Among the Powers (28 page)

“‘
And can you create a mountain so great that
even you cannot lift it?’ Golrol asked innocently.

“
And Aulden paused, and stared at him, and slowly
a smile spread across his face, and he began to grin, and then to
laugh, and then to roar with laughter.

“‘
Oh, mortal,’ he said, ‘you have me there. I
should have known better than to boast so freely! Of course, I
cannot. I am no true god. I can do many, many things that you
cannot even imagine, but I cannot untangle such a paradox any more
than you can...’”

—
from the tales of Atheron the
Storyteller

When Thaddeus and Geste had vanished through the
doorway Bredon turned back to the prisoners. Lady Sunlight still
showed no sign of interest in him, so he addressed himself to the
group as a whole. “Now what?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do
to help?”

“I don’t know,” replied Sheila—the Lady of
the Seasons, Bredon remembered, the goddess of the weather, who
brought the warm sun in summer and the cold winds in winter.

Except that the woman he saw before him,
although she was healthy and attractive apart from her fading burn,
was just a woman, not a goddess. The Powers were only human, and
their power lay in their technology.

And the seasons had nothing to do with
technology, in any case.

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But I hope
so.”

“I’d like to get you out of those chains,
but I don’t have a key or anything that will cut them.”

“Thaddeus keeps the key with him, I think,”
the small man Bredon had identified as Rawl said.

“Why are you people talking to this savage?”
Madame O whined. “What good can
he
do?”

“Thaddeus obviously doesn’t think he can do
anything at all,” Lady Sunlight said, “but Thaddeus has been wrong
before.”

Bredon felt his pulse quicken as Lady
Sunlight eyed him appraisingly.

“He’s not wrong
this
time,” O
spat.

“Maybe not,” Bredon admitted. “I can try,
though.” He looked around the room, but saw nothing useful. The red
light above the door caught his eye. “Monitor, where is a key for
these chains?” he asked.

The intelligence hesitated. “I am uncertain
whether you are authorized to ask that,” it said at last.

“Why?”

“I have no record of your existence.”

“Monitor,” Sheila demanded, “answer this
man’s question.”

“No,” the intelligence replied at once. “The
prisoner Sheila is forbidden all service beyond stated necessities
and emergency aid.”

Imp looked up from Aulden’s chest for a
moment, then glanced at first Bredon, then Sheila, then back to
Bredon. “Aulden,” she whispered, “Bredon took a lot of imprinting
at Arcade; he’s no technician, but he can run machines. Thaddeus
doesn’t know that, and he didn’t give the machines any orders about
him. What can he do to stop Thaddeus?”

Aulden’s expression slowly lost its
underlying hopelessness as he considered this. He glanced up at the
red light, then motioned silently for Bredon to come closer.

The mortal came and knelt beside the chained
technician.

“I can’t do anything about the machines
Thaddeus designed himself, like Monitor up there,” Aulden
whispered, “but they’re all pretty stupid, because Thaddeus is a
lousy technologist, so most of the fortress is run by intelligences
we brought with us from Terra, or ones I designed for Thaddeus. I
think you can do something with those. Except for Monitor, none of
the machines can hear any of us immortals any more, but they ought
to be able to hear
you
. And Thaddeus doesn’t use purely
biological intelligent systems because he doesn’t trust them, since
they have a habit of turning independent, so you won’t have to
worry about creatures, just machines.”

Lady Sunlight glanced up at the red light
that represented Monitor, and asked, “Aren’t you afraid that that
machine will hear you, and tell Thaddeus?”

“No,” Aulden replied. “You weren’t
listening. Thaddeus told it not to disturb him, with no
qualification. Even if it hears us it won’t tell anyone. It’s a
really stupid machine.”

“What should I do?” Bredon asked
eagerly.

“First,” Aulden told him, “you need the
emergency codes.”

* * *

Two levels and a corridor away, Thaddeus settled
into a grey floating chair and gestured for the Trickster to do the
same.

Geste obliged. Something felt very odd about
the room, and he realized as the chair adjusted itself that no
music was playing.

