Empire's End (36 page)

When Kea was only five, his mother disappeared. His father searched, fearing the worst, not sure what the worst meant. And he found his wife—or, rather, found what had happened to her. She had volunteered for a longliner. The elder Richards shuddered, a reaction Kea did not understand for years, until he was able to find some of the declassified accounts of the misery, murder, and insanity that happened on the monstrous sailing ships, even before they were beyond contact in their reach for the stars.

Kea Richards cried a little. Then they told the boy that it did not matter. His mother would be happier, somewhere out there. And they could be happier here. Just the three of them. Two years later, the tsunami struck.

* * *

Kea was climbing a tree when the ocean left. A girl had said that the tree had a coconut, and Kea wanted to see what the fruit looked like. Pollution had killed the native coconut palms decades earlier. He had looped rope between his feet, put a single safety line around the tree trunk, and was shinnying up the palm when he chanced a look out to sea. He gaped. It was as if the tide was going out, except going out in a roar, receding far into Hilo Bay. He had never seen such a sight. There were fish, stranded and flopping in the exposed bottom mire. A wreck of a boat was being turned over and over as the Pacific was sucked away, just as if someone had pulled the plug from a washtub.

Two thousand kilometers at sea, there had been a suboceanic earthquake. The quake set three waves in motion toward the Hawaiian Islands. Each of them was only half a meter in height— but there were a hundred kilometers between wave crests. Instruments sensed the quake. They should have sparked alarms. But there were none shrilling across the city of Hilo when the tsunami struck. The great barriers protecting the Maui Complex and the torchship port slid smoothly into position. There were none around Hilo.

Kea heard screams. Saw people running. Some were running for the waterfront in curiosity, others were running away. Down the street he saw his father. He was shouting for Kea. Kea whistled, and saw his father gesture frantically. Kea obediently started to slide down the tree.

He heard the roar. And the sea returned to Hilo as it had four times in a little more than a century. The ocean floor had slowed the base of the seismic waves and now, as the water shallowed before land, the waves crested. The first wave was not the biggest Kea had seen—his father had taken him to Oahu and shown him the North Shore during a winter storm, and he’d shuddered as the great breakers, as high as ten meters, thundered against the land. This wave was only five meters tall, they said later. But it traveled at a speed of almost eight hundred kilometers per hour.

The first wave shattered the great breakwater as if it had never existed and rolled on, breaking, foaming, destroying. It ripped apart buildings, ships, houses, groundcars, hovercraft, men and women. Ripped them apart and used them as battering rams. The front of the wave was a solid wall of debris. Kea thought he remembered seeing his father try to run, and the wave catch him and their tiny home and diner. But perhaps not.

He woke, a day and a half later, in a charity hospital ward. He had been found by a fishing boat, still lashed to that tree, floating nearly a kilometer out to sea.

No one ever found the bodies of his father and grandmother.

Kea did not end up in an orphanage. An elderly woman appeared at the hospital. Leong Suk. She told the officials that she had once worked for the Richards family, and they had treated her well. Kea did not remember her. Kea went home with Leong Suk that day. She had a small shop on a back street in Kahanamoku City, selling nonperishable groceries and sundries. She and Kea lived upstairs. That first day, she informed Kea what the rules were. He was to be a good boy. That meant he was to keep certain hours and help in the store when she needed him. He was not to give her trouble. She said she was too old to be able to raise a hellion. She did not know what she would do if he was bad. And one more thing. Kea was to learn. That would be the only path out of the slum. She did not care what he became, but he was not going to spend his life in Kahanamoku City. Kea nodded solemnly. He knew she was right. This place had already cost him his entire family. He felt it was trying to kill him, as well.

Kea, already a well-behaved child, gave Leong Suk little trouble—except when it came to school. He came home after two weeks at the local grammar. He was not learning anything. Leong Suk was skeptical. The boy proved it by reciting, chapter by chapter, what his class was supposed to learn during the next quarter. She wondered whom they could find for a tutor. Kea soon ferreted out a likely candidate.

