Ruler of Naught (13 page)

“You shall have it, Jala, you shall have it. Only you must
come to me, quickly, before the drug begins to wear off.”

Hreem signed off, set his boswell with the
Interrupt me
only if it’s life-or-death
code, and headed for the lift.

o0o

Sebastian Omilov set his cup down on its saucer, enjoying
the faint musical ching. A civilized sound, like the opera that Montrose had
piped into the cubicle yesterday when he found out how much Omilov loved music.

“A superb meal, Doctor. No, better. I’d say that this was
prepared by a Golgol-trained chef. The owner of this vessel must be quite
wealthy.”

Montrose slapped his chest and bowed. “Golgol-trained indeed.”

“You? I thought—”

“Surgeon as well,” Montrose said with a rumbling laugh. “I
decided one day that I wanted to travel all eight octants and beyond, and
since I was not wealthy, I had to make myself indispensable. Most ships need a
surgeon and a chef, and in me they get both.”

Omilov savored the real coffee and listened carefully, if
skeptically. This was the first time Montrose had shared any information about
himself. Montrose had given him superlative care, but despite his convalescence
Omilov had noted certain anomalies: the brief visits from Osri were always
accompanied; no ship’s business or destination was mentioned. Except for those
visits from Osri, whose demeanor expressed frustrated rage, Montrose had been
the only person Omilov had spoken to since his half-remembered interview with
Brandon when they first came aboard the vessel. Brandon—now Aerenarch—had not
repeated his visit, though both Montrose and Osri, when Omilov asked, said he
was well.

“Training at the Golgol academy must have been difficult after
all your years training as a surgeon.” Omilov said aloud.

“No, it was easy,” Montrose said with a grin. “Cookery requires
the same kind of precision, and art, as surgery.”

The combined images evoked a faint distaste, abhorrent to
Douloi sensibilities. Omilov suspected that the affront was a deliberate
response to his skepticism. The sharpest trespass is always made by the
expatriate.

He set the cup down again, keeping his face bland. “I take
it that we have inadvertently become guests of the Rift Sodality?”

Montrose’s eyes crinkled with delight. “You have indeed.”
With a slightly more serious air, “But, I need hardly add, our captain is no
ally of Eusabian of Dol’jhar.”

“Nor of the Panarch, I expect,” Omilov murmured, trying to
still the increase of his heartbeat.

Montrose frowned. “You’ll come to no harm here. Captain
wants to talk to you. Think you’re up to it?”

“Whether I am or not, I would like very much to talk to your
captain,” Omilov said.

Montrose took away the tray, and went out.

The hatch hissed open for a tall young woman dressed in a
plain dark coverall. She regarded Omilov with cool interest out of a pair of
extraordinarily dark, thick-lashed eyes in a smooth brown face as
expressionless as a statue.

“I am Vi’ya,” she said. “
Telvarna
is my ship.” She
sat down in the chair nearby with the unconscious poise of one for whom control
is an ingrained habit.

He had decided to suspend judgment, but he found there was
something vaguely disturbing in the trace of accent that shaped the soft-spoken
words, the hint of blended consonants in the middle of her name. “I am
Sebastian Omilov,” he began pleasantly. “Professor of Urian Studies at the
university on Charvann. I wish first of all to thank you for my rescue.”

She made a slight, dismissive gesture. “It was not I but the
Eya’a who were directly responsible for your rescue,” she responded. “But for
them we would not have known of your presence. As for taking you with us, my
primary motivation was to anger the Lord of Dol’jhar.” This was spoken with a
faint but coldly unpleasant smile, yet it was not that but the pronunciation
of the word “Dol’jhar” that sent a burning flame of shock through him.

“Your culture holds that the fear of death is the
greatest pang. We of Dol’jhar know this to be false.”
Back were the
arrogant features of Evodh, Eusabian’s torturer, blotting out the cabin and his
visitor. His ring finger tingled and his cheek twitched painfully.

The young woman blinked, almost a wince.

