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CHAPTER 43

THESEUS HIMSELF


Here I pause. Let us leave the others a moment, as I left them all in the yard outside the docked vessel. Ghoshal feared me, as did his men. They would doubtless review the footage from the Gadelica’s security systems, find the moment in the airlock when I returned. I guessed that they would find I simply appeared, that one moment they would be looking at footage of an empty airlock, and in the next they would find me curled there on the cold metal floor, naked and lost.

Commander 2Maeve likewise feared me, though in her that fear was tempered by loathing. I knew nothing of her people—these Interfaced—though from the name I deduced her implants did more than attract attention. They were surely some race of Extrasolarian, one of the many countless clans and cultures about which we in the Imperium knew almost nothing.

The Cielcin and Irchtani alike—by contrast—were anything but afraid. To the Cielcin I was Oranganyr ba-Utannash, Champion of that god so despised by their fathers, but a god whose powers they knew were real. To the Irchtani, I was Bashan Iseni, one of the higher beings, the lords of men they almost revered as gods. Moreso even than the Cielcin, the Irchtani were a primitive race, a people who little understood the wider galaxy, how it was that ships flew and some men lived so long, in defiance of nature.

That very primitive understanding left their eyes more open to the truth of what I had experienced. Ghoshal and his men, and to an extent even my own Cassandra, thought they knew too much to believe. I was some Extrasolarian contrivance, as Cassandra herself had said. A clone or golem simulacrum meant to mock or dispirit, or part of some cunning and absurd plot. Their very education had blinded them to what Ramanthanu and Annaz had plainly seen.

I had returned from the dead.

And yet Selene had seen it. Selene, whose mere presence forfeited the lives of every man and woman on the Gadelica at least, and possibly the lives of all aboard Lorian’s Mistwalker. But she had kidnapped herself, in truth, had insisted she be brought along to ensure the escape of Cassandra, Edouard, and the others. The memory of her kiss haunted me, of her sobbing into my bare chest, and of my visions most of all. How many times had I seen us two together? Myself enthroned, Selene at my feet?

Was that the future we now barreled toward? Or only one possibility, variously remote?

What good were my visions if they showed only the infinite possible futures? What difference was there between my visions, then, and any man’s dream of tomorrow?

Edouard had believed. He had surprised me perhaps most of all—had been surprising me since Sabratha. He, who had seemed at first the picture of the Imperial cog, had proved himself possessing secret depths, and a clean and honest loyalty. In the wake of my death, he had acted to save Cassandra and Neema from the fire, had thrown his life away and his station to save them. I had told Selene to go to him, and to Lorian . . . and she had.

I had only prayed it would be enough, could only have prayed in that moment.

And Edouard had answered. And Lorian.

Lorian . . . 

How changed was he! No longer the frail skeleton of a child-man who had accompanied me through so many dangers. Extrasolarian praxis had at last given him a body suited to the energy of his heart, and those virtues of tenacity and fortitude which had characterized the man in desperate hours seemed to have become him. It had been those virtues that moved him to pull his trigger. Had I been a fraud, I would have died there, cut down by Lorian’s needler.

He had acted, and proven—to his satisfaction at least—that I was myself alone.

But still there was Cassandra. Cassandra, who did not believe I was myself. Cassandra, who feared me as Ghoshal feared me. Who feared what I might be. If she truly believed that I was some contrivance of their Extrasolarian hosts, then Lorian’s demonstration would mean nothing to her.

And in truth . . . her belief was all that mattered. Of all the people in this broken world of ours, hers was the only face I longed to see. It was for her I fought, for her I had returned to fight. For her, and no one else. Not even truly for the Quiet, for all his gifts.

I needed her to believe, to know that I was myself. That I had returned.

For her. For her sake.

Ghoshal’s men brought me to the Ascalon, safely tucked away in the Gadelica’s ventral hold. They waited at the door to my old cabin as I entered and went to find my clothes. I prayed that Neema had possessed the good sense to salvage my sword and shield-belt, and certain other valuables when he and Cassandra fled with Edouard and Selene.

“I won’t be long,” I said to the men, and the door hissed shut behind me.

