Shadow's End (3 page)

She was suddenly intrigued. “Oh, yes. Leelson's great-grandpop. One of the greatest of all Fastigats, to hear Leelson tell it. A genius, a biochemist.”

“Do you remember the name Tospia?”

Lutha smiled. “Bernesohn's longtime lover. A Fastiga woman, of course.” She frowned. “A diva in solo opera. Leelson played some of her sensurrounds for me. Very nice, though I think the senso-techs were owed as much credit as Tospia herself. To my taste, one person's performance sensed six times, however differentiated and augmented, does not have the interactive passion of six separate actors. I've yet to experience one that has true eroticism.”

The Procurator peered at her over the rim of his cup. “But Leelson never mentioned Bernesohn and the Ularians?”

She gave the question to her subconscious, which came up empty. “I recall no connection.”

He settled himself with a half-muffled groan. “I beg your patience:

“A century ago, there were twelve human populations
on planets in Hermes Sector. Eleven of these were only settlements, six of them homo-normed, the other five at the survey stage. The twelfth world, Dinadh, had a planetary population. Dinadh is a small world, an unimportant world, except that it is near us in a spaciotemporal sense, though not in an astrophysical one. Everything into and out of Hermes Sector, including information, routes through Dinadh and did, even then.

“So, it was customary for freighters to land there, whether going or coming, and one did so a century ago, bringing the news that two of the settlements in Hermes Sector had vanished. Prime sent six patrol ships carrying investigative teams; two ships returned with news of further vanishments; the other four did not return. We sent more men to find the lost men—frequently a mistake, as in this case. None of them returned. Dinadh's government, such as it is, refused to consider even partial evacuation, which would have been the best we could do. Evacuating a populated planet is impossible. There aren't enough ships to keep up with the birthrate.” He sighed.

“And?” she prompted.

“Dinadh is the only occupied planet of its system, the only one suitable for occupation. The Alliance did the only thing it could think of, englobing the system with unmanned sentinel buoys. We might as well have done nothing, for all the good it did. No one came out of the sector toward Dinadh. Every probe we sent into the sector from Dinadh simply disappeared.

“Ten standard years went by; then twenty, then thirty. Planets applying for colony rights were sent elsewhere. Then, thirty-three standard years after the crisis, the sentinal buoys picked up a freighter crossing the line
from
Hermes Sector into Dinadhi space! The holds were stuffed with homo-norm equipment. The crew claimed they had found it abandoned and therefore salvageable, after falling into Hermes Sector accidentally, through a
rogue emergence. Later we checked for stellar collapse and found an enormous one about the right time—”

“Stellar collapse?”

“The usual cause of rogue emergences is stellar collapse. The dimensional field twitches, so to speak. Things get sucked in here and spat out there. Well, the crew was brought here, and more questions were asked. It turned out they'd picked up equipment from four worlds in the sector and had noticed nothing at all inimical. We sent volunteer expeditions to investigate. All of them returned shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads. Nothing. No sign of what had happened to the human population thirty-odd years before, and no signs of aliens at all. We assumed the Ularians, whatever they or it had been, had departed.”

“So there were no survivors?” mused Lutha.

He shook his head. “Oh, we looked, believe me! We had no information about Ularians, no description of them, no actual proof that they existed, which gratified the Firster godmongers, you may be sure, for they'd claimed from the beginning there were no such things as Ularians. Since government is always delicately poised vis-a-vis godmongers, we were extremely interested in what survivors might tell us, but we never found a thing in Hermes Sector. Oh, there were some children who turned up on Perdur Alas around twenty years ago, but they were probably emergence castaways also.”

“Unlikely they'd have been there for eighty years. They'd have had to be third or fourth generation.”

“Quite right. All this is mere diversion, however.”

“You started by asking me about Bernesohn Famber,” she said impatiently.

“The
relevant
fact is that Bernesohn Famber was on one of the ships that went into Hermes Sector right after the vanishments.”

“One of the lost ships.”