Three streets away was the Lane of the Godmen. Tiny storefronts, each one with a different shaman or priest, each one looking for converts and acolytes. Kea came dashing home, shouting about one. The Temple of Universal Knowledge. A bit bigger than the other hovels—and filled with fiches, microfiches, and piles and piles of books. It even had a battered computer link to the university library.

Leong Suk told the boy they would go to this temple. Inside, it smelled a little musty, a little bad, as did the “priest,” a balding, obsequious man who called himself Tompkins. Yes, he meant what he said. No one could know too much. Only when a being knew All Things could he achieve perfection, and he must study all his life and, if blessed, other lives to come. Then would come translation. He listened to Kea read aloud. Asked him some questions—questions that might have puzzled a secondary-school graduate. Tompkins beamed. Yes, he would happily take Kea as a student. His fee would be… it was astonishingly cheap. Leong Suk saw the way Tompkins was looking at the boy, and told Kea to go outside. She told the man that he was not to preach his religion to the boy. If Kea decided to become a believer… that was as it would be. That was not a problem, the little man smoothed.

One more thing, the old woman said… and Tompkins shrieked slightly, as mother-of-pearl blurred around Leong Suk’s wrinkled hand, and the point of a double-edged butterfly knife touched his chest. “You will never touch the boy,” she said, nearly in a whisper. “You will never
think
about touching the boy. Because if you do… you will wonder why your friend, death, took so long to find you.” Tompkins shuddered… and the knife vanished.

Whether Leong Suk was correct or not, the man was never anything other than a perfectly correct teacher to Kea. In fact, whatever Tompkins’s private desires might have been vanished in his awe, as the boy seemed to effortlessly inhale anything that was put in front of him. He particularly throve on mathematics. Engineering. Physics. All practical, though. He seemed to have little interest in pursuing theories. When he was twelve, Tompkins asked Kea why he seemed less interested—even though he read voluminously—in the social sciences. Kea looked at Tompkins seriously, as if not sure whether to trust the man.

“Hard science is what will get me out of here, mister. Out of here… and up there.” He gestured upward—and it took Tompkins a moment to realize that the gesture swept out, out to the stars themselves.

Richards learned other things. How to make change quickly and efficiently. How to spot snide, and refuse it without making a bother. To speak four, and get along in three others, of the more than twelve languages spoken in his neighborhood. He grew tall, strong, and handsome. His smile, and his blue eyes, brought him other teachers, in other subjects. Some were the giggling girls his own age. Some were young and teenaged. And some had husbands. He learned to look behind all curtains in a bedroom before he took off his pants. He learned how to jump from a second-story balcony and roll-land on the mucky street below without breaking something.

He learned where to hit someone and hurt them worse than you hurt yourself. And, more importantly, he learned when to hit and when not to. Sometimes he needed more than a fist. Sometimes he needed an edge. He learned how to use those things, too. He did not lack teachers. The riot police found it necessary to patrol Kahanamoku City in squads, with gravsleds overhead for backup.

When he was fourteen, Tompkins gave him a series of examinations. He passed them, handily. Tompkins did not tell Kea what they were—but he did inform Leong Suk that the boy had just passed the standard entrance examinations for the Academy of Space on the mainland.

“Should he go there?” Leong Suk wondered. Tompkins shook his head. Even though Kea wanted to go into space, that was not the way. The Academy would fit Richards for the military—and that would be not enough for what he thought Kea was capable of. But he refused to tell her more.

The spaceship was tiny—at least compared to pictures Kea had seen of the longliners that hung off Earth, or the torchships that sat like so many oranges, torches underwater, out beyond the barrier. There was no sign on the ship, nor a special marking on the berth. But Kea knew the
Discovery
was a starship. It was one of the five true starships, and the only one still on Earth. Two others had been scrapped: the others were in mothball orbits off Mars.

The ship’s stardrive was simple. Idiot-proof. A blink—Alpha Centauri. A word—Luyten 726-B. A full sentence—Epsilon Indi. Half a cup of caff—Arcturus. The problem was fuel for that engine. It had made two voyages and was unlikely to make a third. The fuel for each voyage, an exotic synthetic, had taken five full years, a manhattanproject commitment, and the resources of an entire government to synthesize. Even so, the synthetic only let the engine develop half-power. The ship was a freak, like Leonardo’s tank, Lilienthal’s airplane, the
Great East-em
, or the
Savannah
.

