The Dark Path Read online

  "That was the whole message."

  "Yes, hi Emperor."

  "I . . . I confess I'm not sure I understand what the High Lord had to say."

  "I'm sure that Imperial Intelligence will—" Randall began.

  "No," the emperor said. "No, before I turn it over to Langley I want to understand what the High Lord was trying to say. He chose to communicate directly with me for a reason. Do either of you know why? Do you know what?

  "And what's more," he said, leaning forward, "I don't have any information that any naval force has been dispatched from Cicero. If I haven't been informed, how can he know?"

  Randall looked at Mya'ar. The esGyu'u had not changed his wing-position, but his eyes seemed to hold some scarcely concealed emotion.

  "The High Lord has dreamed, hi Emperor. His conclusions are based on his dreams; thus the High Lord guides the Flight of the People."

  "But why did he cloak it in . . . Why did he phrase it the way he did?"

  "I do not understand, hi Emperor," Mya'ar answered.

  "The references—the mythological terms. Surely he must know that I don't have the context."

  "He seeks to give you a sSurch'a, hi Emperor."

  "A sSurch'a?"

  "A leap of understanding. It is a means of teaching among the People. The elder places the facts before the junior and waits for him to reach the same conclusion on his own. The junior therefore believes in that conclusion, for he has obtained it through his own reasoning."

  "I see." The emperor was holding his voice level, perhaps a bit miffed at being referred to as "the junior." "Does he believe that I would not accept him at his word, if he simply said what he knew?"

  "Eight thousand pardons." Mya'ar's wing-position changed now, but neither human understood. "Forgive me, hi Emperor, but the High Lord has done exactly that. What he knows is indeed what he said."

  "He speaks of placing the Gyaryu'har on the dark road—"

  "Dark path, hi Emperor."

  "Dark path, then. se Sergei was sent to Cicero—does that mean he was placed in danger?"

  "Yes, hi Emperor."

  The emperor looked at him sharply. "Why? Why was he placed in danger?"

  "He was sent to Cicero in accordance with . . . the High Lord's dreams."

  "What could he do? se Sergei's an old man, for God's sake. He can't even walk."

  "He is the Gyaryu'har."

  "That is not an answer, se Mya'ar. What would he do if a group of—of esGa'uYal—turned up in Cicero System? Stab them with his gyaryu? Tell them tales from zor legend?"

  Mya'ar did not reply, but his wing-position changed again.

  "What will happen to se Sergei?"

  "What esLi wills, hi Emperor."

  "And that is not an answer, either." The emperor stood up and walked to the French doors, which gave out onto a covered lanai. He looked out toward the ocean without comment.

  Mya'ar and Randall waited patiently for the emperor to speak.

  "If this was so damned important," he said at last, "tell me, se Mya'ar: Why does this message come now? Why didn't hi Ke'erl provide this explanation—such as it is—before now?

  "And if he was going to put se Sergei in danger, why did he not inform me of the peril at Cicero?"

  "Surely, hi Emperor, he did—by sending the Gyaryu'har there," Mya'ar ventured. "There would be no other purpose in such a mission."

  "What you are saying," the emperor said, turning again to face the alien ambassador, "is that sending the Gyaryu'har was a signal to us: a signal we didn't understand."

  "The High Lord was not aware of this misunderstanding, hi Emperor. I ask eight thousand pardons again, but it must be noted that the Imperial Court has rarely listened to anything the High Nest has had to say."

  "The High Lord is our good friend. Surely he does not believe—"

  "hi Emperor. Whatever your feelings on the matter, it is not the position of the Imperial Government. This . . . This has been coming for some time."

  "What has been coming?"

  "The attack of the esGa'uYal."

  "But I thought the esGa'uYal were demons. Didn't your people once believe that we were servants of esGa'u?"

  "We were mistaken."

  "I am so very glad to hear that, se Mya'ar. I wish to be sure that the High Nest is not mistaken again."

  ***

  Each month Jackie made a personal visit to Cicero Op, the space station in orbit around the habitable world. The station was the most important facility in Cicero System—it was the anchorage for the Military District fleet and also provided meteorological information for the Cicero Down base and the other installations on-planet.