“No! One that came back. Bernesohn was erratic and
secretive. A genius, no doubt, but odd. Sometimes he didn't appear outside his quarters for days and days. His colleagues didn't expect to see him regularly, so they didn't realize he was gone! When the ship got back here, they didn't have any idea where or when he'd gone. We couldn't find him.”

The Procurator leaned back in his chair. “Imagine our discomfiture sometime later when we learned he was living on Dinadh.”

“How did you find that out?” Lutha asked.

“Well, a year or so after Bernesohn disappeared, Tospia, his longtime companion, gave womb-birth to twins. In Fastiga.”

Lutha knew where Fastiga was. It might be called a suburb of Prime. Leelson's mother lived there.

The Procurator went on. “Tospia's twins were entered in the Famber lineage roster, but nobody at Prime made the connection.”

She said impatiently, “You intend to make the point, I presume, that the twins were conceived after Bernesohn's disappearance?”

The Procurator assented. “Years later a sensation sniffer for one of the newslinks did a so-called biography of Tospia—unauthorized, need I say—in which he alleged that Bernesohn Famber could not have fathered the twins. Tospia threw a memorable and widely publicized tantrum and sued the sniffer for misprision of media freedom, asserting that Bernesohn had been living on Dinadh and that she had visited him there.”

The Procurator set down his cup and went on:

“Enormous consternation, as you might imagine! Alliance officers were sent to Dinadh immediately to debrief Bernesohn about the Ularians.”

“And?”

He shrugged, mouth downturned. “And the Dinadh planetary authorities turned them all away, saying that Bernesohn had bought a hundred-year privacy lease, that
even though he was no longer at his leasehold, his lease was still in effect and no one could be admitted but family members, thank you very much. His ‘family members' were notably uncooperative, and since our only reason for questioning Bernesohn was the Ularian threat, which was seemingly over, we couldn't demonstrate compelling need. In the absence of compelling need, we had no authority to invade a member planet, and that's what it would have taken.”

He nodded to himself, then resumed in a thoughtful voice: “Of course, we drew what inferences we could. We assumed Bernesohn had gone there because he expected to find something on Dinadh, but if he'd come up with anything useful, he hadn't told Prime about it.”

“You said he was no longer at his leasehold?”

He sighed, turning his cup in his hands. “All Dinadh said about the matter was that they ‘had welcomed him as an outlander ghost.'”

“Which means?”

“We presume it means he died. And there the matter has rested until now….” His voice trailed off disconsolately.

“But?”

“But, now they're back.”

Lutha stared at him, disbelieving. “The Ularians?”

He nodded, swallowed, shredded the finan-skin napkin between his fingers. “Almost a hundred standard years! Why not fifty years ago? It was then Prime decided it was safe to open up Hermes to colonization once more. There are three populated worlds and several colonies in there; there are homo-norm teams on half a dozen other worlds, and survey teams everywhere worthy of survey.”

“And?”

“And two of the colonies are gone. Like last time.”

Lutha turned away from his distress, giving herself time to think, holding her cup over the table and feeling it
grow heavier as it was filled with tea by an almost invisible shadow.

“What has all this to do with Leelson?” she asked.

“Now we're desperate to know whatever Bernesohn Famber knew. As long as Bernesohn's privacy lease has any time to run, however, the only people Dinadh will allow to poke about among Bernesohn's belongings are family members. Family is a very big thing on Dinadh. Since Leelson is descended from Bernesohn, Leelson is Bernesohn's ‘family,' so far as the Dinadhi are concerned.”

Now Lutha understood what they were asking of her. “You need Leelson, but Leelson has disappeared.” She tapped her fingers, thinking. “Did you think I might know where Leelson is? Or did you have some idea the Dinadhi would accept me as Leelson's ‘family'?”

“I don't think you know where Leelson is, no. I know the Dinadhi will accept you as family. You are Leelson's wife as they define wife.”

When Lutha told me this, I laughed. It was true, in a way. She was Leelson's wife as we on Dinadh define wife. Some of the time.

“Because we were lovers?” she asked him.

“Because you bore his child,” the Procurator said.

