Dreamspy. Jacqueline Lichtenberg
that often?”
“Probably not. There’s not much we could do if it fails, and nothing we can do to prevent it from failing. But somehow it makes me feel better.”
“I know what you mean. I feel guilty about what happened to him. If I’d stayed in the bunk, he’d be alive.”
“There’s no point to looking at it that way.” She turned to examine him, wondering again about where he was from. His accent certainly wasn’t Teleod, and his cultural assumptions didn’t seem to form a pattern either. But then she didn’t know much about the Metaji cultures. “If it would make you feel any better, talk to Idom about it. He could probably count the tools in that drawer that got loose, and the number of links in Zuchmul’s radiation suit, and explain why the accident was inevitable.” She gave a shrug and smiled.
He laughed. It was tense and a little rusty. None of them had laughed at all in days. But it was a real laugh.
She joined in with a chuckle. “All right, so I tease Idom. But what he really does do seems just that absurd to me. After all, numerical harmonics and probability resonances—accidents—aren’t my field. Astrogation, Guild style, is the creation and control of accidents; telepathy occurs on a level where the concept ‘number’ is not defined. Elias, Zuchmul wouldn’t hold you responsible, but Idom could tell you why you’re not.”
She bent over the stasis indicators. She leaned on the bubble that enclosed her luren friend, wondering if there was any hope for his revival. What would the occupation force do with a luren in stasis? She had to hold her breath against the tears. There was no time now for pain. Their lives were still in danger.
She didn’t hear Elias move, but his hands came onto her shoulders and he pulled her back against him...the only way he knew how to offer comfort. And for the first time since she had threatened him with mental invasion for his trouble, there was no tension in him, just warmth. She firmed up her barriers and tried not to resist, remembering how the Paitsmun crewman had criticized her for her unconscious mannerisms. They could give her away both as a telepath and as Eight Families. If she was going to be Kyllikki Abtrel, Metaji paramedic, she had to practice.
“That’s better,” said Elias, and his voice was a caress. “It won’t be too bad. If they catch you, they’ll just ship you home. Surely, that’s not so terrible a fate.”
She whirled in his arms. “I’d be better off dead!”
“You can’t really mean that?”
“I can, and I do. Doesn’t this war mean anything to you?”
“It does. Oh, it does. But,” he said, glancing at Zuchmul’s shadowy form, “you have friends here, you must have had friends at home. They’d be glad to see you. They’d help you. It must have been terrible, to leave all that.”
She studied his expression, wanting to thin her barriers and read the emotions that always whirled about him in glowing spirals. But it hardly took a telepath to feel the wistful yearning of an exile who lacked hope, nor the solid trust he had in her Metaji Communicator’s principles.
She put one hand on the stasis case. “I had friends, yes, and a lot of them might side with me now...if they saw any political advantage in it. But Zuchmul wouldn’t care what anybody else thought or did. He’d defend me anytime, anywhere, against anything. And I’d do the same for him. Elias, that couldn’t happen in the Teleod. Zuchmul is luren. Do you understand what that means?”
“But luren are human.”
“Here, yes. There, no, not quite human enough.”
“I see.”
“Do you? This war isn’t about enfranchising nonhumans or about protecting the firmament from permanent damage. It’s about power, and the abuse of power. In the Teleod, the reins of power are in the hands of the Eight Families, and right now that’s mostly just one person, my cousin Zimor, Lady of Laila. The Lady of Laila.”
“I thought you said the Teleod elects its rulers.”
“It does, but only members of the Families are eligible to be elected, and only wealth buys the right to vote. The Families control the great fortunes, which rest on the ebb and flow of trade. And all of their power rests on their control of the Pools, on control of ship movements. Destroy the Pool Operators, put the Pools into the hands of the proven impartiality of the Guides’ Guild, and even the Families’ telepathy couldn’t keep them in power. Anyone, even a Paitsmun, could amass great wealth, or even political power. And the nonhumans outnumber humans.”
His face had turned to stone. “I’d never heard it put quite like that before.”
She didn’t think she’d said anything that any Metaji news commentator might not have said.
“But if the hold of the Families on the Teleod is based on trade, why do they oppose protecting the shipping lanes from being destroyed?”
“The Families don’t. Not really,” said Kyllikki. “Zimor does because she doesn’t believe there’s any real threat from the traditional method of Operation. She’s convinced the Guild’s crying doom just to break her power. It’s hard to explain to someone used to thinking in Imperial terms. Here, the people who hold power don’t get it because they want it. They get it because they’re best suited to the job. And they have it for life so they’re not always looking over their shoulder wondering who’s going to take it away from them. I mean, a Count or a Duke has to be really bad before the Emperor would remove them from office. And their incompetence has to be proved before the Imperial courts. There are laws here that prevent the kind of thing Zimor has been doing.”
“What has she been doing?”
She missed the guarded tone of that question. “Oh, anything she pleases! She’s insane, Elias, paranoid, and totally oblivious to the pain she causes as she pursues her own goals. There isn’t anything that can stop her...except maybe the massed power of the Metaji Empire.”
“So that’s why you’re here? Because you want to stop your...cousin.”
“Elias, don’t judge me too harshly. It’s very hard for anyone raised in the Metaji to understand the use of military power as a political tool. That’s why it took so long for this war to get started, but there is no other way to stop Zimor. However many lives it costs, it’s fewer lives than will be lost if she’s not stopped. I couldn’t do anything against her. I just—ran. Ran away to hide.
“You really believe that.”
“It’s true. I’m not proud of it.
“Anything that your courage can’t stand against has to be pretty formidable.”
Shog! He really means that! “I’ve never had to use any courage here. It’s a much better place to live.”
“Are you sure? I mean, how much of it have you seen?”
“Well, I haven’t met the Emperor, but I’ve dealt with some Counts, various Guild officers, and an assortment of ordinary people, a lot of whom were much less human than Zuchmul. There was even one Duke who wasn’t human who treated me with respect when nobody else would. You won’t value what you’ve got here unless Zimor wins this war. And then it will be too late.”
“So after the war, presuming we win, will you go home?”
“I—I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because home won’t be there anymore, and I’m not the same person I was when it was home. Does that make sense?”
He cocked his head to one side and studied her. Then, gravely, judiciously, he nodded. “Strangely enough, I think it does. At least, I hope it will. It’s certainly something to think about.”
It didn’t seem that difficult an idea to her, but she shrugged. “Where do you come from?”
He pulled her over to his bunk and they