CHAPTER 46
THE SOLDIER AND THE SPY
I did not have to wait long. The little clock built into the wall of my room marked the sixth hour after midnight. The doors opened, and my guards greeted me with visored faces and shoulders squared.
“We’re to take you upstairs,” said Holden, Ghoshal’s centurion. “The captain and Agent Albé asked to meet you in the cenacle.”
“Then lead on, decurion,” I said. “Though I know the way.”
We had only to ascend one level to reach the Ascalon’s mess and its adjoining kitchen, which lay at the aft end of the ship, straight back from the bridge and the forward airlocks. I had not seen the place since the journey from Sabratha, but found it much as I had left it. A curving bank of windows—perhaps a cubit high—ran along the rear wall, a narrow slit overlooking the arcing bank of the warp projectors and the primary sublight drive just below. Pressing one’s face to the glass, one might look up and see the line of the tailfin above.
It was dark then, save for the cans that gleamed in the ceiling above the black glass of the dinner table. Captain Henric Ghoshal had seated himself on the far side, facing the doors, looking—if anything—even more tired and less sure than he had the night before. Edouard Albé stood to one side, peering out through the slit windows at the comparative darkness of the Gadelica’s hold without. It was easy to forget that we were aboard an Extrasolarian Sojourner, that outside the old Imperial troop carrier, there was a false sun shining, and warm air, and trees.
“Our hosts spirited you away awfully quick,” Ghoshal began, without preamble. “What did you tell them?”
Edouard had his back to us, his attention still held by some feature of the Gadelica’s hold outside. “Everything,” I said.
“Everything . . . ” Ghoshal echoed the word, spoke it as though it were an incantation in some language he could but little comprehend. “You’re sure we can trust them?”
“I am more sure of Lorian Aristedes,” I said, “than I am of any other man alive.” Rather, I was sure of the Lorian I had known, the good commander. Of the Commandant General, I was less sure . . . and of his master, of the Monarch Calen Harendotes . . . I was not sure at all.
“And of me?” Ghoshal asked.
“How can I trust you?” I asked, sparing a glance for Edouard, who had turned from the window to watch us. “When you do not trust me?”
I had thought much about how to approach the matter of the captain in the night, but I had come to little wisdom. Ultimately, the decision rested with him, whether to believe what I had told him and the evidence of his own eyes—or not. Men accepted the truth or did not, and would use their reason to justify that acceptance or the lack of it. For most men, reason follows belief, and does not lead it.
“Trust you?” Ghoshal’s mustachios twitched. “Trust you? What has trusting you got me? Or my men? We are outlaws now! Cast our lot with the demoniacs outside! And for what? Because Albé here and the princess said we had to save your—Lord Marlowe’s—bastard girl!”
I slapped the table with an open palm, so fast the captain lurched back in his seat. Holden and the other guards flinched, but I made no other move. “She is no bastard,” I said, voice deadly calm. “Her mother and I never wed—but such was the fashion of her people. Cassandra is trueborn. Her genome was written on a Jaddian loom. She is no intus, and even if she were, she is mine, and you would do well to remember it.”
Ghoshal deflated like an old balloon, sagged into his chair. “You must understand,” he said. “I have five hundred men under my command, and thirty-five hundred of yours in my charge. Every one of them is forfeit now. We kidnapped an Imperial princess! Shot our way out of Forum system, killed Earth knows how many of the Martian Guard, and with Extras to aid us, no less!” His hands were balled into fists, and he held them shaking before himself. “There are Pale on this ship! And bird men! A whole cavalcade of demons and rejects! How does that look to you?” He thrust a finger in my face. “And then you show up—whatever you are! I don’t know if you’re a clone or a machine or something else entirely, and I don’t care! But I do care about my men! Now if you can help them, I’ll hear you—but you had better tell me everything, too.”
Looking up, I found Edouard’s gaze. He was the ranking member of our little mob. And yet Ghoshal held almost all the power. The majority of the HAPSIS men who had survived Sabratha were on ice, and if Ghoshal had possessed the will, he might have seized the reins already, killed or imprisoned Edouard and myself and laid plans to return Selene to the Imperium.
Why hadn’t he?