She felt the blood leave her face, felt it drain away to disclose a familiar sorrow, an endless ache. “My son is a private matter.”

He sighed. “Believe me, Lutha Tallstaff, under other circumstances I would not challenge your privacy. The Ularians give us no choice. Do you remember Mallia Stentas? From Keleborn?”

Lutha answered distractedly, “We were at upper school together. She became a manager for some agricultural consortium….”

“You may mourn her now—she and her lifemates and all their many children—gone from Tapil's World. And the people on Updyke-Chel. They are not merely dead,
but dust in the wind, vanished and gone, no stone to mark the place they were. Whatever the Ularians may be, when they come upon a world, they leave behind no monuments….”

He stood, walked across the room to the wall retriever, and flicked it into life. “Tapil's World,” he murmured. “Beamed by our recorders.”

An empty town materialized before them. Everywhere evidence of interruption. A doll lying abandoned by a fence. A child's wagon, half-full of harvested vegetables, standing at the side of a fenced garden. A sun hat caught in a thorny shrub. A fuzzy native animal—either useful for something or a neutered pet, as it would not have escaped homo-norming otherwise—hopping slowly along a hedge, crying plaintively. Kitchens with food half-prepared, rooms with tables still littered, desks still piled. The probe came down over one desk, focusing on a holo that stood there. Herself. Mallia and herself, young scholars, arms around one another, grinning into eternity.

“Damn you,” Lutha said without heat.

“I want you to feel it,” he admitted. “It could be your house. It could be you, and your son. It could be all humanity.”

During our time together, Lutha described his voice, full of a sonorous beauty, like the tolling of a funeral bell. He was working Fastigat stuff on her, wringing her emotions like a wet towel, making her all drippy. Leelson had done that from time to time, worked Fastigat stuff on her, though he had done it for their mutual pleasure.

“Nothing like a romantic moon,” she told me. “A little wine, and a silver-tongued Fastigat to make the worlds move.”

“It does not take wine or a Fastigat to move the world,” I told her, thinking of my own love.

“I am relieved to hear it,” she said then, laughing as she wept. We had then a good deal of reason to weep.

But even then, during her meeting with the Procurator,
she thought all that Fastigat stuff unnecessary. The memory of Mallia alone wrung her quite enough.

So, she took a deep breath and said to this old, conniving man: “You want me to go to Dinadh, is that it?”

The Procurator nodded. “We want someone to go, and the only people they will allow are Leelson, his mother, or you. Leelson's mother has refused to go. Leelson himself, we can't find. That leaves you. You're already proficient in basic Nantaskan. Dinadh speaks a dialect of Nantaskan. And I'll send a Fastigat with you.”

“Please. No,” she cried.

He reached toward her, pleadingly. “Lutha. Please. We'll pick someone who isn't … intrusive. Someone tactful.”

She snorted.

“Some Fastigats can be,” he said in an offended tone.

“The Dinadhi will allow me a companion?” She sneered. “Someone nonfamily?”

“If he goes as your assistant or servant, yes. You'll need some such to help with your son. You'll have to take the boy.”

She laughed again, this time incredulously. “You're joking, of course.” He knew how ridiculous the idea was. Even the invigilators who had summoned her to this meeting had been aware of the problem Leely presented. They'd brought a whole crèche team with them to take care of Leely while she was away.

He shook his head at her, leaning forward to pat her knee, an avuncular gesture. “Believe me, Lutha, I wouldn't ask it if it weren't necessary. The Dinadhi won't accept you without the boy.”

“You expect me to drag a child across half a dozen sectors to…” This child, she said to herself. This particular child, with his particular problems.

“Spatiotemporally, it's not half a dozen sectors,” he told her. “I wish it were, quite frankly. We'd be safer!”

She made herself relax, slowly picked up the cup once more, finding it fresh, steaming hot. “Will you go?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?” she grated. “If I don't go, you'll—”

“Nothing,” he assured her. “Really nothing. We have the power to compel you, but compelling you would be useless. We need your willing, intelligent cooperation. It's up to you whether you give it or not.”