“If she were rescuing you knowingly! If you weren’t feeding her all these lies!”
“The time will come, and she will learn the truth.”
Of course. Alex was silent. Nodded.
“Maybe. But you were wrong.”
“Time will tell,” replied Edward wearily.
“And you’re sure that her mind is stable? To combine a hetaera and a fighter in the same consciousness is already at the limits of possibility.”
“I know the potentialities of the human mind better than you do.” Edward squinted. “Trust me, Kim couldn’t have gone mad and disemboweled the Zzygou … that’s what you’re talking about, right?”
“Yes. I am trying to check out a number of possibilities, to exclude the utterly impossible.”
“Aren’t you taking on the work of a detective-spesh, my friend?” The geneticist laughed. “God … it’s nice to talk with you this way … sincerely and kindly!”
Alex had no reaction to these words. He just sat there, thinking. Most probably, Edward wasn’t lying. He had created Kim O’Hara to suit himself: as a bodyguard, as a source for his means of existence and, ultimately, as a lover. It was improbable that a galactic war had been a part of his plans.
People suppose, but it’s chance that disposes. Still, the girl’s unstable psyche could have skipped a beat … no matter how sure Edward was of the opposite.
Alex asked, “What would you conjecture?”
“The murderer?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m not a detective. If a spesh is aboard, and a clone of Peter Valke, at that”—the geneticist threw up his hands—“all I can do is watch and admire his work.”
“Is he really that good?”
“Magnificent. I worked on that specialization for more than twenty years. Went through a lot of setbacks, but the result exceeded all expectations.”
“So far Mr. Holmes hasn’t impressed me all that favorably. A collection of standard magic tricks and enhanced sensory organs.”
Edward just smiled.
“The very existence of the Empire is at stake here.” Alex tried again to appeal to reason. “You probably won’t survive this, either. Finding the murderer is vitally important to us.”
“The Empire against the Zzygou?” The geneticist sounded utterly indifferent. “The poor little bees don’t have the slightest chance.”
“Why?”
Edward sighed.
“Good Lord, a pilot-spesh should show a bit more intelligence! Everything is there in plain sight! The murderer, and the cause, and the trump card up the sleeve—the card the Imperial cabinet is going to produce at the right moment!”
His voice rang with absolute certainty. But for some reason it only frightened Alex.
“What are you talking about? Is there a magic weapon that ordinary people don’t know about?”
“You could put it that way.” Edward pensively rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No. I won’t explain anything. You have all the necessary data to figure out what is going on. And so does the detective. So don’t worry about the Empire’s fate … and get ready to enjoy the show.”
“How can you call the death of a sentient being a show? And the inevitable death of someone from my crew?”
“I’m tired, Alex,” said the geneticist bluntly. “Drop in to see me in twenty-four hours, okay? That is, of course, if Sherlock Holmes hasn’t solved the puzzle by then. Goodbye for now!”
He got up and lazily walked toward the wall. It trembled, opening up before him.
“Edward!” Alex shouted.
To no avail. The wall reassembled, hiding the geneticist from view. Inside his own crystal, he was lord and master … until a more powerful device took over the controls.
“You don’t know any more than I do,” he said out loud. “Even less …”
What had he missed?
Or, rather—what was he reluctant to notice?
In any case, he wouldn’t get an answer here.
Alex left the virtual space.
Sherlock Holmes had recommended that the crew not leave their quarters until a special permission was issued. And a detective-spesh’s recommendation was, in fact, an order. Even for the captain.
Glancing now and then at the outer-space screen, where the Lucifer hovered languidly, Alex tuned in to the news from Zodiac.
And, of course, immediately ran into the news about the Zzygou.