“You’re aware of what happened on Sabratha?” I asked. “What I was doing in the system in the first place?”
I knew he hadn’t been formally briefed, but I also knew that he couldn’t have left the system without rumor or perhaps even footage reaching him of the battle at Phanamhara.
“I know that the Cielcin attacked,” Ghoshal said. “I know they came in search of some . . . weapon, something left behind by the ancients as built the ruins down around the Whalemont.”
“You knew about the Stonebuilders?” Edouard asked.
“Every officer in the Sabrathan ODF knew about the Whalemont, if that’s what you mean,” Ghoshal said. “There’s nothing writ down, and they call the Chanters in if you ask too many questions, but aye—I know.”
“It wasn’t a weapon,” I said. “It was an extraterranic being of extraordinary power. A creature of pure energy known to the men on Forum as a Monumental. The Cielcin worship these Monumentals as gods, call them Watchers. For several hundred years now, Syriani Dorayaica has been looking for one of them. There was one living in the mountain out on the Ocean of Silence. Albé’s team and I were sent to find and kill it, only the Cielcin attacked before we could do so . . . I . . . ” Here I trailed off, made uncomfortable by so much plain truth. “ . . . have reason to believe that the beast in question escaped, and is in the hands of the enemy.”
Ghoshal’s expression signaled terror and bemusement in equal measure. “Pure energy?” he looked round at Edouard, expecting a laugh. “How on Earth does that work?”
“There’s much we don’t understand,” I said, “but we do know how to kill it.”
Here Edouard interjected. “A series of sustained EM pulses of a certain magnitude over a period of several minutes is supposed to do it.”
“Then why didn’t you succeed at Sabratha?” Ghoshal asked. “How did this thing escape?”
“We tried,” I said. “But our weapon was destroyed.”
“We were betrayed,” Albé said.
“Betrayed?” Ghoshal echoed the word, incredulous. “How?”
I looked to Edouard, who said simply, “The Cielcin had bought one of our own. It was this agent that alerted the enemy to our presence on Sabratha.”
Never shrewd, Ghoshal shook his head. “To think of our own people allying with those monsters . . . ” he said. “But this is incredible. What do the Cielcin want with this creature? What did you call it?”
“A Monumental,” Albé said.
“A Watcher,” said I.
We looked at one another, neither one of us moving. For a second time then in so many minutes, Edouard inclined his head.
“They worship it,” I said. “You are aware of how primitive the Cielcin are? With regard to technological sophistication?”
Ghoshal squinted. “Primitive?” he said. “They gave us a licking at Sabratha. And those ships! So huge! What’s primitive about that?”
I had forgotten. Sabratha had most likely been Ghoshal’s first exposure to the enemy. His knowledge of their culture and capabilities was thin at best, limited to rumor and hearsay. He had served his term some twenty thousand light-years from the fighting, had perhaps expected never to meet the enemy in the field.
Rather than attempt to explain, I forged ahead. “The Watchers uplifted the Cielcin. Taught them to build ships and weapons, turned them into an army.” I detailed, then, how Elu had heeded Miudanar’s call, and built the first ships that carried the Cielcin from their home on Se Vattayu to neighboring Eue, where it had built its empire. I told of how that Empire had fallen to pieces when Elu was gone, and how the Cielcin—forever warlike—had turned on one another, battling across the millennia until they first encountered mankind at Cressgard.
Ghoshal listened all the while, his broad, honest face growing paler above his bristling mustache, his black eyes wide. He had known of the Vaiartu, known—but not examined—the fact that there were civilizations older than those of man, but the galaxy and the cosmos Edouard and I were revealing to him was vaster, stranger and more antique than anything the poor fellow could have ever suspected.
Still shaking his head, he said, “The Cielcin gods are real, then?” He fixed his eyes on me. “But how does this explain you?”
I was suddenly conscious of my hands. Strong hands, young and unscarred—and of the hair that hung down past my shoulders. I was a stranger to myself, and so hardly knew how to answer.
