The Thrones of Kronos (42 page)

Presently the door sloonched open, and Vi’ya and the Eya’a
entered, Vi’ya with her hair hanging loose, her clothing torn in places, and
bruising smudging her dark skin. She glanced toward the console.

Sedry said, “’S off.”

“A hole opened up in that wall,” Lokri said quickly. “Anaris
popped through. After it was over, he got up, said he’d talk to you later—’not
here’ was what he said—and he put his hand on the wall, like this, and it
opened, and he left.”

Vi’ya glanced up at the wall, then turned to watch the Eya’a
move into their chamber. “So telekinesis is his Chorei gift,” she said.

“Can we use it?” Marim asked.

Vi’ya gave her head a negative twist. “Eusabian knows.”

Marim made a noise of disgust and flung herself onto her
bed, her back toward them.

“New area of the station opened,” Vi’ya said. “Eusabian
wants the experiments stepped up.”

“Can you do it?” Lokri asked.

Vi’ya glanced at the back wall, then at Marim’s curly head.
“It is not a matter of whether,” she said, “but how. And when. The station is
waking on its own, which constrains us in time.”

Alarm flared through Jaim at all this news, and he saw the
same reaction in the widening of Lokri’s eyes. In spite of Barrodagh’s
promises, they suspected that Eusabian would dispense with them if the station
energized on its own. Then there was the different threat in the fact that
Norio Danali was not the missing member of the Unity. He never had been. Anaris
was the eighth—which explained, in part, the terrible nightmares Ivard had had
on Ares.

And didn’t he say once
that Vi’ya had also dreamed of Anaris? Though she has never said so.

More questions roiled through Jaim’s mind.

Vi’ya’s black gaze was like a blow. She trod through the
door to the Eya’a chamber.

Montrose and Sedry had fallen into low-voiced converse.
Lokri went to get Ivard some water.

Jaim rose and followed Vi’ya into the bare, chilly little
room where the Eya’a were housed. Already they had curled into balls, their
breathing slowing, frigid air from the hissing vents ruffling their white fur.
The door sucked shut behind them.

“Anaris is the last member of the Unity,” he said.

She gave a short laugh and watched her breath cloud and
dissipate. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

Jaim considered that and said, “Will you tell him about the
Unity?”

“No. If he thinks it happened by accident, he will be
intrigued—and possibly more cooperative in exploring the possibilities.”

Jaim nodded slowly. “Whereas foreknowledge indicates a
conspiracy. But what about the Kelly?”

“The weak point,” she said. “It all depends on how well he
got to know any Kelly while he was living on Arthelion. I will tell him that
our trinity is part of my crew and is hiding on board the
Telvarna
lest Eusabian discover them and treat them as he did their
Archon. If he does not know any Kelly, possibly he can be led to infer that
they are silly, shy, weak creatures who also happen to have a telepathic gift. If
he thinks that my telepathic gift is enhanced solely through the Eya’a, perhaps
he will lose interest in the Kelly and leave them unmolested on the ship.”

Jaim nodded, drew in a deep breath. “What happened?” he
asked. “In Anaris’s room. With you.”

“Nothing. And nothing will, unless I choose.”

Once more he sensed her putting up a wall between them.
Because they were alone, and she was tired, he did not stop. “Why should there
be a choice at all?”

“To hide our conspiracy. To test the limits of his
alliance—and his enmity.”

He crossed his arms, letting her feel the depths of his
skepticism.

Her lips curved in an unpleasant smile. “To pass the time.”

Jaim remembered the Karusch-na Rahali, and how Vi’ya would
be bombarded constantly with the overriding emotions of lust, greed, anger, and
under it all, fear. It must be, he reflected, like trying to live one’s life in
the midst of a shouting mob.

But he knew she was capable of forcing it all from her
consciousness—as she had on Ares. But would she?

“Why should you pass the time with an enemy?” he asked.

“Not out of friendship,” she said. “Or shared interest or
experience. Not out of affection or kindness.” Her tone warned him that this
was as much of the subject as she wished to discuss.