The actual cause of the conflict hadn’t appeared in the commonly available information net. There were only indistinct references to an incident that had led to the death, on the Empire’s territory, of a member of the Zzygou ruling clan. Apologies had already been issued in the name of the Emperor, along with promises of just punishment of the perpetrators, the organization of a fancy funeral, and reparations. In general, from any human’s point of view, the Zzygou’s rage was absolutely unfounded … after all, accidents did happen in the universe, and rushing to war over the death of a single sentient being—it was sheer madness!
And that was what frightened Alex. The Empire was getting ready for war. The Empire was creating background propaganda. Of course, the alien races would learn the unedited version of the conflict, but … the belligerent Cepheideans would be happy with any kind of trouble with the Zzygou, and the Bronins most probably wouldn’t consider even the most gruesome murder as reason for war.
Perhaps the alien races were precisely the cause for Edward’s optimism? Maybe he was betting that humanity would quickly be joined by some allies?
That was naive. Allies always appeared on time, all right. The time when the opponent’s territory was being redistributed.
The worst thing appeared to be the fact that both sides had already sustained some casualties.
The incident had happened on Volga, a poor and austere planet whose inhabitants—mostly Jews and Slavs—earned a meager living by arduous and ceaseless labor. The planet had essentially only one large city, near the spaceport, and a single industrial enterprise—a fuel refinery. The rest of the habitable surface of the planet was taken up by shallow swamps, which were farmed by the planet’s inhabitants.
Volga had simply been unlucky—a small Zzygou trading vessel had happened to be passing the planet’s space.
The vessel wasn’t a recent model. Designed for nonmilitary use, it was not at all suited for action against a planet’s surface. But the Others turned upon the planet with kamikaze-like determination. Had they targeted the spaceport’s defense stations, fate might have actually smiled on them. But the Zzygou seemed to have gone insane. They started randomly shooting at the city from their low-powered plasma cannons, and in forty-two seconds were shot down by return fire. Strange as it may seem, the Zzygou weren’t even able to drop their burning ship onto the city. Instead it crashed in one of the uninhabited outskirts, where it quickly vanished in the deep muck of the swamp.
A short newscast from the planet was full of raw and unedited provincial emotion. A very young and attractive Jewish girl was giving a heated account of the damage sustained by the city and pointing out punctured roofs, mangled roads, and ruined buildings. The worst damage was caused to “the clinic of the kind Dr. Lubarsky,” the planet’s only dental-services center. Dr. Lubarsky himself, an imposing dentist-spesh with a crew cut, was standing in front of a blazing building, giving a colorful account of how, amid the sudden flames and shaking walls, he had rescued a lady-patient, carrying her to safety … he hadn’t even had a chance to finish cleaning a complex, twisted root canal… . Upset as he was, the dentist lost control of his movements—his right thumb and index finger formed a “claw” and started jerking and clicking involuntarily, as if searching for a bad tooth.
But the dentist turned out to be lucky. The destroyed clinic had probably been insured. As for the bookstore, which belonged to Yuri C-the-Second Semetsky, it hadn’t merely collapsed, but had buried its owner under the rubble. The clone’s spouse, sobbing uncontrollably, was incoherently telling a sympathe
tically nodding reporter what a good man C-the-Second Semetsky had been. Way better than C-the-First, with whom she had also been acquainted … He was so fond of trout. He had such a beautiful way of imitating the call of the swamp chaffinch … Believed in reincarnation and assured everyone that he remembered his previous lives, and each one of them had ended tragically … it was as if he had foretold his own fate … But whatever might have happened in Yuri’s former lives, his present life still had a chance, however slim—the rescue workers were tirelessly digging through the ruins in hopes that the poor man may have been protected by a layer of books, before being buried under concrete panels. The words of a rescuer-spesh also sounded encouraging—he heard a rhythmical tapping under the ruins. Perhaps it was only water dripping from some broken pipes, but everyone was eager to believe that it was the beating of Semetsky’s valiant heart … Alex turned the news off.
“What a farce,” he said sharply.
The Zzygou trading vessel hadn’t, of course, had any chance whatsoever. It either had no female aboard, or the female hadn’t been able to calm the crew down. It was amazing that they had even managed to destroy a few buildings.
