A Covenant of Justice (2 page)

Now, the part of Zillabar's palace that served as shuttlecraft slid into its final docking maneuver. It fitted itself gracefully into the center of the great turning web of light and power. Once again complete,
The Golden Fury
glowed in readiness.

Inside the vessel, inside her hold, inside her prison, her human cargo felt the final thump of the docking. The men looked at each other's eyes, searching for a reason to hope.

Sawyer Markham quashed the impulse. “Burihatin,” he said grimly. “We go to Burihatin 14.” He saw the TimeBinder react sharply to this information.

“How do you know this?” asked Lee-1169.

“The Lady herself said so. She told d'Vashti. She did this in our presence, then she dismissed him. I don't think she likes him very much.”

“Don't let her anger fool you,” Three-Dollar said. “Vampire women like to torture their mates before they eat them. They don't have the same kind of emotions as humans. They don't have love; they have a form of intense hatred for that which attracts them. It produces terrible frenzied matings. Sometimes the male survives, more often not.”

“It sounds dreadful. Why would anyone want such a goal as desperately as d'Vashti seems to?”

Three-Dollar smiled gently. “In ancient days, humans practiced much the same kind of mating. And desired it every bit as desperately.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

The TimeBinder nodded gently. “I remember it well. Before the Phaestor began licensing wombs, humans numbered as many females as males.”

“No—you joke with us. I can't imagine that,” Sawyer said.

“Whether you can imagine it or not, it happened.” Three-Dollar said calmly. The men in the room listened, fascinated. Even Drin, Tahl, and Tuan, who normally kept to themselves, came closer to hear this history. “Any man and any woman who chose to mate could do so, simply by publicly declaring their commitment to each other and signing a formal contract which guaranteed their responsibility for any resulting offspring. The female actually carried the children within her own body, within her own organic womb. She grew the children one at a time. Sometimes she gave birth to male children, sometimes female. Without selection, the process remained totally random.”

“It sounds . . . very haphazard,” said Finn. “And dangerous.”

The TimeBinder nodded. “Indeed it does sound haphazard and dangerous, but it worked. It worked for humans, at least. Most of the time. Apparently, it didn't work for the Phaestor. The Vampires don't like to have this fact known, but human scientists created them. Apparently, they created them too well—
too
aggressive. After destroying the predators, the Vampires began uncreating their progenitors.

“Using their authority on the worlds they controlled, they began licensing all breeding to keep the resident populations from getting out of control. Over a period of many centuries, they have drastically reduced the populations of their subject worlds. Now, if a human wants a child, a Vampire has to approve it, and the child—almost always male—will come from a synthetic womb. The Vampires only allow female births where their control of the child remains assured. They fear unlicensed breeding, because their enemies could grow an army that way.”

“Well, we would—” said Lee. “Wouldn't we?”

“You really don't know, do you?” said Three-Dollar. “They've even taken that away from you. Try to imagine,” he continued, intensely, “what it means to hold your own child in your hands, the product of your loins, a laughing infant, so pink and delicate and so utterly helpless and dependent on you. Try to imagine the surge of emotion you would feel every time you look at your baby, the overpowering need to shelter and protect it from all harm. Try to imagine the
love
. Humans don't breed children like Vampires. We don't raise our offspring as weapons. We raise them as family—as pieces of ourselves. Your children become your way of achieving immortality.

“What you feel for your brothers, Lee—what Sawyer and Finn feel for each other, what Ibaka and Kask felt for their families—that same emotion grows even stronger for your mate and your children. The Vampires don't have that emotion. Because of the way they breed, they can never know it. But they know we have these feelings and they fear us because of it. In the calculations of their minds, they might know that we don't think like they do; but in their moment-to-moment hormone-maddened existence, they can only see us as reflections of themselves. Because humans never act as they expect us too, we trouble them immensely.” He smiled wickedly. “The poor Vampires. They imagine themselves the warriors of the Cluster, but in truth, they remain trapped in their inability to imagine.”

