Skolian Empire: The Radiant Seas Part 19

"Father."

Kurj said the word. Father. He had loved Tokaba Ryestar, a scout who pushed back the boundaries of known s.p.a.ce. Then one day Tokaba pushed too hard and the boundaries pushed back. He died in the blazing crash of his s.h.i.+p on an uncharted planet.

Kurj had been six. Held in his mother's arms, he had cried until he felt broken. As a boy, he knew only that he loved his father; as an adult, he recognized the integrity, strength, and emotional depth of the man who had inspired that love.

When Kurj was eight his mother married Darr Hammer-jackson, an athlete of great fame. Kurj had seen Darr as a powerful hero. But that wondrous exterior masked a rage neither Kurj nor his mother expected, one made all the more painful by Darr's ability to twist the emotions of others with his empathic skills. Kurj once grew so enraged by the emotional manipulation that he beat the walls in his bedroom until he broke his fist.

Now, after a century of dealing with the Traders, he better understood what he and his mother had faced. With Darr they had lived, on a far smaller scale, the abusive relations.h.i.+p Skolia now suffered with Eube.

Kurj's mother Roca was a daughter of the Ruby Dynasty, descended from towering warrior queens who owned and often outma.s.sed their husbands. When only she faced the violence she hid it, shamed by her situation. She hoped to change Darr, believing if only she tried hard enough, he would love his wife and stepson the way Tokaba had loved them.

Then came the day when Darr turned his anger against Kurj. At ten years of age, growing at a phenomenal rate, Kurj had been almost as tall as Darr, with a build that already showed signs of the monstrous physique he would have as a man. When Darr beat him, Kurj fought back, driven by the fury of so many nights spent lying in bed, forbidden to leave his room, forced to listen to his stepfather's violence against his mother.

He and Darr nearly killed each other.

Unlike the Skolian-Eube war, their situation had a solution. Roca pressed charges and Darr went to prison. Kurj's physical wounds healed, but even empathy couldn't bridge the silence that grew around mother and son. In the cruelty of his rage, Darr had accused Kurj of coveting his own mother; in the confusion of a youth torn by loss and grief, Kurj feared he spoke the truth. Hating Darr Hammerjackson, he hated himself, and in doing so he withdrew from everyone who loved him.

Now in the ruins of SunsReach, he acknowledged for the first time why he so often ran war games in the Hammerjack star system, blasting apart its planetoids. As the sun sank below the too-close horizon, he realized he had brooded the entire afternoon. If this was introspection, he could do without it. For decades he had banished Darr from his thoughts. Now the memories refused to stop. Was that what drove him so hard against the Traders-the fury of being forced to relieve the nightmare of his youth on a galactic scale?

"Enough," Kurj said. He returned to the tower and ordered his biomech web to put him to sleep.

In the morning he communicated with Starjack Tahota on the Orbiter, sent a message to Althor en route to Onyx Platform, and worked on his palmtop. When Kurj realized he had reorganized the same files four times, he quit and went to sit outside again.

So. Had he made peace yet? Apparently not; he felt worse than yesterday.

Peace indeed. How the flaming h.e.l.l could he make peace? For the first thirty-five years of his life he had kept the image of Tokaba in his mind, admired and beloved, a man who earned respect simply by being himself. When the urge to grasp for power lured Kurj, he denied it, thinking of Tokaba's example.

In those days, a Dyad had powered the web: Lahaylia Selei, the Ruby Pharaoh who founded the Imperialate, and her husband, Kurj's grandfather Jarac, a giant that Kurj so resembled they could have been brothers. It wasn't coincidence that Jarac and Lahaylia had minds dramatically different from each other, just as did Kurj and Dehya. If the psions in the powerlink were too similar it set up a resonance like a driven oscillator, forcing their minds into greater and greater fluctuations until the link shattered.

