm sounded from down the corridor, and I knew I didn’t have time to stop and pick up one of the weapons as a trio of Iron Mass barreled toward me, only meters away. I took to my heels, running the other way. I reached the end of a short corridor, jogged left, then took a quick right. I sprinted, running as fast as I could, but the footfalls of the pursuing Iron Mass came closer and closer.

At the end of the corridor was a closed hatch, the same one we’d come through when returning from our dinner with Radon. On the wall beside it was the control panel—my goal.