The men fell silent for a while, each one examining in his own soul the meaning of the freedoms that William Three-Dollar had described. Such concepts had never before occurred to them, and the visions they produced had a disturbing quality. “When we defeat the Vampires,” Tuan said, with an almost reverent awe for the possibilities that Three-Dollar had evoked, “we really will live differently.”

“Your children will benefit from your victory,” Three-Dollar said wisely. “If you follow in the path of every rebellion before you, you yourselves will probably have a great deal of trouble appreciating the fruits of your victory.”

“Do you think we'll win, TimeBinder?” Drin asked.

“I predict the past,” Three-Dollar said. “Not the future.”

“Burihatin,” Sawyer said. “What does that mean to you?” Sawyer pressed him. “I saw you react to it before. Why?”

The tall man allowed his concern to show. “We've known for some time that d'Vashti had sent his Marauder squadrons to Burihatin 14. We knew that they searched for the TimeBinder, but hadn't yet found him. Zillabar must know something. She wants that headband in particular. It has much more interesting knowledge than this one—” He tapped his forehead. “Much of the history of the creation of the Phaestor rests in the Burihatin memories. If she gains that knowledge, who knows what power it could give her?” He added grimly, “The fact that we go there now could indicate several things. Perhaps she's become too impatient to wait for d'Vashti's agents. Perhaps she doesn't trust d'Vashti. Perhaps her own people have located the headband. If the latter case, then they may have already killed the TimeBinder.” He looked around at the others. “And if the latter has occurred, then she will have the power to destroy the Gathering and
all
the TimeBinders.”

The command bridge of
The Golden Fury
looked like an elegant drawing room. One end of it fell away to become a railed terrace overlooking a giant window onto empty space, actually an enormous holographic display. Below this balcony, the ship's flight crew—all specially neutered Vampires—worked busily at several ranks of work stations. The Lady glanced down at them only perfunctorily. Neuters held no interest for her. She turned back to her guests—in particular, the Dragon Lord.

“Have you had enough to eat, your grace?” she asked with elaborate courtesy. The Lady offered her greeting purely as a formality; her question did not refer to the Dragon Lord's immediate consumption of comestibles aboard the starship.

The Dragon Lord belched contentedly and grinned a metallic smile. The stench of his eructation reached her delicate nostrils a moment later; but if it offended her, she betrayed no sign.

“Feed well? Yes, indeed I did,” the Dragon Lord grunted happily. “For the first time in many years, I have not only filled myself to the point of satiation, but I have actually had to leave part of my meal uneaten because I could not hold any more. I had not believed I would ever know such joy again. Indeed, had I not received your delicious invitation to join you on this expedition, I would have gone dormant for days while I digested. Perhaps I still might.”

The Lady hid her reaction to the Dragon Lord's unexpected admission. Whatever surprise she might have felt, she carefully kept herself from showing it. She realized unhappily that the great Dragon's candor about his own recent excess represented his way of chiding her, of letting her know that he remained very much aware of the hunting rites that Drydel—and by implication, herself—had practiced at the now-razed nest in the desert. She had asked the Lord to personally oversee the destruction of the remaining evidence. Of course, the bloody-damned lizard would use his knowledge to its maximum benefit for himself. He would remind her of this dishonor for years to come, subtly pushing her this way and that—a much more elegant way of throwing his considerable weight around than directly challenging her.

She gave the Dragon Lord her sweetest smile—an industrial-strength dose. “I hope that all of your future assignments shall prove as pleasant.” And by that phrasing, she reminded him that he still worked for her, not the other way around.

The Lady turned off her smile abruptly, and said, “We have to clean up a mess on Burihatin. d'Vashti's mess. I shall require the complete cooperation of your best Dragons.”

The Dragon Lord didn't answer immediately. He rumbled deep in his throat, a sound the Lady knew represented a ruminative contemplation. “I wonder what the people on Burihatin taste like.”