  The recent arrival of distinguished guests had made staff even more unwilling to interrupt her, so Jackie was surprised to hear her door-chime ring.

  "Come," she said, and the door slid aside.

  She was surprised when she saw Sergei Torrijos' chair hovering in the hall.

  "Mr.—se Gyaryu'har! I—"

  The old man smiled.

  She recovered her composure. "Please do come in."

  The chair coasted silently into her quarters. "Thank you," he said. "I would have called ahead, but I chose not to discuss my whereabouts with my staff. Given the . . . current strains, they probably would have demanded that I take an escort."

  She led him into her tiny sitting-room, made to appear larger through the clever placement of mirrors and holos. "Can I pour you something? g'rey'l, perhaps?"

  Sergei looked up at her, surprised for a moment, and then his face composed. "Yes. Thank you, Commodore."

  On an impulse she said, "My friends call me Jackie." She poured the liquid into two delicate long-stemmed glasses and handed one to Sergei.

  "Jackie, then. My friends"—he said, smiling slightly—"call me Sergei." He raised his glass.

  "esLiHeYar," she said and drank, making his face reflect an other moment's surprise: To the glory of esLi.

  He murmured assent. The drink burned pleasantly down the throat into the stomach. "You seem uncommonly well versed in our culture," he said after a moment.

  "Thank you." She pushed a wisp of stray hair from her face. "I have a zor exec. se Ch'k'te has taught me a great deal about the People." She looked at her half-empty glass, then reddened for a moment. "I mean to say—"

  "The two are different entities," Sergei said, holding up a hand and smiling. "I have lived among the zor for eighty-five years, Jackie, since I left Sol System at the end of the war.

  "I am the Gyaryu'har, but I am not a zor, as—" He lifted both of his frail arms. "—as my lack of wings will attest. Still, like many who went into exile with the Admiral, we have assimilated the culture of the People. Our descendants have had that all of their lives—we are a small, isolated culture among the People."

  "I see."

  "I suspect that you don't, but it doesn't trouble me. At least you invited me in for a drink."

  She didn't have a response for that, except to say, "I'm honored. Ch'k'te is honored as well . . . Well, more than that. Awed."

  "I get that a lot. At my age it goes right past, I assure you." He sipped on his g'rey'l. "I'm practically the only one left," he added.

  "Of the exiles?"

  "Of those who could not remain," he answered. "Exiles. 'Outcasts' might be a better term—we committed the unpardonable sin of winning the war and then went to live with the enemy."

  "The sin was in the way the war was won," Jackie replied, wondering where this was leading and whether she should get into this sort of discussion.

  "Is that what they teach aspiring officers these days? It's a terrible generalization. There was no other way. None. Two generations of soldiers and sailors and pilots, two generations of civilians, paid in blood because they wouldn't fight the war the way Admiral Marais fought it."

  There was a sudden quiet in the room as Sergei said the name of Admiral Marais. That name had overtones: They taught about the war at the Academy—how not? Marais was a vill
ain, pure and simple; he'd even written a book a few years after the war, justifying the campaign in the way Sergei had just described.

  She had no illusions. The zor had been an implacable enemy. Ch'k'te had convinced her of that much: She wouldn't want to be in a fight with him.

  "The People have long since accepted this. Why do you think they chose the Admiral to be the Gyaryu'har?"

  "And now you."

  "And now me. I am a human, se Jackie, but I am a servant of esLi and of the High Lord." Sergei moved his chair across the room, reflections in mirrors tracking him as he passed. He turned to face her again. "I suspect that you do not understand this, either."

  "I don't know what the Gyaryu'har does, if that's what you mean. I asked Ch'k'te, and he gave me a circular answer—that the Gyaryu'har carries the gyaryu."

  "The gyaryu." He reached to his belt, and pulled a finely tooled leather scabbard onto his lap. "The gyaryu is a chya, a very special one." Sergei moved his fingers slowly along the scabbard that held the blade. "Every adult of the People, both male and female, carries a chya from the time of enHeru, the rite of passage. In many ways it is the perfect zor weapon: a light, flexible and very dangerous blade. It is a talon. In ancient times, a chya was not enabled until it was bloodied in combat.