Again, I looked to Edouard. Edouard, who had doubtless seen the recordings of all that had transpired on Berenike. On Perfugium. Edouard, who had been present on the ground at Sabratha and who had seen Ushara unrolled across the sky. Edouard, who was of HAPSIS, and knew all that had transpired on Nairi, of the Atropos Expedition and of Project Perseus thereafter . . . Did he know the truth of the God Emperor? Had Lord Friedrich known?
What could I tell them that would be believed?
“You asked how a creature of pure energy could exist,” I said, gesturing to Ghoshal. “You imagine they evolved like you and me, but they were made.”
“Made?” Edouard looked at me askance. While I had spoken, he had come to stand at Ghoshal’s shoulder, had crossed his arms and relaxed as I repeated much of what was already known to him and HAPSIS.
“Programmed, in a sense,” I said. “Designed. By an entity I used to call the Quiet.”
Albé let his arms fall, and he stood a little straighter. Beside him, Ghoshal merely looked confused. As a member of HAPSIS, Albé knew the name, was familiar with it as the name of one of the galaxy’s ancient civilizations—the builders of black halls and towers, of Calagah and Athten Var and of the Menhir Dur on Sadal Suud.
“You mean the Firstborn?” Edouard asked at last, gathering his wits.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s not a people, he’s a single being. An intelligence. One that existed before our universe. I . . . have reason to believe he created our universe, and built the Watchers to . . . well, to watch over it. Some of them abandoned their functions. I don’t know why or . . . how.”
The young agent felt for a chair with numb fingers, not taking his eyes from my face. He seated himself, and made a curious gesture that recalled the sign of the sun disc, touching forehead, heart, and either shoulder. His fingers touched the medal he wore about his neck through the fabric of his tunic.
“What is it?” I asked.
Edouard shook his head. “The Watchers . . . ” He almost mouthed the words. “What happened to you? After you . . . died?”
Something had changed in the adorator. Ghoshal had sensed it, too, and turned to look at Edouard, his own arms now crossed. “You believe all this?” he asked.
Edouard raised a hand to quiet him. “Tell me.”
How could I possibly explain? I resolved to say nothing of Llesu, nothing of the Well, of the far future, of the death of the last sun.
“I met a servant of the Quiet,” I said. “He restored me, as you see.”
“Madness,” Ghoshal said.
Edouard gripped the captain’s arm. “You saw the tests, Henric.”
“What?” I asked.
Ghoshal and Edouard exchanged glances. After a moment, Edouard answered, “We have the results of the tests Doctor Kaur ran on you yesterday.” He fell strangely silent then, staring at the mustachioed captain, as if afraid to look at me.
“And?” I asked, curious to know the answer.
“It’s a perfect match,” Ghoshal said. “Doctor Kaur says you’re the same man. Something about chromatin and histore . . . history marks?”
“Histone markers,” Albé supplied. “Only that can’t be right.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Look at you,” Albé said, gesturing at my face.
“Ah.” I hugged myself, bowing my head. “If I were some scheme of the Extrasolarians, why would they make so poor a copy?” I asked.
Ghoshal said. “You tell me.”
“You had better hope I am not an Extrasolarian copy,” I said.
Ghoshal blinked.
“If I am,” I said, driving the spike home, “then the Monarch of Latarra has the powers of Hadrian Marlowe at his command. If I am a copy, a clone, some device of our erstwhile hosts, ask yourself: What is there to prevent the Latarrans from making of an army of me?”
That cowed Ghoshal, and disturbed even Edouard.
“You saw Lorian shoot me. If you think that some kind of trick, shoot me again. Now. You will strike nothing but air.” I stood, hands going to the magnets that secured the throat of my tunic. Neither Ghoshal nor Albé moved. “If we do not get onside, the three of us, that is precisely the future we risk. Lorian is my friend, but his master is an unknown quantity. I have promised to help reopen negotiations between Latarra and the Solar Throne. We need their aid. We need their army. We need this machine of theirs. And they need us. They need us to cede our rights to Norma, or they will have another war on their hands. They need our atomics.”
“What?” Evidently, this was news to young Albé, who straightened in his chair. “Why?”
“They mean to take what they can of the Cielcin fleet for their own,” I said. “It is my belief that Calen Harendotes intends to use them to transplant his population beyond human space in the event that matters in the Veil turn against him.”
Ghoshal looked at me in disbelief. “But where would they go?”
