Emprise (22 page)

“Director!”

“Show a little of the wisdom your age implies,” Rashuri said tiredly. “I have had to make promises to get us here. I am obliged now to keep them, or our fragile harmony will be destroyed.”

“But a single scientist!”

“Be grateful you have that. If I could, I would send a musician, a poet, an athlete, a woman with child, a philosopher—I might not find room for a scientist at all. But the days when I could act according to the dictates of logic or my conscience are long past. Don’t you realize that if others had their way, we would be sending a warship or a titanium temple? As it is, Tai Chen will send a soldier, Cooke a priest—and you must content yourself with a single scientist.”

Driscoll scowled. “That makes three. What about the fourth?”

“The fourth will be someone whom I hope will speak for all of us. Someone whom I hope has in him something of the best in us. I did everything I could to see that he was prepared… Benjamin, I began this knowing that I would not be there when it ended. Would you deny me the right to send my son in my stead?”

The name of the Star Rise vehicle was announced a week later. Rashuri first thanked all those who participated and revealed that the name would be inscribed on the starship’s hull in every living language. But the actual announcement was made by playing the recording of the nomination, which showed a short-haired black girl who smiled nervously before beginning.

“My name is Jobyna. My family lives in Emali, near the railroad, but I go to the Von Neumann Institute in Nairobi. I’m fourteen. I think we should call the ship
Pride of Earth
, because I think we have a lot to be proud of—our beautiful planet and all the good people on it and the things that we know how to do. I think I was born into the best species in the best place anywhere, and I want the Senders to know that when we go to meet them.”

“The great struggle of life is not between good and evil, but between differing ideas of good.”

—Devaraja Rashuri,
Days of Pangaea

“Pawn to King Four.”

The brown-skinned, round-faced boy propped his chin on his hands and anxiously scanned the chessboard. Finally he reached out and pushed a pawn forward, then looked up uncertainly.

“Call your move,” Rashuri said harshly. “You’ll never learn the board if you don’t.”

“P-pawn to, uh, King Four,” stammered Charan.

“Bishop to Queen’s Bishop Four.”

Charan wrinkled his brow and studied the board.

“Come now, how much time do you think we have?” asked Rashuri. “Sorry, sir,” said Charan, hurriedly reaching out to move a piece. “Pawn to—ah, Queen’s Knight Three.” Rashuri made his move with assurance. “Queen to Rook Five.”

Scratching his nose, Charan leaned forward. After a moment’s consideration, he reached toward the right side of the board.

“Best look to protect your King’s Pawn,” Rashuri said quietly.

Charan looked to the center of the board. “Okay. Knight to Queen’s Bishop Three.”

Rashuri moved as though pouncing. “Queen takes pawn, checkmate,” he declared.

Crestfallen, Charan stared at the board, then angrily swept a dozen of the carved wooden chessmen onto the floor with his hand. “You tricked me!”

Rashuri smiled slightly. “No, Charan. I taught you a valuable lesson. Never let your opponent dictate your play—either your pace or your strategy, in chess or any other part of life. No matter how much they smile nor how friendly they seem, an opponent wants only one thing: to defeat you. Remember that.”

“I’ll remember,” Charan said sullenly.

“Remember, too, that if you are defeated, there is no profit in anger. You cannot blame your opponent for wanting what he wants. You can only blame yourself for allowing him to have it. Now—pick up the pieces and set up the board.”

His face flushed by the humiliation he felt, Charan complied. When he was finished, he looked to his father, who nodded grudging approval.

“I will be away for several days, in Geneva for a conference,” Rashuri said, rising from his chair. “I expect you will practice against Priya and Shantikumar. We will play again when I return, and see if you have learned enough to defeat me.”

Charan had a sense of foreboding on seeing Kantilal, his bodyguard, approaching in the hallway between classes. Until a few months ago, Kantilal had been a constant and unwelcome presence, hampering Charan’s efforts to make friends and embarrassing him before his peers. At long last, Charan had persuaded Kantilal to exercise his vigilance in the main lobby during classes. The sight of him now meant that something had broken the routine.

“Your father wishes to see you right away, Charan.”

“I have another class.”

“Your father is a busy man. You must make allowances.”

Charan sighed resignedly. “I’ve got to get my things.”

Once at his father’s office, Charan was kept waiting twenty minutes before he was allowed to enter. “You sent for me, sir?”

“Yes, Charan, come in. Close the door behind you.” Rashuri eyed the school blazer his son wore. “A profitable day, I trust?”

“Yes, sir. I’m working hard at my studies.”