A Dol’jharian
. The gnostor forced away the memory. “Osri
mentioned the Eya’a and I had difficulty believing him! How comes it they move
among humans?”

“They were selected by their... world-mind to observe humans.
I met them in a spaceport on Two-Bit.”

Then it was true. These legendary sophonts were not only
real, apparently they were on board this ship.

Omilov shut his eyes, struggling to control the mental and
emotional shocks. Too many impossible ideas all on top of one another.

But it was for this that he had made his most important
oath, so he took a slow breath, and forced himself to think about one thing at
a time. “How did they come to be there, and how did you meet them?”

“From what I can understand, they had somehow commandeered a
Shiidran vessel, which caused quite a panic when it showed up and requested a
landing link. How they managed that I still do not know, as they do not use
language the way we do.”

“And you met them, you say?”

“Everyone fled any area they approached. But I could hear
them.” She touched the side of her head. “Not sound, but with my tempathic
ability. I decided to approach them—I could sense no hostility, although their
emotions do not correspond to human ones—and found that communication was
possible.”

Yet another shock—she was a tempath. Now he knew why she’d
grimaced. It was in reaction to his own emotions. This shock brought a surge of
revulsion. Someone who could read past the surface, who could penetrate the
trained Douloi mask, was a threat to a social structure built on politesse.
Besides
,
he thought,
it’s embarrassing
.

“Communication?” he said. “I am not a Synchronist, but it is
my understanding that tempathy and telepathy are two very different talents.”

She shrugged. “Human-to-human, I suppose they are. The Eya’a
are different.” She did not amplify.

“So the rumors concerning their abilities are exaggerated?”

“No, and yes.” She studied him dispassionately. “How much of
this do you wish to hear?”

”Though I am a xenoarchaeologist,” he replied, “it does not
mean my interest in other cultures is confined to ones no longer existing.”

If she thought the direction the interview was taking an odd
one, she gave no sign whatever. “Very well. Their psionic powers have not been
underrated, but they are not the genocidal monsters that rumor names them.
Theirs is an ice planet, which has huge deposits of complex minerals barely
exploited by the Eya’a.”

“That much I had heard. However, such minerals can be found
elsewhere in the Thousand Suns, on planets not inhabited.”

“But not woven into materials we cannot manufacture.”

“Woven?”

“They weave everything. Including a kind of crystalline armor,
which protects them against a formidable array of predators on their planet.
The original scout ship that landed in search of minerals discovered the armor,
and brought it back to Rifthaven, where they sold it for a fortune. When word
got out, the usual swarm of jackers skipped in to grab what they could before
your Panarchy implemented the usual quarantine. They flamed any natives they
found before they raided their domiciles, which caused the Eya’a (after an
unsuccessful attempt to communicate) to retaliate and clean the planet of the
intruders in one sweep.

“The next three or four ships that landed were likewise
treated, until the Eya’a made a discovery which was almost incomprehensible to
them. They could not contact the human world-mind because there was no such
thing, and they finally observed the possibility that each individual was
self-directed. Such a discovery meant they must investigate further before
deciding how to deal with humans.”

“This is news indeed.” Omilov heard the blood pressure
monitor pick up its pace, sending a ripple of colors through the readout. He
tried to slow his breathing. “I take it you have deliberately refrained from
contacting the authorities with this information?”

“I am my own authority,” she said, “and what they decide to
do about their world and its resources is their decision.”

“So they are collecting their data about humans from a ship
of Rifters... ”

“Why not?” she replied. “It’s as good a picture of our
species as they would get anywhere else.”

Omilov shifted to diplomatic mode. “I won’t enter into a
debate with you on that. I expect we’d both be right—and wrong.” He folded his
hands together. “What I would like to know, if I may, is what are your intentions
toward myself, my son, and the new Aerenarch?”

“Why was a xenoarchaeologist put under Eusabian’s
mindripper?” she countered.

Omilov did not immediately answer. The captain waited, her
dark eyes steady, until he said, “I suggest you ask Eusabian.”