Kea stared, hypnotized at its sleekness, dreaming of where it had gone and where it might go again. He left the port at dusk. But he came back again. And again.

Kea was sixteen when Tompkins died. After the morgue crew had left, he and Leong Suk looked at each other. “We must find,” she said firmly, “if he had a family, and communicate with them.” They searched through the ruins and baled papers of a failed man’s life. They found no sign that Tompkins had any friend or loved one anywhere on Earth or the planets. But they found a small antique safe. Leong Suk agonized, but eventually told Kea that perhaps they should open it. Perhaps he knew someone with that skill?

Kea did: himself. An older boy had once shown him. Kea twisted the dial, ear pressed against the door, listening. And he could hear the tumblers fall, just as the other boy had told him he would. Inside, there were two envelopes. One of them contained almost two thousand dollars in new credits, and a will. The money was for Kea. The other contained forms, and exact instructions on how they were to be filled out and who they were to be sent to. The old woman and the boy stared, in that reeking, moldy store. But the instructions were clear.

Kea filled out the forms and sent them off to the named person on the mainland. Within a week, a thick letter came back to him. He was to contact a certain person in Oahu. That person would have him take some tests. Kea followed those orders, too. They waited.

Six weeks after they had decided the whole matter was either a joke or complete madness, another letter came to him. This one was from the Director of Admissions, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena City, Province of California. He was welcomed to the Entering Freshman Class, Fall, A.D. 2182. Kea Richards had won. He would not live, or die, in Kahanamoku City. Now he would be free.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Pasadena, A.D. 2183

KEA SAT ON the edge of Millikan’s Pot, waiting to meet the smart guys. So far, there hadn’t been any. Cal Tech was a rather large disappointment, which he was just now realizing at the beginning of his sophomore year. His freshman year had been a blur of auditorium-sized classes, expensive fiches, loneliness, and work. He’d had little chance to evaluate the world he was now in. The blur had probably been increased by Leong Suk’s death, just before Christmas of 2182. Kea hadn’t been notified of her death until after the funeral.

Cal Tech was just as much a fraud as any of the faiths on Godmen Lane. And like all good swindles, it looked great from the outside. It had more Nobel laureates man even Houston or Luanda—but most of them taught one or two survey courses and perhaps a doctoral-level program with a handful of specially chosen disciples. The school, with more than 25,000 students, was approaching its three hundredth anniversary, and was a soar of the most modern architecture and imagination. About the only buildings left from the “olden days”—before the institute had begun its cancerous expansion, devouring not just a nearby city college but the city’s main center as well—was the fountain he was sitting on, and the nearby Spanish-style Kerkhoff Hall, now used for freshman orientations.

The work, while hard, largely consisted of swotting: rote memorization and regurgitation at periodic examinations. Both of the Theory courses he had qualified for this semester seemed to preach enhancement/modification of the past’s breakthroughs rather than instilling any truly original thought in the students.

He wasn’t so cork-topped that he had expected Cal Tech to be perfect, that it would give him the Secrets of the Ancients. But he had thought the school would have
some
original thinkers, scientists who were looking beyond this system/time’s moil of rote repetition of the past’s errors. Maybe there were sages, he thought, and he was just too damned young and dumb to know who, or where, they were. Yeah. Or maybe the original thinkers had gotten fed up and were teaching offplanet on Ganymede or Mars. If so, why were there so many offworlders going to Cal Tech?

Not that any of Kea’s doubts had shown up in his work—he was holding a flat 4.0 average and had been on the Founder’s List both semesters of the previous year. He was set All he had to do was keep his grades, smile, morale, and genitalia up, and he would be a Twenty-second Century Surefire Success. Which meant, he thought wryly, he would be sucked into one of the super design-plants like Wozniak City and, eventually, if he behaved properly, allowed to put his name on a “particularly elegant” computer path.
Or,
even more dizzyingly, to have a tertiary process in some synthetic industrial plant named after him. Perhaps they would reward him with a two-week, all-expense-paid trip to Nix Olympica. On one of the lesser peaks, of course.