“Far away,” I said. “What does it matter?”
I was still standing, and leaned over the table, hands flat against the surface. Ghoshal had begun this meeting with the command, but he had ceded it. He ought to have stood when I did, ordered me to take my seat.
“I suppose it doesn’t,” the man said.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Albé said. “Trying to capture Cielcin worldships seems like a lot of effort for a contingency plan.”
“If they can truly track Cielcin fleets through the void,” I countered, “they can isolate one or two, catch them unawares. Perhaps it is more feasible than we believe.”
But Albé was tracing circles on his cheek with a finger, leaning upon his hand. “There is more here we do not fathom.”
At this I turned my back, left the two men at the table to search the cabinets above the sideboard. There was no wine. The ship had lain at anchor on Forum for many years, and I had emptied her stores. Going instead to the arc of windows, I peered out at the darkness of the Gadelica’s hold. The name and serial number of the larger ship was stenciled on the wall of the hold in fading letters.
Something about Latarra’s ambitions struck me as strange. Sclerotic. Almost random. Calen Harendotes had been amassing power for the better part of five hundred standard years. In all that time, he had strengthened his power base near the galaxy’s core, but had not ventured much beyond the narrow confines of the Veil of Marinus. He had united much of the scattered and leaderless Norman territories, forcing the others to consolidate behind Uhra in the nascent Norman Alliance.
His had been a defensive game. Conservative. Safe.
Now all at once he had attempted an alliance with the Imperium, revealed a technological superiority that might have proved the decisive factor in any war against the Empire and its Legions, and in return for what? Assistance in the Empire’s wars against the Cielcin? While at the same time preparing a contingency plan should all turn against him?
“Why not simply remain in the Veil?” I asked.
“Precisely,” Albé said. “You see the problem.”
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” I said, regarding them both. Albé had turned in his seat to follow me, but Ghoshal sat hunched, his hands folded on the table. “We are not in an especially strong position, gentlemen,” I said. “The Latarrans have us in their power, and I owe Lorian a debt. Additionally, the whole of the Empire is now against us, as they believe we kidnapped the Princess Selene . . . ” I planted my hands on my hips, addressed the brushed metal ceiling. “The Chantry already believed that Lorian and I were allies, that I was conspiring with the Extrasolarians.”
“Were you?” Ghoshal had found his voice at last. “Conspiring?”
“Would you believe me if I denied it?” I asked, addressing the back of the captain’s head. “Until he appeared on Forum at the head of the Latarran delegation, I believed Lorian was dead,” I said. “That man sacrificed everything to save me from a life sentence on Belusha. He went in my stead. He escaped—don’t ask me how, he wouldn’t tell me. And now he has jeopardized his master’s delicate plans in order to save my daughter from the same Imperial assassins who murdered me.”
For me.
The thought intruded like a thunderbolt, casting lightning shadows across the uncharted recesses of my mind. A lump had formed in the hollow of my throat, one I could not choke down. One hand floated up to shield my eyes, but I let it fall. “We have but three cards to play with the Latarrans,” I said, and raised the commensurate count of fingers. Ticking them off as I spoke, I said, “First: We can smooth things over with the Imperials, reopen the negotiations this episode has closed. Second: We have the Princess Selene.”
“You can’t be serious!” Ghoshal stood at last, whirling to face me. “What would you have us do? Offer the poor girl to this warlord?”
I did not rise to the challenge. “Lastly: We have myself.”
A fresh silence coiled in the air between us, an amphisbaena with heads poised to strike both Ghoshal and myself. But Henric Ghoshal was no Bassander Lin. He blinked, and I said, “I am only enumerating the pieces on our side of the board, captain. Listing our assets. We have nothing else. It may be that all Calen Harendotes wants is to reopen a dialogue with the Imperium. That we can achieve. With the princess’s help, this whole unpleasant matter can be put behind us. But we must be prepared. We must recognize the reality of our situation. We are trapped, Henric. You and me and Albé here. Whether or not you believe I am who I say I am, we have no choice but to trust one another. Do you see?”
Henric Ghoshal hesitated, his balled fists half-forgotten in the air before him from his zeal to defend Selene’s honor. “I am me, Henric,” I said, pressing once again. “You told me about your son, do you remember? About Arramon.”