  "When the Dark Wing conquered, all of the chya were disabled—dishonored. Though we didn't realize it at the time, a majority of the People were willing to use their chya to transcend the Outer Peace, because the People had become hi'idju."

  "idju means 'dishonored,' " she said carefully. "hi'idju means—"

  "The entire People were dishonored."

  "And they would have committed mass suicide?"

  "Yes." Sergei looked away. "At the point at which the People surrendered to the Admiral, they considered that as a possibility—even though he told them he'd never ask them to do it. You nay find it hard to believe."

  "I do. Go on."

  "In order to change the flight of the entire People, Admiral Marais was given this." He drew the blade and held it before him, point up, his hand tightly gripping the hilt.

  The gyaryu was made of dark-colored metal, just over a meter long. It gleamed from careful attention. As the moment stretched out, Jackie became aware of a barely audible noise, as if from a quickly vibrating wire. Further, the blade seemed to be drawing on all the light in the room, making it dim and shadowy. She knew this was some sort of illusion, but found it strangely compelling.

  The old Gyaryu'har seemed to be watching her reaction, the way her junior officers did during staff meetings: alert to any indication of dissatisfaction or anger. No, she decided; it was more than that—it was almost as if he was trying to see if she'd noticed anything when he drew the sword.

  She certainly had noticed, but wasn't sure what that meant.

  "se Sergei . . ."

  "Let me tell you something else, se Jackie. The High Lord presented Admiral Marais with the gyaryu when he realized the Solar Empire—and humanity—was not the enemy, and that it was likely they never had been. The war changed so many lives, but it came about as a result of a flawed vision. My life, my career . . ."

  "Your career was ruined by the war," Jackie said quietly into the darkness.

  "Well," Sergei said, "one career was ruined." He sheathed the gyaryu, and placed his hands over it, one atop the other. "We all took solace from the irony of the situation—that we had had our service to the emperor severed because we did too good a job.

  "It was a common belief in the Empire, you know, that in a few years there would be another war, more violent than all of the previous ones. The zor would be even more angry and vengeful for what Admiral Marais did to them."

  "It would stand to reason."

  "Human reason, se Jackie. Not zor reason. It was not possible to undo what had been done, but the Flight of the People had been irrevocably changed. We all changed with it: The Empire, the Nests, everything changed . . . except that the true enemy, the one we did not see, remained. It's still out there and High Lord Ke'erl HeYen has felt the dark ships at the edge of our space."

  "Dark ships," Jackie repeated.

  "Horace Tolliver didn't believe me when I told him that hi Ke'erl had dreamed. It's curious—your analysis may be exactly correct: What the Gustav Adolf II and the Negri Sembilan encountered was the enemy that hi'i Sse'e felt so many years ago. All these years . . . waiting for us, just as he believed."

  "Wait." Jackie leaned back against a side table. "Hold on just a minute, se Sergei. 'The true enemy?' Are you suggesting that the High Nest has known of an enemy . . . for most of a century? Why didn't this intelligence come to the emperor's attention?"

  " 'That the ear does not hear is not the fault of the voice,' " Sergei quoted. "There have been representatives of the People at the court of the Solar Emperor since the Act of Normalization; there is an envoy who is the voice and the ear of the emperor at the High Nest. Do you think that the matter has never been mentioned?"

  "Of course not."

  "Indeed not. The High Nest has tried to reach out to humanity, but there has been no effort in return."

  If there had been any doubt how much exile had changed the old man in front of her, the last comment confirmed it. When he spoke of "humanity" he wasn't talking about himself; when he spoke of the High Nest, it was something he was part of.

  "What does the High Nest believe will happen next?"

  Sergei looked away, as if there were a response he had in mind but didn't want to express it.

  "Horace Tolliver has taken six ships of the line into the hands of the enemy. There's a good chance we will never see them again."