“Why?”

She looked up at him, and her eyes narrowed.

He stood his ground, glaring back. To try to forget Brandon?
To revert to her origins as an exorcism of inconvenient emotions? A symbolic
snap of the fingers in Eusabian’s face? Any reason he could offer would only be
a part of the truth, and thus none of it. But his instincts warned him that she
was on the cusp of a lifetime of trouble if she pursued this path.

“An excess,” she said finally, “of energy.”

Jaim stepped further into the freezing room and laughed. He
was no longer cold; danger, and more complex emotions that had nothing to do
with danger, sent hot blood coursing through his body.

“You’re a fool,” he said deliberately, and slapped her
across the face.

Though the Hand of Telos had pointed Eloatri onto a new
path, old habits stayed with her. Finishing her meditations, she drew three
cleansing breaths and rose to her feet. One hand reached absently for her
begging bowl, and as awareness conquered habit, she touched the Digrammaton
hanging round her neck.

It was time to journey to the next cusp.

She stepped onto the trans-tube, moving around knots of
laughing, talking people.

It seemed as if everyone on Ares was either at a party, on
the way to a party, or had vanished to celebrate—or commiserate—in privacy the
imminent departure of the last of the Fleet.

The Jehan Gardens were nearly deserted. Soft air currents
carried the sound of distant laughter, like the cawing of seabirds. Eloatri
walked down to the discreet double doors for what she knew would be the last
time.

Within was what had become a familiar and glorious
geometry—a mandala of light and glass and endless water—that on her first visit
she had found fractured, the use of light and illusion antithetical to the harmony
and peace of Desrien.

But she had set herself a task, and gradually had come to
regard her first impression as ignorant, even wrong. For her daily visits to
the Whispering Gallery had vouchsafed her an insight into Douloi consciousness
that years of study could not have matched.

Those fractures had gradually appeared to symbolize the
fissures in Panarchic society. She now saw the Whispering Gallery as a gestalt
on its own; there was even a kind of synchronicity to the random voices and
fragmentary conversations one heard.

One thing she knew: everyone who came here, even if only for
a short time, was a pilgrim.

But the one who had organized it was a seeker in spiritual
mendicancy just as much as Eloatri had been those long years on Desrien,
wandering dusty roads with bare feet, begging for meals, and seeking answers
through meditation and discussions.

For long weeks Eloatri had watched in silence as Vannis
Scefi-Cartano wove a vast web around Brandon Arkad, using as threads a
complicated tangle of conviction, obligation, barter, subtle innuendo, and
smiling request. Eloatri was not certain how—she suspected it had to do with
the novosti connection—but soon, very soon—within hours, perhaps—Vannis would
activate her connection and that web would become a trap, forcing the Panarch
to stay behind on Ares while others carried his war to the enemy.

This weaving had required unceasing labor to complete, and
still each day at the hour of five, Vannis had found the time—and the
excuses—to come to this place and listen to the accumulated wisdom of her
peers.

Eloatri strongly suspected that Vannis had as yet to find an
answer and that she would come a final time.

And she knows that I
will be here, waiting.

Eloatri looked down the pristine glass pathway which, by a
trick of the mirrors down one side, seemed to stretch into infinity. No voices
whispered on the cool air currents; there was no sound but her own steps and
the distant plash of fountains.

She took a deep breath and began to sing.

Her voice, echoing from the smooth glass, sounded scratchy
and old and not particularly melodic, but this did not matter.

The plainchant she had sung every visit since she found out
the subject was love would suffice as a beacon.

“If I speak in
the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,

I am a noisy gong
or a clanging cymbal . . .”

Eloatri knew that Vannis would find her. She herself had
come to see this complex as a gestalt, but there was a level of awareness even
more encompassing than that. Anyone who could walk into a room and instantly
assess all the details of hangings, furnishings, clothing, poses, and voices,
had probably an internal map of the Whispering Gallery second only to the
architect’s.

