End of the Circle Read online

  Several theories had been advanced when the fog of newspace had lifted and distant stars had appeared, all of which had since been quickly overruled by updated findings: The SDF-3 had not been returned to hyperspace, nor had it manifested from fold somewhere in the intergalactic void.

  According to some, however, the present darkness was but the afterlife tunnel itself, and next would come encounters with deceased relatives and shadowy presences.

  Many, in fact, had already begun to review their lives.

  Screen-weary, Rick was massaging his eyes with his fingertips. Here was a universe to behold from the viewports, but to hear Lang tell it, the stars might as well have been insubstantial.

  Rem was standing behind the two of them, silently brooding.

  Lang said, “We train our scopes on the farthest reaches, millions of parsecs distant, and what do we find?”

  Rick waited, then realized that he was supposed to answer. “Uh, I don’t know. What do we get?”

  “Stars literally winking into existence.” Lang punched a scancorder’s playback bar. Eyes on the monitor again, Rick felt as though he were soaring over the crest of an invisible hill to watch stars appear on the horizon.

  “Maybe we’re inside some sort of torus,” he ventured. “Our motion’s a continuous curve instead of the straight line we perceive.”

  Lang’s upper teeth were bared when he turned Rick an over-the-shoulder look.

  Rick felt skewered. “It was only a suggestion.”

  “Of course,” Lang said with unconcealed condescension.

  All at once Rick was aware of Rem’s breath on the back of his neck. “Are you just going to stand there?” he asked, adopting Lang’s curdled expression as he swung around.

  “I have nothing to add,” Rem told him.

  Rick inclined his head to one side. “Rumor has it you blacked out when the lights hit us.”

  Lang twisted around in his chair. “I heard nothing of this.”

  The Tiresian regarded them coolly. “Minmei exaggerates. We unfortunately found ourselves at a nexus point. The experience was somewhat overwhelming. I may have lost consciousness, but only for a moment.”

  Lang traded looks with Rick. “Why didn’t you report this?” Rick pressed.

  Rem shrugged. “There was nothing to report. A slight feeling of dissociation, not altogether unpleasant.”

  Rick regarded him for a long moment. “The next time you find yourself at the center of something, Rem, you come to tell us about it. That’s an order.”

  Jack gave the Alpha’s thinking cap an angry toss as he climbed from the cockpit. The sensitive helmet struck the forward seat with an audible thud and drew the attention of a burly flight mechanic who was standing nearby.

  “You wanna watch that, sir,” the man said as Jack dropped to the deck. “Next time your bird’s not answerin’, you know why, right?”

  Jack considered making an issue of it but in the end apologized. “I’ll watch it.”

  “That’d be smart, Cap’ain.”

  Everybody’s a goddamn expert, Jack thought, striding away. Command when they order you not to engage, mechies when they’re telling you how to care for your gear. And Sean and the rest of the 15th jockeys when they’re telling you how to pilot your craft.

  Captain Phillips was approaching from across the hangar bay, Dante and Marie Crystal on either side. Jack looked around for Karen, but she was nowhere in sight. So I’ll go it alone.

  “That was some soarin’ there, hotshot,” Sean began. “Where’d you think you were, in an air circus?”

  “And I suppose you had the whole thing sussed, is that it, Phillips?”

  “At least we knew enough to go to Battloid, Jack,” Marie interjected.

  Jack glared at her. “Enough to go to Battloid? That was the most asinine thing I’ve ever seen. Even a VT cadet knows better than to go upright when going to lasers. It’s not only a waste of fuel but a wasted thought. I don’t know if that kind of stunt flying cut it against the Masters—personally, I doubt it—but this is null-g, folks. I mean, you Troopers better get your exo shit together if you’re gonna stay with the program.”

  The three ex-tankers exchanged wide-eyed looks.

  “Can you believe this guy?” Sean said. “He goes in teats-up, belly lasers engaged—full retro, mind you—and he’s got the nerve to rag us about stunt flying?”