When both were comfortably seated, Thaddeus
asked politely, “Now, why do you think I should stop my efforts to
rebuild my stolen empire?”

“Because it’s stupid and pointless,” Geste
replied quickly.

“Oh?” Thaddeus’s reply was cool.

“Yes,” Geste said. “Seriously, Thaddeus,
what can you get by ruling an empire that you can’t just buy now,
with what you have? You can have any material possession you could
possibly want; our galaxy is jammed with raw materials and energy,
and all it takes is time and technology to make whatever you
want—food, shelter, clothing, amusements, even women, whatever
creatures you want. What good will an empire do you?”

Thaddeus cocked his head and smiled cruelly.
“Can you really be that naive?” he asked. The smile vanished, and
his voice turned hard. “I can have
power
. I will prove my
superiority to all you young upstarts, with your foolish
egalitarian beliefs and petty social rituals. I’ll get the human
race
organized
again, put an end to all this hedonistic
anarchy.”

“Will you?” Geste asked, almost sneering in
mockery of Thaddeus’s own behavior. “Do you really think you can do
that?”

“Of course I can!” Thaddeus roared back.
“I’m thousands of years older than you, Geste; show a little
respect for your elders. I’m not a manufactured immortal like you,
dependent on machines and symbiotes for longevity—I’m a natural
immortal, a member of a superior race, one of the chosen people. My
family is
destined
to rule over you ordinary humans. I have
a head-start of more than two thousand years on any artificial
immortal, and that two thousand years gives me experience and
knowledge that you can’t even imagine, with your pitiful few
centuries behind you. You’ve lived all your life in pampered
comfort, and you’ve been content with that, but I grew up in harder
times, boy, I saw my mother’s family murdered, my homeland
destroyed, by you normal humans. I’ve lived through wars and
disasters that would frighten you into catatonia, and I’ve learned
from all of it.”

“Have you? Then why did you fail twice
before?”

“Because I was
betrayed
!” Thaddeus
bellowed, rising from his chair, his face red with fury. “I
trusted
people, and they
betrayed
me!”

Geste resisted the impulse to taunt Thaddeus
further. “All right, you were betrayed,” he said quietly. “Doesn’t
that show you that people don’t
want
you to rule them?”

“What the hell do I care what they want?”
Thaddeus asked, as he sank back into his seat. “
I
want it! I
never claimed to be doing this for anyone else!”

Geste abandoned that line and groped for
another.

“You could get killed,” he said. “You don’t
know what’s happened out there these last few centuries. You might
run smack into some sort of interstellar police force, or somebody
else’s empire, and get yourself killed.”

“I’ll risk it,” Thaddeus said. “I don’t
believe it, for one thing; I saw what you decadent babies were
like, and now that you’re all fake immortals, four hundred years
wouldn’t be enough to change that. You people need a thousand years
just to decide what to have for breakfast.”

“But what if some group of short-lifers took
charge, caught someone by surprise...”

Thaddeus stared at him in such open
disbelief that Geste did not bother to finish his question.

“Short-lifers,” Thaddeus said, “are
absolutely harmless. They don’t live long enough to learn anything
dangerous. I’ve survived seven thousand years of the worst
short-lifers can throw at me. If there’s a short-lifer empire out
there, all I have to do is wait for it to fall. It never takes very
long.”

The Trickster was by no means certain
Thaddeus was right about that, but he did not see any sign that
Thaddeus could be swayed by logical argument, and he did not
continue that line of debate. “All right,” Geste said, “let me
think.” He reached up and scratched his ear.

Thaddeus took the opportunity to signal a
housekeeping machine for a drink. He turned to Geste, intending to
play the gracious host and offer the Trickster something, and found
himself staring at a sparkling web of metal in Geste’s hand, a web
he recognized immediately as a stasis field generator, though he
had never seen one so small.

Before he could say anything, Geste
triggered his weapon, and Thaddeus froze into total immobility, a
sphere of air around him freezing with him. The soft light in the
room refracted strangely through the interface between normal air
and the motionless field, and the colors within the field—the red
of Thaddeus’s angry face, the grey of his chair, the black of his
hair, the brown of his clothing—seemed to fade.