“You'll find out soon enough,” the Lady remarked, surprising even herself with her straightforward reply. “I would advise you to take extraordinary care, though. We do not enjoy the same control on Burihatin that we do on Thoska-Roole, and you already know too well how precarious the situation on Thoska-Roole can sometimes get.”

“Madame Zillabar—” The Great Dragon bowed in elaborate obeisance. “You may count on the total support of myself and all the warrior-lizards under my command. We will place ourselves completely at your disposal.”

“Thank you, great Dragon. You honor me with your service.” The Lady turned to her Captain then, a near-featureless neuter, and nodded her command.

The Star-Captain bowed and proceeded to his station. Quietly, he began whispering orders. A moment later, a solemn chime sounded throughout the vessel. It broke its orbit and headed out toward the darkness between the stars.

When it had finally put enough distance between itself and the worst effects of the gravity well created by Thoska-Roole and its bloated red sun, the starship activated its faster-than-light stardrive. It wrapped itself in a fold of
otherness
and leapt into
otherspace
.

Sawyer sat alone for a long time with his thoughts. He hadn't liked some of the things that the TimeBinder had said about his brother and himself. It bothered him. In particularly, he did not like the phrase “ethically retarded.” It implied that he and Finn had never considered these so-called higher concerns at all.

In fact, Sawyer and Finn had had many long discussions about morality, ethics, philosophy, and individual responsibility. After a number of direct exercises and experiments in the physical universe, their unique experiences had revealed to them the limits of trust in the realm, and based on that information, they had developed a system of personal behavior consistent with their discoveries. They trusted no one, sometimes not even each other.

For William Three-Dollar to call that “ethically retarded” seemed to Sawyer, evidence of a terrible prejudice against self-contained individuals.

The only “alliance of life” that Sawyer had ever really noticed remained the unbreakable relationship between predator and prey. The universe offered you a choice between diner and dinner. ‘Tis better to dine, Sawyer and Finn had decided. All life feeds on death. Even plants, that depend only on sunlight for the energy to drive photosynthesis, feed on the heat death of a star. To characterize death as an enemy rather than accept it as part of the process seemed stupid, short-sighted, and narrow-minded. On the other hand, when death threatened you or someone close to you, it concentrated one's attention immensely. It put the matter into the subjective domain, which Sawyer knew, always skewed one's perceptions.

In other words, the very real possibility of Finn's death scared the hell out of him.

Maybe they had made a very bad decision here. Maybe, as a result of their actions in tracking and capturing the TimeBinder, Lady Zillabar would now have the power to do a lot of harm to many unsuspecting people.

¹
Did he and Finn bear the responsibility for that?

The question gnawed at his mind, coming back again and again to torment his peace. Should he have let Finn die to protect some people he didn't even know? He and Finn had always considered rebels just as bad as governments. They shared equal arrogance, both claiming moral authority and righteousness of purpose. Governments and rebels not only deserved each other; if either didn't exist, the other would have to invent them as an opponent. They needed each other. Why shouldn't the Markham brothers profit from the pigheadedness of those who believed they knew better than anyone else what other people should or shouldn't do? And besides, what else could they have done here? d'Vashti hadn't given them much choice—death, or death by
boonga
.
²

Later, after Finn had lain down to rest again, Sawyer approached William Three-Dollar quietly. “Can I talk to you?”

The spindly man sat in a corner, his bony knees folded up in front of his chest, his arms carelessly wrapped around them. He nodded. He moved over on the bunk and made room for Sawyer. “You look like a man who has swallowed a live toad.”

“Huh? I don't understand.” Sawyer sat down next to Three-Dollar.

“You've never heard the old saying, have you? Swallow a live toad the first thing in the morning. Nothing worse will happen to you all day. Your face still shows the aftertaste of toad. You haven't yet figured out that things can only get better.”