“So you say,” said Rashuri, crossing his arms on his chest and leaning back in his chair. “I have been looking for a new school for you, one which will allow you to achieve the most that you are capable of. I am happy to tell you that my search has been successful.”

“I don’t need another school,” Charan quickly protested. “I can learn everything I need to where I am.”

“That is not so,” said Rashuri, wagging a finger at his son. “The world is changing. There are more important things than knowing the particulars of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms or the birthdate of Nehru. You must study mathematics, engineering, languages, psychology.”

“I like what I’m doing now.”

“You like what’s easy and resent being reminded that you tend toward laziness. I will not accept that in you. You will have challenges and you will learn to relish them.”

“Where is this school?’

“In London, England. You will spend two years there—”

“You want me to go to a
British
school?”

“In Britain, but not British. A new school. A Pangaean school.”

“But
Britain
. I’ll never see Priya or Shantikumar. I’ll be the only Hindu there. I won’t have any friends.”

“As many friends as you have time for, you will find.”

“I don’t want to go,” Charan said grimly. “It isn’t right. I have friends here. I like my school. I like what I’m studying.”

Rashuri glowered at him. “You speak as if all that matters is that you should be kept amused. Listen, Charan, and listen well.

“You are a link in an unbroken chain of life stretching back three billion years. In a very strange and profound sense, you have been alive not since your birth but since the beginning. Whether the gods or nature forged the first link or whether those are simply two words for the same idea is trivial beside the sweep of biologic history that allowed for your existence.

“In this wondrous present the weight of responsibility falls more heavily on some than on others, Charan. You have been gifted with a strong body and a keen mind, and you were born into a family of influence in a time of opportunity. Your responsibilities are very great, indeed.

“You will study what I ask, where I ask, and you will excel, or I will know the reason why. Great deeds await you, and your name will be remembered longer than my own—if you do not fail me.”

Thoroughly cowed, Charan lowered his head and mumbled, “Yes, Father. I apologize for my selfishness. I’ll go to Britain for you.”

“Not for me,” Rashuri said, exasperatedly. “Not for me, or there’s no point. For yourself.”

“Yes, Father. For myself.”

It was Moraji, fretting over security, who suggested that Charan go to Tsiolvoksky not as the Chairman’s son but as Pradeep Saraswathi, a Telugu youth from Madras. The idea found favor with both Rashuri and Charan, though for different reasons.

“This will assure that your wits, rather than favoritism, will ‘ determine your success,” Rashuri told his son. “No one will hesitate to criticize you for fear of offending the Chairman.”

“Does this mean that Kantilal isn’t going with me?” Charan asked hopefully. Moraji answered. “We will trust to Tsiolkovsky’s normal security and to the deceptions we employ here.”

“Then I agree. It’s not easy being the Chairman’s son. I’ll enjoy being an ordinary student for once. Only—”

“Whatever name you go by, I expect you to be more than ‘ordinary,’ ” Rashuri said warningly. “I know. You didn’t let me finish. I want to choose my own name.”

Moraji asked, “What name would you prefer?”

“Tilak Charan.” He looked to his father. “Do you know why?” he said challengingly. “It is dangerous to keep the same name—” started Moraji. “I’ll use it as a surname. It’s common enough that no one will question it, particularly not the British.” He looked expectantly at his father.

“I have no objection.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Charan, bowing slightly.

“I have not answered your question. The most famous Tilak, of course, was the publisher of
Kesari
—the Hindu Thomas Paine, thorn in the side of the viceroys. Do you think to cast yourself in his mold?” asked Rashuri.

“I suppose Jawaharlal would object if I did.”

“He would not be alone in that,” said Rashuri sharply. “Use the name as a silent symbol of protest if you must. But remember always that you are there for something far more important than avenging some affront you took to heart while reading your histories.”

The two years at Tsiolkovsky passed with lightning speed, and not unpleasantly. Charan got on well enough with his dormitory roommate Les, a youth from Manchester whose yearning to fly led him to decorate the wall with photographs of improbably futuristic aircraft he called
Concorde
and
SR-71
.

For a time, he enjoyed a largely chaste romance with a new student who appeared one day in his Structure of Information Systems class. Gwynne was an irrepressible Swede who had the good taste to find Charan’s wry jokes amusing and the self-confidence not to fawn coquettishly the way so many English girls seemed prone to.

The cultural mores of India had allowed little opportunity for the kind of casual fumblings and fondlings Les so triumphantly shared with him, and his own sense of being culturally displaced combined with his inexperience to keep his relationship with Gwynne on an intellectual plane. Les insisted that was a mistake, and warned Charan that he stood to lose Gwynne if he didn’t warm up.