Ghoshal was forever boasting of his son, forever sharing word of his accomplishments with any man who would listen. Mention of his son rekindled the man’s fighting courage, and he advanced a step. “I told Lord Marlowe—”
“You told me, Henric,” I said. “You told me you never knew him. He was decanted after you left your home on Andraka. You asked me to write a letter of introduction for him. To get him into the Ares Command School.” Ghoshal hesitated, was beginning to question his doubt that I was indeed myself. “You told me how proud of him you were, this boy you’d never met.” The man’s hands had fallen almost to his side. “Now ask yourself: How would I know all this if I were a contrivance of the Extras? You told me all this on our voyage to Forum from Sabratha. When exactly were the Extras meant to have made this me with those memories? They did not arrive until mere weeks ago! Do you know how long it takes to grow a body like this?”
“Do you?” Ghoshal asked, and turned aside to Edouard, who shook his head. “I’m no bloody warlock! Can they not have stolen your memories? Copied them into . . . whatever you are?”
“Certainly they could,” I said. “But I assume you scanned me when you brought me on board.”
Albé bobbed his head. He alone was still seated, but still seemed shaken by my earlier revelations about the nature of the Quiet. One hand massaging his jaw, he said, “We did. You’re clean.”
“There must be other ways of doing this!” Ghoshal said, gesturing at all of me, looking to Albé for support.
Spreading my hands for his examination, showing that they were empty, I said, “You told me you hoped the war would be over before your boy left Command School. That he wouldn’t have to fight at all.”
Henric Ghoshal averted his eyes, stared down at his scuffed uniform boots. “He’d be there now if he got in, I think.” At once he sounded utterly spent. “How am I to know, being here?”
I felt for the man. His son had loomed, grown, born, entirely in his absence, been raised on Andraka by Lady Ghoshal and their servants. I could not imagine being so separated from Cassandra. Abruptly I recalled her youth on Jadd, remembered sitting on the floor of my solarium while the newborn Cassandra—hardly more than a cubit high—toddled toward me across the damasked carpet. I watched her charging up the stairs, heard Neema shouting after her, desperate for her to leave her sandy boots by the door.
The captain had known no such moments with his own son.
“You will meet him one day,” I said, “when we are victorious.”
I was mistaken—as I so often am. Though I did not know it, Arramon Ghoshal would never meet his father. Though we would prove victorious, the humble captain would not return to the country manor of his home.
Gododdin lay ahead for him, though he knew it not, and I could hardly guess—having been granted only the barest glimpse of that final fire in my visions. When I think back upon all the horrors I have seen: the pits of Dharan-Tun, the fates of Smythe and Crossflane and their men, the child of Gaspard Valavar, the Black Feast, the sacrifice in the pantheon and the defilement of Muzugara’s prisoners . . . Ghoshal’s death is not lost among them. Still I recall the look in his black eyes, the smile on his lips . . . and shudder.
It would have been better if he had never left his home at all, if he had remained on Andraka with his lady wife and poor son.
He was a fair officer, and a good man.
And no man deserved his fate.
But Gododdin was yet to come—and his end—and for the moment, the tired captain leaned upon my table, his face drawn and shadowed, wearied with care. “I don’t know if you really are Lord Marlowe or not,” he said, “but maybe you’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe you’re all we’ve got.” He pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes, swaying where he stood. “Either you’re some monster these Extras have made—and they deny it—or you really have come back from the dead. Either way, it’s more than I bargained for when I left Williamtown.” He laughed hollowly. “I’m a simple man . . . ”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” Ghoshal snapped, eyes finding my face again. “My crew are good people, Marlowe. Honest people. They didn’t sign up for this . . . this treason. They’ll all hang if we’re caught, and me with them.”
“You won’t,” I said. “You’re palatine, Henric. They’ll reserve the White Sword for you.”
What little blood remained in the man’s face left it then, and a curious series of emotions played across it. He cursed, then—to my very great relief—he laughed. “Was that your idea of humor? Blood and thunder! They always said you were mad. That Marlowe was mad, I mean.”
He was beginning to come round.