  Jack fumed. It was the same argument they had been having for two years. Of course there had been no missions to fly all that time, so the competition had to be saved for practice runs with green cadets outside Tirol’s envelope or the occasional deep-space prototype op off the Ark Angel. Then there were the nights on leave when things got roughneck and rowdy downside in some Tiresian canteen. But what else could you expect from mechamorphs who had suddenly been plucked from combat and practically returned to school when they were not drawing watch assignments in ordnance factories or on some Karbarran-manufactured peat-cruisers?

  “I’m gonna have to trim your course some, Phillips,” Jack said menacingly.

  Sean motioned his teammates back and set himself in a bent-knee stance. He curled his fingers at Jack. “Come on, then, Jack. Make your move.”

  Jack really had not expected things to go that far but clearly realized there was no backing down. “Suit yourself, Sean,” he said, about to raise his fists.

  “That’ll be quite enough of that,” a voice said loudly enough to bring everyone around. Jack thought for a moment that Karen was coming to his six, but one look at her face told him he was flying blind.

  “This is positively the most pathetic excuse for a debriefing I’ve ever witnessed.”

  “We weren’t exactly debriefing, sir,” Dante started to say.

  “That’s right,” Sean said with a glowering glance at Jack. “It was more in the way of comparing styles.”

  Marie said, “Look, Karen, we were just—”

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten that we lost several good pilots out there, is that it?” She shook her head in disapproval. “Real heroes, all of you.”

  “Jeez, Karen,” Jack said with a hangdog look.

  “Save it,” she told him.

  “How are they being listed, sir?” Angelo Dante asked softly as Karen was about to walk away.

  She turned to face him. “A new classification to suit our new situation, Sergeant Dante. Neither killed in action nor missing and presumed dead.”

  “How then, sir?”

  “Presumed missing,” she told him.

  Elsewhere in the superdimensional fortress, retired 15th ATAC corporal Bowie Grant was making music.

  The return of the stars, the lightstuff of real space, had proved something of an inspiration for Bowie and his female lead singers, Musica and Allegra—two of the clone population Jonathan Wolfe’s starship had returned to Tirol—and they were trying out their gifts on a new composition when Minmei’s quiet entrance into the music room startled them into silence.

  “I—I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said.

  Bowie was speechless.

  “I just wanted to listen for a moment.”

  “C—come in, please,” Bowie stammered. The two clones, poised like museum statuary on either side of his rack of keyboards, regarded him with bemused expressions.

  Octavia, their sister in the triumvirate, had died on Earth, where Musica’s mystical rapport with the Cosmic Harp—an instrument whose melodies had once given shape and effect to the telepathic power of the Robotech Masters—had died too. But Musica’s voice was more alive than ever, as was Allegra’s, and together their harmonies came close to recalling for Bowie the magic of his first taste of that ethereal sound.

  He had been a keyboard artist then, masquerading as a tanker, just another artist caught up in the war. But he had been lucky enough to emerge from it with his creative impulses intact, and love to boot. Love for Musica: his pale and slender green-haired muse, his vocal accompaniment, his very life. Even limboed in newspace, they had e
ach other, the separate world created and sustained by their music.

  For years Bowie had tried with synthesizers and samplers to play the part of their missing third. But a rendering, an interpretation was the best that had been achieved. Oh, the harmonies might sound pleasing to an audience of untrained ears, but for those lucky enough to have experienced the triumvirate songs, the reconstructions were as far from the pure as Lang’s facsimile matrix was from Zor’s original creation.

  Missing in both cases was some immeasurable emotional component, the true conjurer’s magical touch. Lang lacked it, and Rem as well. And Bowie, for all the love that went into his work, simply could not push the compositions over the top. In the end what the trio had had to settle for was virtuosity, when the goal had been transcendence.

  What they lacked was a voice: powerful, heartfelt, sublime. Minmei was possessed of the gift, and countless times the past two years Bowie had wished that she might sing again. Now, suddenly, there she was standing in the music room’s curved hatchway.

  “You really want to listen?” Bowie asked as the hatch hissed closed.

