The Dreaming Void (65 page)

“Call me Oscar. I was that longer than I was ever Yaohui.” That was his new identity when he went on the run for over forty years.

“As you wish.”

Oscar managed to prop himself up on his elbows, a movement that surprised him. He had seen re-life clones several times: pitiful things with thin flesh stretched over bones and organs that had been force-grown to adolescence, unable to move for months while they painfully built up muscle mass. This body, though, seemed almost complete, which meant the technique had improved. There had been a lot of bodyloss in the war, tens of millions at least. He probably had been shoved down to the bottom of the list. “How long?”

“Please understand, er, Oscar; you were put on trial for your, uh, previous crime. It set quite a few legal precedents, given your, uh, state at the time.”

“What trial? What do you mean, ‘state'? I was dead.”

“You suffered bodyloss. Your memorycell survived the crash intact; legally, that is recognized by the Commonwealth as being your true self. It was recovered by one Paula Myo.”

“Uh …” Oscar suddenly was getting a very bad feeling about this. “Paula recovered me?”

“Yes. You and Anna Kime. She brought both of you back to Earth.”

“But Anna was a Starflyer agent.”

“Yes. Under the terms of the Doi amnesty, her Starflyer conditioning was edited out of her memories, and she was re-lifed as a normal human. Apparently she went on to have a long life and a successful marriage to Wilson Kime. She was certainly on the
Discovery
with him when it flew around the galaxy.”

Oscar's shoulders were not so strong, after all; he sagged back onto the mattress. “How long?” he repeated; there was an urgency in his growl.

“You were found guilty at the trial. Your navy service record was a mitigating factor in sentencing, of course, but it couldn't compensate for the number of people who were killed at Abadan station. The judge gave you suspension. But as the Commonwealth clinics were unable to cope with the sheer quantity of, uh, noncriminals requiring re-life at the time, he allowed you to remain as a stored memory rather than be re-lifed before the sentence began.”

“How long?” Oscar whispered.

“You were sentenced to one thousand one hundred years.”

“Fuck me!”

He was all alone. That was probably a worse punishment than suspension. After all, he was not aware of time passing during that millennium; he could not reflect and repent his wrongdoing. But in this present, life was different. Everyone he had known had either died or migrated inward—ridiculous phrase, a politically correct way of saying they had committed euthanasia with a safety net. Maybe that was the point of suspension, after all. It certainly hurt.

So with no friends, no family, knowledge and skills that even museums would not be interested in, Oscar Monroe had to start afresh.

The navy, understandably, did not want him. He explained that he didn't expect to be part of the deterrence fleet and offered to retrain as a pilot for their exploration crews. They declined again.

Back before the Starflyer War he had worked in the exploration division at CST. Opening new planets, giving people a fresh start, was like a self-imposed penance except that he'd really enjoyed it. So he did train as a starship pilot. Fortunately, the modern continuous wormhole drive used principles and theories developed during his first life; he brought himself up to speed on its current technology applications quite rapidly.

Orakum SolarStar was the third company he had worked for since his re-life. It wasn't much different from any other External world starline. In fact, it was smaller than most. Orakum was on the edge of the Greater Commonwealth, settled for a mere two hundred years. But that location made it a chief candidate from which to mount new exploration flights, opening up yet more worlds. They were rare events. The navy had charted every star system directly outside the External worlds. Expansion to new worlds was also at a historical low. The boundary between Central and External worlds had not changed much for centuries. The old assumption that Higher culture always would be extending outward and that ordinary humans would be an expanding wave in front of it was proving to be a fallacy. With inward migration, the number of Higher humans remained about constant, and the External worlds provided just about every kind of society in terms of ethnicity, ideology, technology, and religion; should any citizen feel disenfranchised on their own planet, they just had to take a commercial flight to relocate. There was very little reason to found a new world these days.