“She expects it,” Les said knowingly. “She’ll be insulted if you don’t.”

But the eventual point of departure was Gwynne’s unrelenting enthusiasm for being where she was and doing what she was doing. “I am in the best possible place at the best possible time and taking part in the most exciting things possible,” she said fervently one night as they sat together, looking out at the lights of London from the roof of the Institute’s classroom building.

Her feeling was deep, sincere, and self-re warding, and Charan was embarrassed that he could not match it. Though only he was aware of it, it was as though a yawning gulf had opened up between them. Finding he had no heart to pretend an enthusiasm he did not feel, he abruptly stopped seeing her. It came as something of a blow that Gwynne did not seek him out for an explanation. Les took it as proof that he had been right.

Charan was not devoted to his studies, but he was at least dutiful, and on that basis alone became known in several departments as a student with outstanding potential. Untapped potential was what it remained, since Charan’s special multidisciplinary program allowed him to become conversant with all fields but master of none. In an institution of budding specialists, he was condemned to be a generalist, and more than once wondered why. But there was no answer to that one except that Rashuri wanted it, and Charan tried to think of Rashuri as little as possible.

Which meant of course that he thought of him daily.

As the second year wore on, the novelty of Tsiolkovsky, more important to Charan than the others, began to wear thin. He had no research projects of his own and could make only trivial contributions to others’ projects. He knew all he cared to about the limited range of subjects offered at Tsiolkovsky, and hungered for something which would possess him as so many others seemed to be possessed.

His roommate Les was one such: wrapped up with some aspect of a hydrogen-fluorine engine, he never seemed to have time that second year for a game of chess, or perhaps it was that Charan had begun to beat him consistently. For want of something better to do and because he knew Les better than anyone, Charan spent his free research blocks with the Power Technology team as an overqualified and occasionally sulky gofer.

Presently he became aware that what he found objectionable about remaining at Tsiolkovsky was that there was nothing there for individuals. Synergy was the organizational byword. Tsiolkovsky’s teacher-researchers encouraged independent thinking but interdependent action. Even the rumor that all the research projects were somehow connected to the building of a starship was not enough to coax him into real involvement. He had taken what he could from Tsiolkovsky and had discovered he had nothing to give back.

“It’s time to move on,” he told Les.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why exactly are you here?”

“At my father’s request.”

“What would you rather be doing?”

“I don’t know that, either. Not this, anyway.”

“They’re not keeping you here, are they? Why don’t you just leave?” As an afterthought, he added colloquially, “It’d make room for a sharpie with some fire. Even with Croyden open now up north, there’s more that wants than has.”

It made sense—so much so that when the second anniversary of his arrival came and went, Tilak Charan walked out the front gate of the Tsiolkovsky Institute with his clothing in an English knapsack and his future in his own hands.

“
Swaraj
at last,” he breathed to himself.

He took several days to make his way down to Dover, where he bought passage to Calais on a slow and crowded ferry. For the first few weeks he fully expected Moraji or some of his operatives to swoop down and whisk him back to Delhi to face his father. But the shapes in the distance remained nothing more than French farmers’ wagons, and the sounds in the night merely other vagrants. He did not think for a moment that he was capable of eluding a determined search by Moraji; in fact, he had made no real effort to do so. The obvious conclusion offered itself: he had been forgotten.

A curious series of emotional states followed on the heels of that revelation. The first was disappointment. He realized he had been not only expecting Moraji, but counting on him. Over the last two years, there had been little communication with home, and a dearth of praise for what he was doing at Tsiolkovsky. The former he could ascribe to security—but even a Telugu father was allowed to hand out praise to a noteworthy son.

Next came confusion, as Charan struggled to decide in what particularly heinous way he had failed in order to earn the privilege of being ignored. He could identify none, and so gave up guilt for anger. He had been shunted out of the way, shipped away because for some reason it was inconvenient to have him in Delhi. Now, he did not seem to matter at all.

Which meant that he had no obligations to anyone but himself, and he intended to let that be his guiding principle.

He found the worldly-wise cynicism of the French—at least as displayed by the stratum he was interacting with—wearying. He was in France only long enough for a side trip to Paris. Its charms were largely lost on him, and he stayed but two days before heading north to Brussels.

As long as his money lasted, Charan city-hopped through Europe, working his way by foot and thumb as far north as Copenhagen and as far south as Rome. Since he spent little except for food, that period lasted nearly three months. He lost his virginity the second week to an aggressive Dutch girl, and for a short time was caught up in the easy sexuality of the runaways’ subculture. A painful case of gonorrhea put an end to that phase.