Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds

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REQUIEM FOR A RULER OF WORLDS

To Lucia, with love, thanks, and, admiration.

My gratitude to Lil and Ron Drumheller for their kindness and interest.

I'm also much beholden for the contributions of Owen Lock, who's been endowed by Destiny with all the things that define a truly great editor: a touch of the poet; perception; imagination; expense account lunches; an understanding, good-humored wife named Arleen; and most importantly, a convertible couch.

" … and let him be cast forth, into the exterior darkness."

Matthew 22:13

PROLOGUE—IN THE TIME OF THE THIRD BREATH

Stormclouds for my winding sheet,
Caspahr Weir thought with approval as his chair floated out over the meadow.

A towering black front was rolling toward him, outlined in blue-green by Guileless Giles, the larger of Epiphany's two moons. That he'd helped nature along, ordering his meteorological engineers to shape the night's tempest, didn't detract from Weir's enjoyment. He was accustomed to arranging things to suit himself. And, he'd decided, a person as close to death as he could be forgiven a little theatricality.

Certainly his life had been filled with high drama, triumphs, and defeats.

He wondered what they'd say about him when he was gone. Perhaps a paraphrasing of an ancient Earth barb, one of his favorites:
He was never more popular than when he died.

Fifty light-years inside what had, within living memory, been a special corner of hell, Director Weir-sometimes known as Weir the Defender—touched a control on the arm of his chair. It descended slowly toward the meadow's thick, tangled carpet of ribbon grass. By craning his head a bit—panting with the effort, feeling dizziness assail him again—he could see his home, stronghold, and palace, Frostpile.

It was a lofty dream-megastructure, veined like intaglio and lighting the night. Frostpile was composed of domes, turrets, and spires; citadels like shark fins; outlying forms that often put visitors in mind of moored dirigibles cut from crystal.

Begun almost thirty Standard years earlier, it wasn't quite completed yet. A pity …

Director Weir winced as the chair jostled the least bit, settling onto the oily ribbon grass. He automatically reached for a control to make built-in medical apparatus mute his pain. But the control wasn't there; he'd chosen to soar forth from Frostpile in his old chair, unencumbered by machinery that was fighting a futile holding action.

At least this is a seat of power,
he thought,
and not a flying geriatrics clinic.
Its arms, of beautiful teak from Brimstone, worn by his hands and the years, comforted him. The chair had served him for a decade before the damned sawbones and his sister had browbeaten him into using an airborne deathbed.

He smiled his chagrin at his own absentmindedness and took his hand away from where the missing control ought to be, lowering it into his lap slowly, trembling with the effort. No pain interdiction tonight!

No message blockers or neuroinhibitors; no dulling drugs. He wanted to experience everything, even the pain; it was time to die.

The deathwatch had already summoned together loved ones, friends, and allies, along with others for whom he had little or no regard. If it made them feel better to gather there on Epiphany, the Director had no objection so long as they left him in peace.

Doubtless enemies in many places were keeping their own shadow-vigil. The repercussions of his death would be felt far beyond the relatively small volume of the nineteen systems he ruled.

His momentary twinge had been swallowed up in the deep, steady aching he'd endured for so long.

Now he watched the stormclouds roll in, right on schedule. He nodded without realizing that he did. His engineers were expensive, but they were the best—and they asked no questions.

He knew he could trust them to keep their mouths shut, too. Good girls, even though Sonya's eyes had been brimming over when he'd given the order. Everyone knew his fondness for good, bracing weather.
At least,
he tweaked himself,
you're fond of it now that you don't have to campaign in it
anymore.

The black avalanche of clouds engulfed the sky, spreading and advancing. As he watched, it blotted out The Strewn, the gemwork open-star cluster that ornamented Epiphany's night as though a divine hand had sown seeds plucked from the First Light. Lightning danced among the clouds, green-white, followed by thunder; the air freshened with ozone.

On Old Earth-now shunned, mocked, having turned her back on her progeny—on Old Earth his age would be reckoned at ninety-three. In that time he'd been slave, murderer, outlaw, rebel, and conqueror.

Hated and loved, he'd never quite believed that he deserved either.

Weir had brought along a small sound unit. Almost missing the control in his trembling, he put finger to touchpad. Music surged, sinister but lush and high-flown.

It was the overture to an opera written long ago on Transvaal, a world that Weir had been about to draw into his expanding sphere of influence. A thinly disguised metaphorical tale sponsored by that planet's government, it had been composed by a young genius who'd unleashed his full powers. Weir was portrayed as a kind of Mephistopheles who was defeated in the course of the story.

But Weir took a perverse pleasure in the grand and undisguised majesty of the music, the unrestrainedness of it. The young composer had died in the final battle for his home planet. Weir's forces took over, doing away with the slave trade that had thrived there and executing most of the plutocrats who'd run the place.

He loved the music, though, and was amused by it. He was not as evil as he was often portrayed, he was convinced; nor was he as virtuous.

He longed to stand and stretch, fill his lungs with the charged air, but his body had long since failed him. Perhaps on one of the truly advanced worlds, one that had missed the dark age after the sundering of the old interstellar unity and the end of the Second Breath of humankind, he could have had more years of life. But the new techniques were unavailable within his jurisdiction, and he refused to leave it.

That had left him infirm, wed to the sustaining machines.

Until tonight.

Still, he'd extended his influence, played his part in the great conflicts and struggles that had given birth to the Third Breath of the human race.

"The Third Breath!" It was a labor even to murmur the words, but a joy nonetheless. He loved their sound, he who ruled nineteen star systems and wore an owner's code tattooed into his skin, and a subdural implant that broadcast it.