As the stasis field reached full intensity
the three-meter globe first turned a dead, flat black, then
brightened to gleaming, reflective silver, as light became first
unable to leave the field, and then unable to enter.

Thaddeus was gone, sealed inside a
mirror-finish bubble of timelessness. The housekeeping machine
carrying his drink, a floating wedge of black with a crystal goblet
embedded in it, bumped futilely against the bubble’s bright,
impenetrable surface.

Geste stared, trembling. He had forced
himself to remain calm while arguing with Thaddeus; he had had his
internal machines and symbiotes under orders to keep him calm, and
a semi-intelligent biochip chanting gently hypnotic reassurance
directly to his audial nerves. He had been as slick and smooth as
anyone could have wanted in pulling the stasis generator from the
bent-space pocket he had built into his ear.

Thaddeus had scanned his guests up and down
the spectrum, checked for every sort of emission imaginable—Geste
had expected as much, and had detected some of the operative
devices with his own internal mechanisms. Thaddeus had blasted them
all with high-speed flashes of high-intensity ultraviolet,
infra-red, and gamma radiation that were too quick to seriously
harm human tissue, but which would fry virtually all
surface-dwelling or air-carried tailored microbes, and would burn
out the metastable energy fields that made up noncorporeal
intelligences—not that they had brought any noncorporeals to
Denner’s Wreck, or had the means to create them. He had doused them
all in chemical suppressants to prevent any sort of
pheromone-assisted psychological assault. He had removed their
clothing and searched it, all the way down to the subatomic
level.

Their symbiotes had been damaged, their own
tissues somewhat damaged as well, and Geste was fairly sure that he
had lost some magnetic memory somewhere, but Thaddeus had been
reassured that he had disarmed his visitors.

However, he had not checked on the shape of
the spaces they occupied.

Even Thaddeus could not think of
everything.

Geste had counted on that. He had never
heard of putting a bent-space pocket into a human body, and he had
hoped that Thaddeus hadn’t either.

Not that that had been his only trick.
Thaddeus had wiped out a wide variety of artificial bacteria and a
few viruses with his disinfectants and ultraviolet, and had
confiscated more than a dozen weapons of various kinds in Geste’s
clothing.

The bent-space pocket had been the
Trickster’s best gimmick, though, and he knew it. People built the
pockets into floaters all the time, but not into themselves; it
seemed somehow unhealthy to put a hole through one’s own body, even
a polyspatial hole that bypassed mere normal-space flesh. For one
thing, an opening was needed. Virtually all the natural openings in
the human body were already spoken for, and creating new holes was
dangerous and unesthetic.

Geste, of course, had been desperate. He had
considered anchoring the pocket to the roof of his mouth, but had
rejected that; he had needed to be able to talk. Instead, he had
sacrificed the hearing in his right ear. He hoped that removing the
pocket and rebuilding his inner ear would not be too difficult.

His trick had worked, and Thaddeus was
captured, and now Geste’s programmed calm had run out. Adrenalin
poured into his blood unregulated by his damaged and panicky
symbiotes. He stood, shaking, as the realization sank in that he
had done it, he had stopped Thaddeus.

A sliver of triumph worked its way through
the numb relief, and then shattered into full-blown gloating. He
had
done
it! Thaddeus was neatly boxed up and out of the
way.

On the heels of exultation came doubt.
Was
Thaddeus boxed up? It seemed too easy, somehow.

Perhaps there were machines that were
programmed to release Thaddeus. Perhaps there were creatures with
orders to kill the prisoners. Geste stepped back and looked about
warily.

“Not bad, Geste,” Thaddeus’ voice said,
speaking from the wall behind him. “Not bad at all.”

Geste turned, telling himself that it was
just a machine, a recording or an artificial intelligence
synthesizing its master’s voice.

“A very nice effort,” the voice said. “But
not enough. No, Geste, I’m not a recording, not a machine. I’m
Thaddeus. The
real
Thaddeus.”

Geste was trembling again, harder than
ever.

“You see,” Thaddeus said, “you only got
one
of me.”