The old room was as I had left it when we first arrived at Forum, and a caul of dust lay on everything. Still, the lights winked to life at my presence, illuminating that close, gray space with its scrub carpet and metal fixtures. My lungs drank the memory of years, recalling the solitude of that wretched, lonely voyage from Eue to Colchis; those warm nights with Valka beside me before and after it.

I stood stock-still awhile, unsure where to begin. I wanted to weep, to sleep—wanted not to move. So much had happened to me in what felt so short a span of time.

With unsteady fingers I stripped the foil-blanket skirt from me, let it float to the black carpet.

I looked at myself in the washroom mirror. The reflection I had seen in the glass of that poor woman’s fugue crèche had been a frosty and distorted thing. This was plain and clear.

A man who was and yet was not myself peered from the polished glass. How young he was, and lean! But broad of shoulder and strong of arm! His hair fell over his shoulders almost to his ribs, fell in rippling cascades where before it had hung lank and unbending, framing a face that was not the face I recalled from youth. Not precisely.

The man in the mirror resembled the reflection I had known all my life only so much as the image of a man drawn from memory might resemble a photograph. It was as if some artist who had only heard of Hadrian Marlowe had endeavored to carve the man afresh from new stone. The proportions of my face had changed. Where before mine had been a long and pointed face, sharp of nose and chin, the face that peered out at me from that mirror was one perfectly balanced, with a slim, straight nose, strong brow, and pronounced cheekbones. I was still recognizably myself—the violet eyes were mine, and the slight cant of brow recalled the satyr I so often thought of when faced with my own appearance—but I was myself clarified, as though some alchemist had distilled my very essence.

I looked like Ragama had looked, his face a testament to mathematical precision. Any of the great sculptors of the Imperial court—acting in the grand classical tradition—might have produced such a face, so precise was its symmetry, so ideal its ratios.

I bared straight, white teeth, smiled.

It was not my smile.

The crooked Marlowe asymmetry was gone. The slight irregularity of the musculature that that had created that smile—imprint of the natalists who had designed my family’s line—had been corrected.

That more than anything frightened me.

Still, I knew that face, had seen that face before.

It was the face I had seen in my visions, the face of that other Hadrian who had stood upon the bridge of the Demiurge and uttered those terrible words. Do what must be done, he had said. Fire at will.

Shaking, I touched my shoulder, the right shoulder that had been torn in my agony upon the walls of the Dhar-Iagon—touched it with the hand that Kharn Sagara had once regenerated, scaffolding new flesh over adamantine bones.

There was no pain, nor any sensation of deep numbness when I clenched that hand into a fist. There was no sign the last two fingers of the right hand had been regenerated by Elkan’s ministrations.

I turned to look at my back. The thick ropes of scar where the lash had bit and striped me from shoulder to buttocks were washed away.

I felt my heart hammering.

I was not the same Hadrian who had died in Selene’s arms. Or was I? His memories remained to me, just as I could recall the memories of those days which had preceded that first death aboard the Demiurge. But a man is more than his memories. He is his body, too, and this was not—could not be the same body as the one I had lost.

But then . . . a man’s body is not the same substance all his life. Most of the cells in a man’s body are regenerated—replaced every few years. The teeth that I had spat upon the floor of the Martian bath were not the teeth with which I had emerged from the birthing vat. Those had fallen out and been replaced half a dozen times in the long course of my life. Even in those cells which might not be replaced—those cells of the heart and brain which remain to most men all their lives—the atoms had changed. Those particles of carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium and all the rest were gone, exchanged entirely every handful of years, so that the atoms that had been Hadrian Marlowe were in the air he had breathed, the water he had drunk of, the objects he had touched, and the people.

Man is not matter, but a phenomenon, a wave crashing across the unpastured universe.

A force.

And that force was unchanged.

That force was me.

There were voices at the chamber door.

Hurriedly, I left the mirror and found the drawer that held my undergarments, selected a pair and put them on just in time for the door to cycle.

“My lord?” one of the guards intruded.

“Let me through, I say!” came a second voice, thick with irritation and its familiar, Jaddian accent. “Domi, it is I! Neema!”

“Let him through, guard!” I said, turning to face the door.

The old familiar face was a ray of light in a dark well.