But one fact remained—the Swarm and the Empire had already engaged in an armed conflict.
The door signal beeped.
“Open,” Alex ordered. He was getting ready to see Watson or Holmes, but it was Janet who entered the cabin.
Never since they’d met had Alex seen the Ebenian woman so content and aglow with such charm. Janet’s appearance couldn’t be described as beautiful, after all—five specializations had made her facial features too strange. But now she seemed to be radiating a light from within.
“Janet?” Alex went off to the bar, returned with a bottle of wine. Poured her a glassful.
“Thanks, that certainly won’t hurt. I just had a talk with our friend Holmes.” Janet lowered herself into an armchair. Looked sideways at the neuro-terminal that lay on the table. “You were having some fun?”
“A bit … So what did Holmes tell you?”
“That everyone is a suspect. But I …”—Janet gave a blinding smile, raised her glass in mock salutation—“am the prime suspect.”
“And that’s what made you so happy?”
Janet shook her head, regaining her seriousness for a brief moment.
“Not at all, Alex. I’m not prone to masochism. And I don’t find these accusations pleasant in the least. After all, I didn’t kill the Zzygou.”
For a few seconds, they were looking into each other’s eyes.
“Really and truly, I am not the one who killed her,” said Janet. “I have sworn an oath to you. What made me happy is something else.”
“What?”
“The war! The Zzygou won’t stop now. The Empire will have to engage in the war.”
“Janet Ruello,” said Alex slowly, “what you’re saying is monstrous. The war will cost the Empire billions of lives.”
“Oh, please.” Janet shook her head. “That’s complete nonsense. Our illustrious detective-spesh is of the same opinion as you, but he is wrong. The Zzygou will be defeated with little bloodshed.”
“But how the hell …?”
Janet gave him a puzzled look.
“You really don’t get it? Alex, my home planet hasn’t been demolished. Eben is sealed in an isolation field, but removing it is a matter of just a few minutes … if the Emperor gives the order.”
Alex gasped. And Janet continued calmly:
“Our planet cannot be measured by ordinary criteria. Trust me—I know. There, under the eggshell, the Church is still alive, and the patriarchs, as well as most of the fleet. New ships are still being built. New weapons are still being created. And our people feel no hatred for the Empire. If the field is removed, Eben will rejoin the Empire’s ranks. And believe me, there is still nothing in the galaxy to match the power of our Liturgy cruisers or our Anathema raiders! Your Emperor …”—Alex noticed this accidental—or was it deliberate?—slip of the tongue—“is only a little kid. But the Imperial Council has more than just idiots. If war becomes imminent, they will remove the quarantine from Eben. Then the Zzygou will be doomed. I’ve estimated … we will lose from five to fifteen planets before the fighting moves to Zzygou territory. Closer to five than to fifteen. And if the South-Sea lab on Eben has already finished working on the gluon net, the ships of the Others will burn upon exiting the hyper-channels.”
“Janet … do you understand what you’ve been saying?” Alex whispered. It was clear now what Edward had been hinting at. Earth really did have a super-weapon hidden away, a weapon everyone had long forgotten.
“I hope I’ve calmed you down!”
“Janet, you have just signed your own death sentence! Now you’re not only the prime suspect, but all the clues point to you!”
“But I didn’t kill the Zzygou,” she repeated stubbornly. “I had no idea her social status was so high. But … if my death serves to liberate Eben, I’m ready to die. By any means the Others may choose to devise.”
“Good Lord, Janet, what are you raving about?” Alex lunged toward her, grabbed her by the shoulders. “Even if Eben is liberated and the Zzygou defeated—what next?”
“We’ll see.”
“No need to see. I’ll tell you what will happen. If, with Eben’s help, the Empire manages to destroy one race, all the rest of them will prick up their ears. A common anti-human front will be formed … or a coalition. You don’t really think that the Empire will be able to stand up to the combined forces of ten alien races?”