In the nineteen years he had been on Orakum, SolarStar had launched only three planetary survey flights. Two of them had been closer than the distance the company's long-range commercial flights traveled, hardly breaking through to new frontiers. But he had seniority now. If another outward venture came along, he ought to be chosen. Like all pilots, he was an eternal optimist.

There was no hint of that elusive mission in the company offices when he filed his flight report. He'd just gotten back from a long haul flight to Troyan, seventy light-years away, a fifteen-hour trip with nothing to do other than talk to the smartcore and trawl the unisphere for anything interesting. One day soon, he was sure, people finally would chuck the notion that they had to have a fellow human in charge. He was sitting in the front of the starship only for public relations. In fact, there were probably people sitting in the passenger cabin who were better qualified than he if repairs were needed, not that they ever were.

But at least he got to visit new planets. The same ones—over and over again.

His regrav capsule sank out of the wispy clouds to curve sedately around the house and land on the grass beside the spinney of lofty rancata trees nearly twenty meters tall with reddish-brown whip leaves that swayed in the mild breeze. He climbed out and took a deep breath of the warm, plains-scented air. Out beyond the horizon, Orakum's untamed countryside was carpeted by spiky wildflowers that budded most of the year. Another reason to choose Orakum was its benign climate.

Jesaral was walking out from underneath the house. The splendidly handsome youth did not quite have a welcoming smile on his face but definitely looked relieved to see Oscar. He was wearing only a pair of knee-length white trousers, showing off a tanned body that always got Oscar's blood pumping a little faster. Jesaral was the youngest of his three life partners, barely twenty. That, Oscar suspected, probably qualified him as the worst Punk Skunk in the galaxy. A thousand-year-plus age gap: It was delightfully naughty.

The youth opened his arms wide and gave Oscar a big hug to accompany a long sultry kiss. Enthusiasm sprayed out heedlessly into the gaiafield.

“What's the matter?” Oscar asked.

“Them,” Jesaral said, stabbing a thumb dismissively back at the house.

Oscar refused to sigh. He and his other partners, Dushiku and Anja, had been a stable trio for over a decade. They were both over a hundred and completely at ease with each other. At their age they understood perfectly the little accommodations necessary to make any relationship work. It was taking everyone longer than expected to accommodate and adjust to the newcomer, who did not have anything like their experience and sophistication. That was what made him so exciting in and out of bed.

“What have they done?”

“It's a surprise for you. And I know how you hate surprises.”

“Not always,” Oscar assured him. “Depends if it's good or bad. What's this one?”

“Oh, no. I'm just telling you there is a surprise for you. I don't want you to be upset that it's there, that's all.”

Oscar used a macrocellular cluster to connect to the house's net. Whatever was waiting inside had been blocked skillfully. That would be Anja, who developed commercial neural routines. She was one of the best on the planet.

“You have the strangest logic I've ever known,” Oscar said.

Jesaral smiled broadly. “Come on! I can't wait.” He tugged at Oscar's arm, his outpouring of enthusiasm shining like sunrise.

They hurried to the base of the pillar and climbed the wide spiral staircase. It brought them out into a small vestibule planted with colorful bushes from several worlds, their flowers reaching for the open sky above. Ten doors opened off it. Jesaral led the way into the main lounge. In contrast to the exterior, the lounge was clad in caranwood, a local variety that was a rich gold-brown. The grain of the planks had been blended so skillfully, it looked as if they were inside a giant hollowed-out trunk. Its furniture was scarlet and gold, contributing to the sumptuous feel.

Dushiku was waiting in the middle of the big room, holding out a tumbler of malt whiskey with three ice cubes. He had a mischievous smile on his broad face. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks.” Oscar took the drink wearily.

“I see Jesaral's restraint is as strong as ever.”

“I didn't tell him,” Jesaral protested.

“So?” Oscar inquired.