So Kurj denied his drive to join the powerlink and focused his energy on ISC, until he commanded the Imperial military in all but name. Yet still he coveted his grandfather's t.i.tle. Yes, he coveted it, with a pa.s.sion he found difficult to admit even now. But he remembered Tokaba and controlled his ambition.

Kurj knew by heart the histories detailing Tokaba's life for the public. He had read every overwritten, melodramatic word, how the a.s.sembly searched for a Rhon man suitable to marry the beauteous Roca Skolia, a hero who together with the golden lady would produce golden Rhon children. Fodder for the web, though none of the histories put it so bluntly.

No Rhon candidate turned up, so the a.s.sembly chose Tokaba instead, a suitably heroic figure who carried all the Rhon genes, but most unpaired. Left to chance, it was unlikely his Rhon genes would all pair with those Roca carried. So the geneticists helped matters along. Never mind that Rhon psions were so sensitive to genetic manipulation that even clones died. Never mind the vanis.h.i.+ng probability of finding a man like Tokaba or the even smaller probability that he could produce a viable Rhon heir. History offered Kurj as living proof it had worked.

History lied.

Kurj wished he had never come to SunsReach. Once begun, the d.a.m.ned introspection refused to stop. As the sun descended in the sky, he relived the day in his thirty-fifth year when he had found and restored a lost cache of files in the Orbiter web. It had been erased by experts decades before, but a buried trace remained, enough for him to get back the files.

It was all there. All of it. Medical records. Fertility a.n.a.lysis. Genetic maps. Tokaba's DNA came nowhere near a full set of Rhon genes. The a.s.sembly had nothing to do with his marriage to Roca. Her parents arranged it because they knew Tokaba would make a good husband. The hoped-for source of Rhon children? Not Roca and Tokaba, but Roca's parents, Lahaylia and Jarac, the Ruby Pharaoh and Imperator, their extended youth giving them a faint hope of fertility beyond what nature granted.

Roca and Tokaba couldn't have children, Rhon or otherwise. It was common among couples where the people came from colonies that had been isolated for millennia. Fertility declined.

The hidden truth of Kurj's conception turned out to be far less benign than the public histories. Desperate for more Rhon children, the a.s.sembly had sent an agent to the clinic that both Kurj's parents and his grandparents were using in their waning hopes for children. Unknown and unseen in the night, that agent fertilized Roca's egg with Jarac's seed and labeled it with Tokaba's name. The next day, the unsuspecting doctors implanted the egg in Roca's womb. Everyone rejoiced when the pregnancy took. Roca thrived and delivered a healthy baby.

A Rhon baby. Kurj.

In his thirty-fifth year of life, Kurj learned the truth. Tokaba Ryestar had almost no Rhon genes. He couldn't be Kurj's father.

Jarac had sired him. Kurj was his grandfather's son.

His world shattered. His memory of Tokaba became a sham. Already wracked with the legacy of Darr's accusations, Kurj saw his true parentage as the ultimate betrayal. He had refused to believe his grandfather committed no crime, that none of the parties involved even knew what had happened. Blinded by a sense of betrayal so overwhelming it was drowning him, he went to the Orbiter Lock and forced himself into the link that powered the web. He turned the Dyad into a Triad.

Kurj's life had made him a harsher man than his grandfather. But they were matched in the quality of their thought processes: power without nuance, pragmatic, taciturn, literal, blunt. The Triad couldn't support them both.

The link imploded, tearing itself apart from within. Rather than see Kurj die, Jarac gave his own life to the web. On an isolated observation deck of the Orbiter, holding Jarac's head in his arms, Kurj wept while his father died.

Now Kurj sat in silence. It was dark, only a faint line of light on the horizon to mark the day's end. Tears dampened his face. He cried for all of them, for the beloved father he had lost, for the father who had betrayed his love, for the father whose love he had betrayed, and for the father now who would have loved him, given the chance, but instead paid the price of his stepson's ravaged heart.

10.