The Third Breath, no longer being born but passionately alive. Change and growth and light; he welcomed them.
Strange attractors.
A habitual musing came to him as his thoughts wandered.
Strange
attractors …

When Weir realized he was no longer alone, he was half dreaming of a girl he'd known for a brief moment in his youth. Her brown hair, ringlets of it, with its highlights of gold, had flown in the wind of a landing field. Her eyes, black and deep, had reflected the glare of a binary stellar system and held everything else to themselves—at first.

They'd come to love one another. For nearly eighty years, he wondered what had become of her, and never, for all his efforts, had been able to find out.

Then, emerging from his reverie, he saw the figure. Many in Frostpile were waiting with him, waiting for death. This was one such.

He said wearily, "Please go. I want to be—"

"You've altered your last will and testament. Why?"

Although no more than the residual image of his onetime self, muddled with age and pain, Weir was instantly cautious. "It doesn't concern you. No one's business but my own."

The interloper's tone put danger in the air, like the lightning's ozone. "It might be everyone's business, Caspahr. An Earthman. A
Terran
!
What have you bequeathed him? Why are you bringing him here?"

Weir looked up craftily. "You mean 'her,' don't you?"

The figure moved closer. The wind was cold now, the lightning flashes more frequent, the thunder louder. "The cunning hasn't left you, Caspahr." A right hand came up; a glittering pinbeam pistol was pointed at the old man. A left hand exhibited a medical styrette.

Weir almost laughed at those, but hid it; a near-century of experience had made it a reflex to keep his options and advantages hidden as long as possible. He'd been victorious so many times, and on such a scale, that people tended to forget his defeats. Weir never did.

"No," the intruder went on, " 'he' is the correct pronoun. That much I know. What have you given him?"

The pain was growing in Weir again, and he felt a little dizzy. He grunted, shifting in his chair, then gasped with the passing torment of even so minor an effort. He'd been lucky to make it from his bed to the chair.

"You'll be there for the Willreading. You'll find out then," he wheezed.

With a rasp of exasperation, the other stepped closer, the styrette before him. "You'll tell me in any case."

"A memory release?" Weir allowed himself a hacking laugh, forcing it a bit. It devolved into a gargling cough, and the old man tasted blood. It wouldn't be long now.

"Ahh, I see," the dark figure breathed. An injection would be futile, producing only coma or death.

The styrette disappeared, leaving the pinbeam. "But why Earth?
Why
?"

Weir shook his head, almost drunkenly. "Poor Old Terra. Why
not
!" He knew it was a feeble deception. Still wed to his machines, he'd have managed something better, but the music and the approaching thunder were too loud. He was nearly chattering with the cold, and racked with pain. It was growing difficult even to assemble a coherent thought.

I'm only an old man who wants to be left alone!
he thought. But few things in his life had come easily, and he saw now that his death would not.

"I am engaged in locating his name now; I shall have it soon," his unwelcome visitor said. "What I don't understand is your purpose. You've always claimed to despise Earth."

"I hate the Earthservice. I've nothing but pity for Terra itself." He gathered the warm, salty blood in his mouth and spat; in the dark, his enemy didn't see the crimson.
Merciful Fates preserve you,
Functionary Third Class Hobart Floyt!
Weir thought. "I wish Terra well."

But it might not come out well for Floyt, particularly if he were unaware that he had a dangerous enemy moving against him. Weir now regretted the lack of instrumentation in his old chair; no built-in alarms or commo, and the old man had purposely left his own comband behind. He began fumbling with the buttons of the player, shutting off the music, hoping to surreptitiously record something the other said.

But the intruder impatiently took the instrument out of his hands, put it aside, and began adjusting the pistol. The storm was nearly upon them.

Of course. Weir couldn't simply be left; there was the off chance he would live long enough to tell someone that there was an assassin in Frostpile. But the pistol, adjusted to very low power, maximum dispersal, and held close to Weir's failing heart, would fool any but the most exacting coroner, even if there were an autopsy.

Fighting from a corner, as he had so many times before, Weir coldly dismissed any chance of his own survival. Instead he concentrated on the need to leave evidence, somehow, that he hadn't met a natural end. His hand fell on the chair's lift control. The intruder yelled a curse, raised the gun.

The old chair hesitated a bit, rising. Weir waited for a bolt from the pinbeam, which hadn't yet been completely adjusted. A wound from the weapon would serve his purpose; so would the intruder's secreting of his body to conceal the evidence of a violent death. In either case, others would know that an investigation was in order, and that precautions must be taken to safeguard the Inheritors. The old man took the only course of action available to him.

The chair's hesitation gave Weir's foe a chance to leap forward, dropping the pinbeam, grappling. The chair slewed around under their weight. Old, long unused, it sank to kick up tangles of ribbon grass. Then the safeties cut in, and it stalled.

Weir's heart was fluttering in his chest like a dying bird. Blood ran from his nostrils and mouth. His head lolled, then wobbled half erect. His assailant had gathered up the handgun again but held fire, watching the old man.

Weir arched backward in sudden agony. A minute part of him was content that he'd provided as best he could for the well-being of his little realm of nineteen stellar systems. But he also thought,
Poor
Hobart Floyt
!

He seemed to be watching a blinding white light, his torment retreating. Then he passed from life into death.

The intruder felt for a pulse and found none. Weir was slumped in his chair. The storm struck; rain falling in windblown sheets. Frostpile was a luminous white faerie city in the distance.