“The sphere that your son was carrying?” She dipped a hand
into the pouch at her side and pulled out the silvery ball that had appeared so
mysteriously at Omilov’s home what now seemed ages ago.

Yet another blow. He closed his eyes, then forced them open
as Vi’ya passed it from hand to hand, her arm muscles jerking and tightening
when the sphere did not behave the way any normal object would.

She looked up. “Inertialess. Who made it?”

Omilov said, “The beings we call the Ur. I know little else.”
Too many shocks.
There was that warning tingle in his ring finger again.

“And Eusabian wants it?” She added softly, “The Eya’a, they
sense great power.”

“I know that it is called the Heart of Kronos, and that it
has been kept for millions of years by sophonts on a now-quarantined planet. It
ought to be returned to them. Will you give it to me?”

“Perhaps—eventually.”

“May I inquire what you intend to do with it?”

“I have not yet decided. Much depends on what I can discover
about it, and how to use it. What can you tell me about that?”

“Almost nothing,” he answered, unable to prevent distress
from rasping his voice.

“The Eya’a identified it as a psionic device, but it seems
an integral part of it is missing. Do you know what?”

He shook his head slowly, betraying none of the impact of
the question. He remembered the vast, echoing space of the Shrine of the Demon,
the towering Guardian and its swarm of near-mindless commensals.

None of the psis reported a missing part. Apparently the
combination of a human tempath and the Eya’a world-mind—or the portion they
carried with them—was something new in Totality.

“If you know that much, you know more about it than I do. I
don’t even know how it left that planet. It appeared without warning one day,
having been sent to me by a former student, for reasons unknown.”

“It was sent to you because someone felt you would know what
purpose it serves. That person must have realized its importance, and likewise
you knew enough to have been mindripped for your knowledge. And it was important
enough to you that you continued to resist while a shred of your will remained.”

Her gaze was steady. He knew she was concentrating on him,
and he felt a flicker of pain behind his temples as if his brain was undergoing
a physical memory of the mindrip machine.
Tempaths cannot cause this effect.
Are the Eya’a nearby? What am I facing here?

He forced himself to take a long breath before speaking. “I
have no facts whatever, only guesses,” he stated finally.

“You know how to find the facts. And your guesses might
prove to be truth.”

Her gaze was still intense and unwavering, and his headache
rapidly made coherent thought difficult. He could not prevent himself from
wincing as he brought a hand up to shade his eyes. “I beg your pardon... ” He
sighed. “I am not as recovered as I had thought.”

She stood up to go, and he fell back, feeling a pressure had
been released from his skull.
I must be remembering that damned machine of
Eusabian’s
, he thought hazily as she said, “I will seek answers to my
questions elsewhere. Until then, it is mine.” And she left.

o0o

Montrose sat back in relief. With anyone but Vi’ya he would
have intervened halfway through that interview—but then with anyone else, the
interview would have been short. Montrose adjusted the meds, and sat at his
console watching Omilov in the viewscreen until the gnostor’s vitals settled
into the green, and the man drifted off to sleep.

Switching the viewscreen to the next two cubicles, Montrose saw
Ivard sprawled on his side, watching as Lucifur played bat-and-chase with a
spoon in the quarter-gee environment. Ivard was having one of his good days. He
seemed hugely entertained watching the big cat spring lithely about, using
every surface in the berth including the ceiling for propulsion but never coming
near the boy. Gray’s tail wagged as it watched alertly, but the dog showed no
inclination to try to wriggle out from under Ivard’s arm. Its wounds were
healing rapidly.

Montrose put the cubicles on automatic. He tapped the locate
on his boswell, got up, and stretched.

He found Marim and Lokri at consoles in the rec room. As he
dialed up some hot caf—they were getting low on coffee—Marim turned to him, her
small face sharp with expectation.

“What made Vi’ya rasty?”

Montrose paused. “What?”

“Only hear her walking when she’s angry,” Marim said impatiently
as she ducked to the hatch, looked out, then back. Grinning, she added, “And
when she’s rasty, that tongue cuts like monothread. If she’s looking for
trouble, I’m gone.”