  Minmei approached the keyboards tentatively, as though afraid of them somehow. “Well, more than listen, really.” She pressed a finger down on a black key. “Is it true you’ve learned to play some of Octavia’s vocal parts?”

  Bowie looked up at her. “Yeah, I have. Sort of. I mean, I sampled her voice before she … died.” He gestured to one of the keyboards. “Electronics do most of the real work. But we can’t get the harmonics Octavia’s voice used to create.”

  Minmei paused to consider that, then smiled lightly at the sister clones. “Do the three of you ever … well, do you ever sing any of the ancient Tiresian psalms?”

  “The Clonemasters’ songs?” Musica asked.

  Minmei bit her lower lip and shook her head. “No. I was thinking of the psalms from the early days, before the Great Transition.”

  Allegra looked surprised. “You know something of our ancient culture, Minmei?”

  “Some,” she confessed. “I read quite a bit when I was in Tiresia.” In the hospital, she left unsaid. “And of course Rem talks about those times.”

  The sister clones eyed one another.

  “So, you’d like us to sing one of the old psalms?” Bowie said uncertainly into the silence.

  Minmei fingered a minor chord. “Actually, Bowie, I was wondering if you could teach me some of Octavia’s parts.”

  Lisa hurried through the ship’s corridors, returning salutes when she was forced to but primarily attempting to avoid everyone’s gaze. Not that she heard so much as a giggle from the crew, but she knew what they were all thinking.

  She huffed to herself as she exited the lift on the med deck. One did not have to be a telepath to read the expressions of concealed amusement, to take note of the near smiles.

  She came through the hatch to the nursery’s observation room with fire in her eyes, the anger palpable enough to be felt clear across the room by the on-duty pediatric nurse and child-care staff.

  “Sir?” the nurse asked cautiously after springing to attention.

  Lisa threw everyone a cold, appraising look. “Which one of you made the PA announcement?”

  A small hand went up, and a corporal stepped sideways into view from the rear of the group. “I did, sir?” the young male staffer said in a tone that modulated to falsetto.

  Lisa coughed into her hand, suppressing a smile. “Now hear this, mister. When my presence is required or requested, you can send a courier or you can key into my command channel. But I don’t ever—repeat: ever—want to hear a call like that over the PA again. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” the corporal returned crisply.

  “ ‘Admiral wanted in the nursery’ ” Lisa muttered to herself. “Remember, all of you, we have to at least pretend that I’m running this ship. That I’m not just some working mom fitting a job around child rearing.”

  “Sir!” said several voices in unison.

  Lisa adopted a theatrically firm expression. “Good. Now what’s all this about?”

  “The children, Admiral,” the nurse said, indicating the nursery’s one-way observation window.

  Lisa stepped over to have a look, a puzzled frown contorting her features. Roy and a couple of human toddlers, along with Drannin and the rest of the Zentraedi children, were assembled in what was called the “creative crafts area,” where a sphere a good fifteen feet around had been fashioned out of extruded plastifoam. Lisa could see that some sort of hinges were inset along the equator of the sphere.

  “They didn’t do all that by themselves, did they?” she asked in alarm.

  The corporal shook his head. “No, sir. They asked for our help with the … globe or whatever it is. But they told us exactly what they wanted.”

  “I take it it opens somehow.”

  The head nurse chuckled. “It does indeed, Admiral.”

  Lisa regarded the two of them. “What’s inside?”

  “The most amazing thing,” the nurse said, enunciating each word. “They’ve been working on it all day long, everyone pitching in. The Zentraedi doing the heavy work, Roy directing the other kids in the fine work. But with barely a word exchanged among them. It’s like they knew from the start what they were after.”

  Lisa felt a chill run through her. “And what is it?”

  The nurse looked to the corporal, who drew a breath. “Their own version of a puzzle block or a transformable toy. Made entirely out of what they could salvage from other toys, except for a few items they asked us to procure: springs, cams, lubricants, that sort of thing.”

  “Lubricants?! You should be in there supervising them.”