Kurj's shuttle slowed on approach to the Orbiter, matching velocity and acceleration to the metal world. With one rotation every ninety seconds and a diameter of four kilometers, the sphere's hull moved at eight kilometers per minute. For a conventional habitat, cylindrical or wheel-shaped, the shuttle could have come in at a center hub that didn't rotate. For the Orbiter, no "hub" existed, so s.h.i.+ps docked in the outer hull.

Kurj wondered why the Ruby Empire engineers had chosen a less conventional form for the Orbiter. The ancient habitat had survived many millennia since the fall of the empire, but the reason for its design was lost. After ISC found the ruined habitat drifting in s.p.a.ce, they worked long and hard to remake it-for the Orbiter contained the First Lock.

Without Locks, the psiberweb would cease to exist. Telops, the telepathic operators trained to use the psiberweb, could access the web from any console, if it had the correct equipment, but the web's creation and maintenance required the Locks. Three existed. Kurj had used the Orbiter Lock to join the Triad. The Second Lock was on Raylicon, ancestral home of the Ruby Empire, one of the best protected planets in the Imperialate. The Third Lock was a s.p.a.ce station currently at Onyx Platform. To protect the Lock, the Onyx military complex had grown to twenty-three stations, becoming the largest ISC base-which was why ESComm had turned its interest to Onyx Sector, pus.h.i.+ng its boundaries.

The huge door of a docking bay in the Orbiter hull rolled open. The shuttle pilot fired a burst from the rockets, using chemical fuel to maneuver, rather than the antimatter drives adapted for more open s.p.a.ce or the inversion stardrive.

After the shuttle moved into the bay, robot arms clamped around it, anchoring the s.h.i.+p in place while the great door closed. As soon as an atmosphere tube fastened onto the shuttle air lock, the craft emitted its only pa.s.senger: Kurj Skolia. The Imperator had boarded the Orbiter.

Kurj found the a.s.sembly councilor he sought in a lodge shaded among a grove of trees within Valley, the private mountain retreat of the Ruby Dynasty. Silent and un.o.bserved, he stood on the wooden balcony that bordered the second level inside the building. The room below was also wood, mellow and gold, with an antique quality to it, a luxury here where they used almost no wood. Bars lined one wall and mirrors another. A golden woman in a blue leotard, pink tights, and a filmy blue dance skirt was spinning across the room in pointe shoes, her movements as light and graceful as the tendrils of hair that had escaped her bun.

Kurj had always loved to watch his mother dance. A memory came to him; he was five, going with his father to see her perform with the Imperial Ballet under the stage name Cya Liessa. It had been a magical night, with a small boy enthralled by his beautiful, beloved parents. Strange how he had forgotten that.

Roca stopped in midspin and looked at the balcony. "My greetings, Kurj."

"Mother." He went down the wooden steps that descended from the balcony. "You dance better than ever."

A smile gentled her face. "You're being kind." She wiped her face with a towel she took from a wooden chair near the wall. "I never have time to practice anymore, with my a.s.sembly duties."

His voice cooled. "And when did your a.s.sembly duties extend to my private life?"

She stopped toweling herself. "Barcala talked to you about the wedding."

"You knew about it?"

"Only after they made the decision. They wanted me to tell you." She sat down and began untying her toe shoe. "I told them it was their decision and their funeral, so they could flaming well tell you themselves."

Kurj rather enjoyed the image of his diplomat mother, usually the essence of tact, cussing at Barcala Tikal. He settled in the chair next to her and stretched out his legs. "Have you talked to Dehya recently?"

"This morning." She pulled off the shoe and began winding its ribbons around it. "In web mail."

"I mean in person."

"It's been a while." Roca stopped winding her ribbons. "A long time, actually."

"How long?"

"Months?" She stared at him. "That can't be right."

"What do you think she's doing?"

Dryly she said, "With all those paras of hers, who knows?"