“And if I have
prophetic powers,

and understand
all mysteries and all knowledge,

and if I have
all faith, so as to remove mountains,

but have not
love,

I am nothing.

If I give away
all I have,

and if I
deliver my body to be burned,

but have not love . . .”

A blue flicker in one of the mirrors heralded the appearance
of Vannis, wearing layers of sky-colored draperies, her hair bound up by a
coldly gleaming diamond clasp.

Eloatri folded her hands.

“Why,” Vannis said in her perfectly modulated, musical
voice, “are you doing this?”

“The context here is love,” Eloatri murmured.

Anger glowed along the molded cheekbones. “Don’t mock me.”

Eloatri opened her hands. “It is the truth.”

Vannis inclined her head and gestured with polite irony.

“I am not a spy,” Eloatri said. “I observe, and if asked I
share my observations.”

Vannis made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “Either you or
one of your minions has been here every day, always the hour that I am here, always
singing that same piece. I know it’s aimed at me. Why?”

“The plainchant is thousands of years old, my child,”
Eloatri said, pressing her palms together. “The subject seemed appropriate to
your fifth-hour discourse, and numerous interesting conversations have been
fostered by its addition.”

The jewels at Vannis’s throat glittered with her suppressed
breathing.

“There is wisdom in the words of our ancestors, don’t you
think?” Eloatri went on. And, clearing her throat, she sang:
‘Love is patient and kind; Love is not
jealous or boastful; It is not arrogant or rude—’”

“Is this not an oxymoron, religion and love?” Vannis’s voice
cut across the ancient melody.

“‘Love does not insist
on its own way; It is not irritable or resentful—’”

“What,” Vannis’s voice sharpened, “‘wisdom’ could a monk
offer on the subject—a monk four thousand years dead?”

“‘It does not rejoice
at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, Believes all
things, Hopes all things, Endures all things . . .’”

Eloatri stopped for breath. Vannis waited, her eyes narrowed,
her brow tense from emotions now close to the surface.

Eloatri said gently, “Do you really believe that sexual
congress confers wisdom? Or that those who choose celibacy do not have the
minds to perceive or hearts to feel?”

Vannis said nothing.

“The thing I cannot know,” Eloatri continued, “which is the
commingling of two into a union that is wholly neither but the best of both, is
a thing you will never know if you persist in mistaking possession for love.”

“What do you mean by that?” Vannis whispered.

“I have been watching you from a distance ever since the day
we saw the Rifters arrive at the Suneater,” Eloatri said. “I have seen you
fashion a net around the Panarch in order to force him into an action against
his will. Into every fiber of that net is woven your intelligence, your will,
and your abilities, but it is not motivated by love.”

“It is love.” The whisper was barely audible.

“It is not love,” Eloatri said. “And it will not be with
love that he cuts himself free.”

Vannis turned away as if to leave, then turned back, her
skirts whirling softly at her feet. “Are you threatening me?”

“Of course not, my child,” Eloatri said. “I have not spoken
to him on this subject, nor will I. However, do you really believe he does not
know what you have been doing? What else was all that pomp and circumstance
over the welcome of the Rifter triumvir but a warning—a gesture of
generosity—to you?”

Vannis again made that dismissive gesture. “It was political
expedience.”

Eloatri shook her head. This time she abandoned the plainchant
and spoke the words: “‘Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away;
As for tongues, they will cease; As for knowledge, it will pass away . . .’”

“I heard that, once, when I was small.” Vannis’s hands
gripped each other with white-knuckled force. “I remember what comes next:
‘When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned
like a child.’ What are you telling me, that my actions are that of a child?”

“I have a message for you,” Eloatri said, and now, despite
her own control, her heart accelerated its beat.

The jewels trembled in Vannis’s hair.

“The ships mustering in bring up to date various parts of
the Net. I have communicated with Desrien. One of my messages was an answer to
an inquiry I sent to your mother. Her answer is what you have been hearing
every day for all these weeks.”

Vannis’s lips whitened.

“‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, But then face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully
understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; But the greatest of these
is love.’”