“No one will hang for this,” I said. “You have my word, one palatine to another.”
Ghoshal’s mustache hinted at the frown beneath. “How do you propose to stop it?”
“By speaking directly with the Emperor when we reach Latarra.”
The captain’s eyes went wide. “You can do that?”
“No,” I said. “But I can contact Prince Chancellor Aurelian.”
“What good will that do?”
“The Chantry acted alone in my murder, of that we can be certain. They’ve overplayed their hand, and the Emperor and his party will—I think—be glad to learn that I am alive. Besides . . . ” I stood a little straighter. “The Empire has as much to gain from an alliance with Latarra as the Extrasolarians do. If we can reopen negotiations, you’ll have to fear neither the noose nor the White Sword, eh?” I clapped Ghoshal on the shoulder.
Ghoshal chewed on this a moment, and in the end he nodded. “All right,” he said, “all right. Whoever you are, I’m cornered. I can see that. But how . . . ” He hesitated. “How can I trust you when your own daughter does not?”
I felt my fingers tighten on Ghoshal’s shoulder, and withdrew the hand in haste. Turning my back, I asked, “Do I have your leave to go where I will?”
Ghoshal hesitated. After a moment’s pause he shook his head. “I need to think . . . ”
My anger flared. “Be reasonable, captain!”
“Reasonable?” Henric Ghoshal echoed the word, matching me anger for anger. “What about this is reasonable, Marlowe?” He thrust a finger at the floor of the cenacle. “What about any of this is reasonable?” His nostrils flared. “You will stay in your room until I can at least speak with the princess, and if you are who you say you are . . . you will sit there quietly.” He glowered at Edouard, looking for support.
The young agent sat there quietly, neither moving nor speaking.
“I want no trouble,” Ghoshal said, and raised a hand to this forehead, “but I need to think.”
“Take all the time you need,” I said. We would be years yet reaching Latarra. I turned my back on Ghoshal, peered out the window at the iron walls of the hold. I did not want Ghoshal or Edouard to see my face.
I feared what might be written on it.
“Very well, then,” I heard Ghoshal say. “I’ll fetch the guards.”
“Just a moment,” interjected Edouard, surprising both Ghoshal and myself by his sudden return to the conversation. “Captain, may we have the room?”
I watched Ghoshal’s reflection dither in the alumglass. He had every ability to object. He had the power, the men. But Edouard had the station, despite his lower blood. He was an agent of the Imperial Office, and something in the tone of his request conveyed that to the country officer.
“I’ll see Lord Marlowe is returned to his rooms,” he said. “Have Holden and the others wait just outside, if you would.”
Ghoshal pulled his maroon beret from a tunic pocket and smoothed it over his goat-black hair. “Do what you will.” I knew the sound of a salute when I heard one. The click of heels. The thump of fist on breast. The rustle of tunic and limb. “My lord. Agent Albé.”
My lord . . .
I smiled that strange, symmetric smile.
I heard the sound of retreating feet, the cycling of the door.
Only slowly did I turn and face the HAPSIS man.
The younger man was looking up at me with an expression of revelation. He had grown quiet as the confrontation with Ghoshal intensified. It was as if a lantern that had before been shuttered was unveiled. He averted his eyes, was clearly working up the courage to ask some question. “There is something . . . after, then?”
I thought of all Ragama had told me, of the dead whose memory lay asleep in the Howling Dark, set to rise again at the end of the universal day. “There is,” I said. “I’m the proof.”
“The Quiet . . . ” Edouard stood facing me then, surveying my changed face. “You really think they . . . it . . . he . . . created the universe? And the . . . the Watchers?”
I studied the younger man, searching for some clue to his thoughts in the pale, patrician lines of his face. “You think he’s your god, don’t you?” I asked.
Young Albé had the grace to look abashed. “I only thought . . . ”
“You’re in good company, my friend,” I said, and touched his shoulder as I had touched Ghoshal’s. “Prince Kaim du Otranto thought the same . . . that my . . . return—my first return, that is—was a miracle of his Ahura Mazda.”
Edouard blinked at me. “It’s true, then?” he asked. “You’ve died before?”
“Yes,” I said. “One of the Cielcin princes took off my head. I was just a boy.”