Dushiku raised an eyebrow and half turned, indicating the balcony beyond the glass wall at the far end of the lounge. Anja was standing out there, leaning on the rail as she spoke about some aspect of the gardens below. Her laughter-filled voice was just audible through the open door. Oscar knew the tone well. She was playing the perfect hostess, marking her territory. Anja was astonishingly beautiful, a beauty that took a full third of her salary to maintain. Two visits to a clinic each year were considered an essential minimum, for beauty was fluid and fashions were treacherous ephemera even on Orakum. She'd returned three weeks earlier from her last treatments, showing off her reduced height and dark satin-texture skin. Her face was all gentle curves veiled by a mane of thick chestnut hair swishing down past her shoulders. Huge fawn-colored eyes peered innocently out of the shadows, projecting a girlish innocence complemented by a perpetual ingenue effervescence into the gaiafield. Her clothes were deceptively simple: a scarlet T-shirt and dark blue swirling skirt demonstrating her compact figure's expensive femininity.

Yet for once Anja wasn't impressing the person she was talking to. Oscar watched the other woman leaning on the rail. She was easily half a head shorter than Anja, wearing a stylish white dress with a slight surface shimmer and a rust-red short-sleeved jacket. She was not responding with the kind of attention Anja was used to extracting from everyone she came across. He could tell. After ten years, Anja's body language and the tone of her voice were an open book. And the more she failed to impress, the more huffy she got. He even allowed some of his amusement to trickle out into the gaiafield.

Anja must have sensed it. Her full lips hardened into a rebuke as Oscar walked toward the balcony. “Oscar, darling, I've been talking to an old friend of yours.”

The other person on the balcony turned around, smiled shrewdly.

Oscar dropped the tumbler as his hands, along with every other part of his body, were shocked into loss of sensation. The crystal smashed, sending the ice cubes bouncing across the polished wood.

“Hello, Oscar,” Paula Myo said.

“Holy shit!”

“Long time, no see.”

Oscar couldn't even grunt.

Alarm was starting to seep into the gaiafield as his life partners took in the tableau.

“You two …” Jesaral said, his finger rising to point accusingly at Paula. “I thought—”

“It's all right,” Oscar managed to croak.

“What is this?” Jesaral said accusingly to Paula. “You said you were friends.”

“We used to be. A long time ago.”

“That old excuse. Again! Everything happened before I was born.”

“Everything did,” Oscar said. His u-shadow summoned a maidbot to clean up the broken tumbler. Only then did he finally manage a weak smile. “How are you doing, Paula?”

“Same as usual.”

“Yeah.” She had not changed, not physically. Nothing was different, except maybe her straight dark hair was a couple of centimeters longer. Unlike him, who had been given a great new Advancer body based on his own DNA and then enriched with all the macrocellular clusters and stronger bones, more efficient organs, and greater longevity. After eighty-six years, he still wasn't anywhere near needing rejuvenation, although his face was starting to show signs of his newly lived years, as Anja never tired of pointing out. But her … He guessed she must be Higher now. Somehow he could not see her visiting clinics for vanity's sake.

“You do know each other, then?” Dushiku asked uncertainly.

“Yes.” Oscar cleared his throat. “Could you give us a moment, please.”

His life partners exchanged troubled glances, flooding the gaiafield with concern and considerable irritation. “We'll be outside,” Anja said, patting his arm as she went past. “Just yell.”

The maidbot waddled into the lounge and started sucking up the malt. Oscar backed up to a settee and sat down hard. The numbness was dissipating, replaced by a growing anger. He glared at Paula. “One thousand one hundred years. Thanks for that.”

“I recovered your memorycell.”

“You put it on trial!”

“You're as alive now as the day you flew the hyperglider. That's more than can be said for your victims at Abadan.”

“Jesus fucking wept! Will you stop persecuting me.”

“I can't make you feel guilty. You do that to yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He sank deeper into the cushioning. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You live well.” She turned her head, studying the lounge. “Anja was quite proud of the house. I can see why.”

“My CST Retirement and Rejuve pension fund was paid over into a trust the day the trial ended, courtesy of Wilson. You want to know what one thousand one hundred years' interest looks like? You're standing in it. Bloody inflation! I should have been able to buy a planet.”