  “We tried that, Admiral,” the nurse said. “But they stop playing whenever anyone enters the nursery. Frankly, sir, I find it a little, well, unnerving. That’s why I asked you down.”

  Lisa folded her arms, considering. “I think it’s time we found out just what they’re up to.” She spun on her heel and stepped to the nursery door. “I’m going inside,” she told the staff, one hand already on the knob.

  In a silent and deserted corridor on the recreation deck, Rem pressed an ear against the hatch to Bowie’s music room. He had promised Minmei he would wait until conditions were right before attempting to reachieve the altered state of mind that had gripped him when the lights had penetrated the fortress, but walking past the music room had proved too great a temptation.

  Rem understood that the nucleic memories awakened by those probing lights were not his own but Zor’s—Zor’s to a degree he had never experienced. Not at the insistence of the Regent and Haydon IV’s mind-bending devices, not with Cabell’s guidance, not under the influence of dried Flowers from Optera’s regrown gardens. The lights—and whatever intellect animated them—had accomplished something perilously wonderful by unveiling the sensate content of his progenitor’s experiences. And though the lights had vanished, perhaps never to reappear, they had left open a frequency to his other self.

  He ventured that he needed only attune himself to that uncommon freq and the flood of psychoid stuff would recommence. And with it, answers to just where the fortress was and for what purpose it had been brought there.

  Reluctantly, Minmei had agreed to assist him. The clones’ songs will provide the prompt I require, he had told her.

  But how much greater the effect if the triumvirate’s harmonies could be reinstated! For Minmei it would mean coming out of voluntary retirement, facing fear, relocating the voice that had worked miracles.

  And Rem could hear that voice now, muted by distance and inch-thick alloy. Bowie’s synthesizer was teaching her a vocal line, a measured, seemingly impossible leap of octaves. Minmei sang and Rem grinned: Yes, yes!

  “All right,” Bowie said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  The three singers joined voices.

  And a spike of pure light pierced Rem’s mind.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

>   I must admit that even I am somewhat stunned by the sudden reappearance of this comforting darkness and these distant stars, because I cannot help but recall what I said to Hunter that day in engineering: What would you have me do—fashion you a galaxy? Words to that effect, at any rate. Hunter, as usual, didn’t know how to take the remark. But could it be that I have actually succeeded in doing just that? Has the Protoculture finally endowed me with the ability to Shape, as Zand always maintained it would? And what, then, becomes my next move? Do I impose my will on the laws of this domain or simply think into being a world for us to orbit?

  Dr. Emil Lang, The New Testament

  Scanners indicate a profusion of life-forms, m’lord, Vard had told him. Perhaps this one will prove our treasure trove, eh?

  Zor could not recall his reply now—a glance, a glower, some noncommittal sound. It was true that treasures were sometimes found or discovered, but most often they were the end result of greed, plunder, willful extraction … “Which is it that you hold in store for us?” he asked an arc of reflected light outside the viewport. “A discovery that will reward us with wealth and fame, the accolades of our distant fathers? Or a world that will bring out the worst in us, a world for the taking?”

  The planet was the fifth of this star the charts called Tzuptum, a lush wanderer with a single oblate moon to light its night skies. Zor had a preference for such celestial partnerships and shivered thinking of Tirol’s long night, Fantoma’s oppressive proximity. It was not fitting for sentient creatures to be so overruled, rotated in the shadow of something monstrously huge. Thought and contemplation required a more subtle interplay of forces: of winds and tides and natural rhythms. In the absence of that grew an urge to dominate, to absorb the power of that larger other, to extend influence in the basest of manners, to conquer all that would threaten to overshadow …

  He brought his face close to the hull’s transparency, as though his eyes could tell him something the scanners could not. But what was there to discern from up here? he asked himself. Hailings had gone unanswered, and yet there was, as Vard had indicated, abundant life of a complex sort. So the planet’s life-forms were either pretechnological or atechnological. Primitive was the operative classification used by the ship’s cyber-networks, but Zor knew better than to accept that as in any way descriptive.