  Sergei spoke of an enemy. To Jackie, the idea of an "enemy" was a simple, logical one: a foe, usually armed, whose objectives were opposite to one's own. The armed forces of the Empire existed to combat enemies . . . but she realized that Sergei was not speaking in those terms. To him the enemy was a shadowy, almost mystical thing. Following her own intuition, Jackie's mind snapped back to the horror of her shared vision with Ch'k'te: of the tentacled monsters that had comprised her nightmare.

  The enemy. The true enemy.

  She could not speak. It was as if Sergei held her silent, drawing out the moment. She had thought mankind had come to terms with its fear of the dark, the fear of what might be lurking out there beyond the range of its narrow sight. The zor had personified that darkness, calling it esGa'u, the Deceiver. Humans had simply rationalized it away.

  It remained there all the same.

  ***

  They rode the shuttle into orbit in relative silence. It was hard to make small conversation with the Gyaryu'har. It was not a question of taciturnity on his part; more that she realized a certain ambiguity to everything she thought to say and wondered how he might interpret it.

  It was too much for her. The older man seemed to be trying to get her to jump to some sort of conclusion based on the available data. She had thought she understood the zor, with their strange, precognitive culture and their mystical view of the universe. She had thought she understood the unknown, and the way in which it was to be explored. She had thought she had learned to comprehend the vastness of space, especially the seemingly infinite reaches beyond that which man and zor had explored. In a sudden moment of terrible insight, Jackie realized that she had really understood nothing at all.

  She did understand Admiral Tolliver's position: It was hard to base any sort of sound military planning on the dreams of a High Lord, especially someone like Ke'erl HeYen. They said that the High Lord was mad; even Ch'k'te had confided to her his fear that the zor were being led by an—what was the word he had used?—alGa'u'yar. Decadent and weak; short of the standard expected of a warrior. Certainly not a complimentary view.

  Nonetheless Ke'erl HeYen, whatever his faults, real or perceived, was a powerful Sensitive, perhaps the most powerful alive. Before now Jackie had always assigned these facts—along with the rest of the insight she had gained into zor culture—to a
compartment of her mind in which illogical and irrational perceptions could exist. As a Regular Navy officer, it was inappropriate for her to base her judgment on such things; the idea of having to take such matters into consideration frightened her more than she wanted to admit. Enemies she should understand; bogeymen she could not, or would not, grasp—only fear.

  But the idea that they might exist scared her even more.

  ***

  One visit a month to the Operations Center was about all Jackie could usually take. Though it was always a pleasure conduct an inspection of the Center, it was almost as great a pleasure to depart. Its CO, Commander Bryan Noyes, was in any ways the epitome of a staff officer: an intelligent, precise, studious man, demanding and accurate, who probably hadn't touched a weapon in ten years. When she had been posted here, Jackie had been advised on Noyes by the former commander of cero, who had chosen to leave Noyes behind when taking a flag post somewhere in the inner sphere. "Noyes," the old commander had said, "is a pain in the ass, but he's the best damn pain in the ass in His Majesty's Fleet." Truer words were never spoken.

  As she had ordered several days ago, the Operations Center was at full alert. After a long exchange of recognition signals and passwords, the shuttle was directed to a berth at the station. The orbital station was extremely busy, requiring its own traffic coordination; the shuttle was routed along a lane between two large tugs, one coming in from the outer system and the other parting. They dwarfed the little gig.

  Noyes had prepared for their visit with more flourish than usual. He met them on the hangar deck, accompanied by an honor guard that mustered all half-dozen zor on board the station.

  Jackie and Sergei descended from the gig to the hangar deck. Noyes stepped forward and offered a crisp salute, then bowed to Sergei.

  "Permission to come aboard, Commander," Jackie said. It was a ritual phrase, but tradition required her to ask.

  "Granted, of course. Welcome aboard, Commodore," he said to Jackie. "Welcome aboard, sir," he said to Sergei. "Is this your first visit here?"

  Sergei was taking in the view with what seemed to be the curiosity of a dirtsider. He turned his glance slowly to Noyes. "Yes, it is. Quite a facility," he added.