“Why?” Edouard asked. “What’s so important about you that this . . . Quiet—as you call him—would restore you to life not once, but twice?”
“This time is different,” I said. “The last time, he only altered time to preserve my life. I was only really dead—I think—for an instant, but this time . . . ” I shook my head. “This time . . . ” I tried to explain the Well, how Ragama and Saltus had condensed my energy pattern into new matter, created an image of myself capable of taking the walk to the ruined building the Judicator had called the church.
“A church?” Edouard’s expression changed again.
“What?”
“We call our temples churches,” he said.
“The Quiet is not your god, Edouard,” I said.
The other man shrank at the words, bent, but did not break.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Men have always been quick to believe their gods to have been some form of advanced life. That Jove and Loki and Enki and the rest were xenobites that fell to Earth.”
“I don’t think that,” Edouard said. “I think what you’re calling advanced life, I call god.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“No, it’s not,” came Edouard’s riposte. “It’s the other way round. You see a god and call him a xenobite. I’m saying what you call a xenobite might be a god.”
“But you believe it is your god you see,” I said.
“There can only be one god,” Edouard said. “You think him a character, like Jove, a being like you or me, but higher. That’s not what god is. God is being itself. God is is.”
I blinked at him. Had not Ragama—had not the Quiet himself—said much the same?
“The Absolute,” I whispered, using the name Ushara and Ragama both had used to refer to their maker.
“If you like,” Edouard said. “My god raises the dead, Hadrian.”
I was shaking my head. “The Quiet is not your god, Edouard,” I said, less forcefully than before. “Even if you’d like him to be.”
The younger man did not argue. “All right,” he said after a long moment. “But we cannot deny this means our universe was made with intent, made by someone or something. It is no accident!”
“On that we agree,” I said, and thought once more of Preceptor Prytanis and his Order for the Seekers After the First Truth. The Extrasolarian monk believed creation a simulation, a contrivance of some machine. Was that not an extension of the very belief I had just credited to Edouard? So much ink had been spilled for the belief that the gods of primitive man were xenobites, creatures like the Enar, like the Watchers themselves. It was a material explanation, an answer within the grasp of little men like Urbaine and Severine, men who believed their will sufficient not only to comprehend the universe, but to conquer it. What was belief that the universe was only the dream of some vast engine but an explanation that could be entertained by tiny minds?
And yet it was true—if only in a sense.
Our universe is the dream of the Quiet. His creation—if he and his servants are to be believed, as I must believe they are, since I am one of them, have been made one by my death and regeneration. What was the difference between the Quiet’s dream and the dream Prytanis and his Seekers envisioned?
“I have another question,” Edouard asked.
I shook myself, returning my attention to the cenacle. “What is it?”
“If the Monumentals taught the Cielcin everything they knew . . . ” Edouard began, “what happened to the Monumentals that did the teaching?”
I thought about this long and hard. Miudanar had spoken to Elu across the light-years, had called it from its homeworld to somber Eue. But Miudanar had been dead, or nearly so—at any rate, it had occupied a state different from the state Ushara enjoyed. I cannot pretend to understand it. But had I not seen others in my visions? Still more Watchers at the head of various Cielcin armies during Elu’s too-long reign?
What had become of them?
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “They can’t still be alive. We’d know. We’d have seen them.”
Edouard was nodding. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “But doesn’t that suppose the Cielcin have—or had some method of killing them?”
That gave me pause. Here was a thing I had never considered before. “Elu’s empire collapsed,” I said at length, and sank into the chair Captain Ghoshal had but recently vacated. “There was some kind of civil war. Elu’s aeta—the princes that served it—turned on one another. Perhaps the Watchers split with them.” I tried to imagine what such a war must have looked like. I quit almost at once. “I should ask Ramanthanu.”
“I doubt it knows,” Edouard said. “Do you suppose the Cielcin might have turned against their gods?”
“I doubt it,” I said honestly. “I can more easily imagine they turned on one another. The Watchers are each unique. Built to purpose, I guess you’d say. I don’t think they feel loyalty to their brothers like you or me.”
“But what we do know,” Edouard said, “is that they can be destroyed.”