The Nemrutti manservant snapped his fingers at one of the two guards, sidled through the open portal. Neema wore the familiar white tunic, waistcoat, and loose-fitting sirwal trousers he so favored, though he wore also an expression most unfamiliar and out of place on his broad, square face.

Joy.

“It is you!” he said, and blinked away his tears. “Pleased be the Lord, Ahura Mazda, with this prayer of mine! All praise to him! To see you well again, Domi, after . . . ” He wiped his eyes. “After I saw you die!”

“I know,” I said. “And the princess.”

“It is truly you?” Neema asked, stepping forward.

I embraced him. “It’s me, Neema.”

“Master!” the Jaddian homunculus sobbed into my shoulder. “It was horrible, so horrible . . . what happened . . . ”

I drew back, one hand on each of the servant’s shoulders. “Let us speak no more of it, good Neema. It is over, and I am here.”

Neema’s eyes seemed to focus on my face for the first time. “Domi!” He blinked. “You are changed!”

“I am renewed,” I said. “But I am myself.” I looked down at my near nakedness. “Some of my clothes remain, do they not?”

Spurred by this question back to business, the butler inhaled sharply. “Of course, domi.” He hurried to the armoire built into the wall of the cabin, and produced a white shirt that buttoned at the left side of the neck. I pulled it on, accepting the flared, equestrian-style trousers Neema produced for me next, the familiar red piping running along the outer edge.

“There ought to be a spare pair of boots here,” the little man said, crouching to open the lower compartment. Sure enough, Neema straightened holding a pair of self-fitting jackboots tailored to fit my calves. I permitted Neema to button the cuffs at my ankles and to fit the boots one by one. The laces concealed between the inner lining and the outer leather sheath contracted.

“We left in such a hurry,” Neema fretted, stepping back to examine me. “The princess, you understand—dreadful woman. Dreadful. She would not let me stay to collect all that was necessary. Your books, master! All your books! If she had only permitted me a moment, I might have collected my wits, might have saved more than I did. But the girl. Cassandra returned. I didn’t want her to see your . . . your body. But she insisted! And the princess said we had to go with her at once. She had brought a shuttle, and we called Agent Albé, and that . . . little man. Aristedes.”

“Neema!” I raised my hands for quiet, and the servant stammered to a halt. There were many black tunics hanging on a rack in the armoire. Imperial military style. Double-breasted, buttoned up the left side in cavalier fashion, their twin silver collar tabs embossed with the Imperial sun. I drew one out and looked at it, but did not put it on. Tossing it onto the bed, I sat beside it, curtains of black hair flowing over my shoulders.

“Valka’s phylactery . . . ” The words left me in a breath. “It’s lost, then?”

And my piece of the Quiet’s shell, of the very egg I had seen in the church on that hilltop in distant Llesu. And Gibson’s sword.

“Begging your pardon, master,” Neema said, “but I did not say I saved nothing! That is why I am here.” He fussed with another of the drawers. “I left your effects in here. I . . . didn’t know what to do with them. I thought . . . thought I might give them to the girl. But you are here now, and there has been so little time.”

“Two days,” I said, “yes, I know.”

“I cannot believe you live, domi!” Neema said, and turning presented his salvage.

He held my shield-belt out. The well-worn mechanism of the emitter gleamed in the cabin light, a silvered disc a hand’s breadth from the buckle. Gibson’s sword hung from its hasp, and the empty holster that might have held a stunner or some other sidearm with it.

Smiling, I took it, and when I did, Neema reached for his own throat, drawing out a familiar, hair-fine platinum chain. “I had to clean it,” Neema said. “Get the blood off, but both the shell and the pendant are undamaged.”

It was my turn to wipe the tears from my face.

Valka’s phylactery and the Quiet’s shell both hung from the loop Neema pulled over his head and offered me.

I seized the man instead. “May your god and every other bless you, Neema,” I said, crushing the fellow to myself. “You are a better servant than I or any man could ask for.” Stepping back, I took the necklace from him, and closed my fist about shell and half-moon pendant alike.

How could I doubt I was the same man?

I was only the Ship of Theseus, as are we all—and I was Theseus himself, and myself alone. The pain was the same, the ache where Valka should have been.

Where all my friends once were.

“I must get finished,” I said. “There’s still much work to do.”


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