“The races of the Others are disjointed. All have their bones to pick with one another.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll temporarily forget those. Eben, its ideology and politics, were at one point the cause of tension in the whole galaxy. Even the crazy Bronins had never made it their goal to purge all space of alien life forms. Eben as part of the Empire is the alarm signal for everyone!”
“So then, you think that a whole world, equal in power to the combined forces of Earth and Edem, should remain isolated for all eternity?” Janet spoke calmly, but dry bitterness broke through now and then in her voice. “Yes! I want it to be liberated! I dream of seeing my first-born again. I would like to go visit the graves of my parents and pay my respects to them, according to our custom. To see my old house … to visit my first teacher … to call on my first lover … You all consider Eben a cesspool of evil, when we’ve been humanity’s shield for hundreds of years! A weapons smithy, a military academy, a factory, and a base … everything the Empire needed. Do you know how beautiful Eben is? At least, those places where nature can still be found … We raped our own home planet, turned ourselves into soldiers … and all that we did for the sake of humanity! Because the Empire needed ships, ships, and more ships! And soldiers, and channel stations, and new kinds of armaments …”
Speshes were not prone to hysterics. But five specializations were probably too much for a human mind. Alex sensed that Janet was ready to burst into sobs.
How weird and absurd that was—here was a woman whose planet was used to scare little kids, whose profession was to torture the Others, and he couldn’t feel the socially prescribed condescending sympathy for her. He couldn’t, because he was ready to sign his name to every single word she had been saying.
Except that if Eben were to be liberated, a pan-galactic war would be unleashed.
“We became what humanity required,” Janet continued. “We were the Empire’s shield and its sword. And when we were no longer needed, they locked us away in a closet. To wait for better times.”
“For worse times.”
“What’s the difference? We were struck from the ranks of humanity. Yes, we had our own independent policies, but that didn’t happen overnight! We … we were betrayed, as soon as the Others raised a howl!”
“Your people refused to change, Janet. When wars became a thing of the past, your people didn’t want to move on.”
“Were we ever offered th
at option?” The woman tossed the hair off her forehead and looked defiantly at Alex. “Did anyone ever give us even the slightest chance? All we had was an ultimatum, and the united fleet moving towards Eben. That was it. There was no time to look for compromises. And so … forgive me, Alex, but I’m happy we are at war! My home planet will be free.”
Alex was silent for a moment.
“And still—it wasn’t you?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then who?”
A shadow of a smile ran through her face.
“I think I know who it was. But I won’t tell, Alex.”
“But you must tell!”
“No. Sharing suspicions isn’t part of my contract. A detective is aboard, let him puzzle it out.”
“You’ve sworn an oath to me,” Alex reminded her.
“I’ve sworn not to kill the Zzygou. I never swore to look for their killer.”
“And if I were to demand another oath …”
“No.”
Alex threw up his hands. Janet’s voice was dangerously high with tension. She was balancing on the edge of hysteria. But he was sure her hysterical fit would not lead to a concession.
“You’re wrong, Janet. Believe me, all this will lead to tragedy for Eben … and for the whole human race.”
“Maybe,” she rejoined immediately. “Nevertheless, it’s a chance.”
“Thank you for telling me the truth about yourself, at least.”
“Did I narrow your circle of suspects?” Janet laughed, calming down. “Alex … don’t attempt your own investigation. You can talk to everyone, and every single person will tell you they didn’t kill the Zzygou …”
“Why?”
“Because.” Janet got up. “I’m going back to my cabin, Captain. You can come visit me, if you want. We can play ‘sweet-sweet sugar and bitter chocolate.’”
Alex didn’t recall any such game. Well, Janet would probably be a great instructor, and the game—a fun way to pass the time.
If only he had the slightest wish to have sex now …
“I’ll think about it,” he said, evasively.