Kurj understood the reference. Some schools of thought in neuroscience held that the greater density of neural structures in a psion's brain could enhance intellect. It depended on the structure and distribution of the paras. Dehya's brain apparently maximized the effect. No one knew the full extent of her intelligence. The last tests, done in her adolescence 150 years ago, had put her into the genius range. Since then her mind had continued to evolve.

"She sent me a strange message," Kurj said.

"Strange how?"

"It said, 'You are right.'"

Roca laughed. "From Dehya to you, that is strange."

"She meant I finally picked the right icon."

His mother took off her other shoe and began wrapping its ribbons. "What icon?"

"She's trying to tell me something." He blew out a gust of air. "For all we know, she's dead and she left an EI running on the web to simulate herself."

Roca nearly dropped her shoe. "You think she's dead?"

Before he realized what he was doing, he had laid his hand on her arm, the first time he had touched her in years. It felt like an electric shock. She went rigid, then pulled away from him.

Disconcerted, Kurj withdrew his hand. "She's not dead."

Roca spoke uneasily. "What is all this about icons?"

He tried to frame an answer for something he wasn't sure he understood himself. "Making peace. I think."

"With ESComm?"

"No. Myself." Kurj stared across the room. For a century he had focused his existence on building ISC. He had given up all semblance of a normal life, hardened his mind, crippled his capacity to love, all to make ISC what it was today. And it wasn't enough. Even the a.s.sembly wanted more from him.

"Do you remember the ruins we used to visit with Father when I was a boy? Before he-" The word died stopped on his tongue. "Before he was gone?"

"SunsReach? I remember."

"I had the entire planet cla.s.sified as a wilderness sector."

"Whatever for?"

"To keep it untouched. No one can go there without my permission." He made himself turn to face Roca. "You and I have too many ghosts. We need to make peace before it's too late. But I can't here. Too much history lives in this place."

She watched him as if he were a cipher. "I've never heard you talk like this."

"Come to SunsReach with me. Help me settle the ghosts while we still can."

"Kurj, don't."

"Don't what?"

"Talk like you're about to die."

"I've no intention of dying, I a.s.sure you."

She looked at her shoe, turning it over and over, watching its ribbons flutter. "I don't think it wise I go alone with you to such a remote place."

"I won't-trespa.s.s against you. You have my word." It was the closest he had ever come to acknowledging the labyrinth of emotions he negotiated where she was concerned.

"Eldri will object," she said.

Kurj suspected that for his stepfather Eldrinson, "object" would be a mild word for his reaction to Kurj's request. "I will swear your safety to your husband as well as to you."

She looked up at him. "I need to talk to him."

"Of course." He stood up. "I leave for SunsReach tomorrow. If you decide to come, I will be in the Skyhammer ruins." He bowed to her and left the studio.

The sun was setting as Kurj walked out into the rustling glades of Valley. It took only a few minutes to reach Dehya's home. Built into a hillside, the house stood shaded within a grove of trees. Colors from the sunset glowed on the pale door, like a soap bubble film.

Kurj touched a gilded leaf on the door and a bell chimed within the house. After several moments he tried again, with no more success. But as he was about to leave, the door opened. His half brother Eldrin stood in the archway, rubbing his eyes.

"Kurj?" Eldrin blinked at him. "My greetings."

"Did I wake you?" Kurj asked. "I can come back later."

Eldrin smiled. "Don't do that." He stood to the side. "Come in."

Goldwood furniture set with white satin cus.h.i.+ons graced the airy living room. Suns.h.i.+ne sifted in through the windows, dappled by the trees outside.

Eldrin went to a faceted crystal cabinet in one corner. "Would you like a drink? Rum?"

"No. Just water." Kurj knew how Eldrin had wrestled with alcohol in his youth, during his troubles adjusting to life on the Orbiter. Eldrin never drank now, a choice Kurj respected.

His brother poured water into two crystal goblets and brought one to Kurj. Sitting on the couch, Eldrin studied his face. "You look tired."

"A little."

Are you all right? Eldrin asked.