The Day of Their Return

XXI

Chimes rang from the bell tower of the University. They played the olden peals, but somehow today they sounded at peace.

Or was Chunderban Desai wishfully deceiving himself? He wasn’t sure, and wondered if he or any human ever could be.

Certainly the young man and woman who sat side by side and hand in hand looked upon him with wariness that might still mask hostility. Her pet, in her lap, seemed touched by the same air, for it perched quiet and kept its gaze on the visitor. The window behind them framed a spire in an indigo sky. It was open, and the breeze which carried the tones entered, cool, dry, pungent with growth odors.

“I apologize for intruding on you so soon after your reunion,” Desai said. He had arrived three minutes ago. “I shan’t stay long. You want to take up your private lives again. But I did think a few explanations and reassurances from me would help you.”

“No big trouble, half hour in your company, after ten days locked away by myself,” Ivar snapped.

“I am sorry about your detention, Firstling. It wasn’t uncomfortable, was it? We did have to isolate you for a while. Doubtless you understand our need to be secure about you while your story was investigated. But we also had to provide for your own safety after your release. That took time. Without Prosser Thane’s cooperation, it would have taken longer than it did.”

“Safety—huh?” Ivar stared from him to Tatiana.

She closed fingers on the tadmouse’s back, as if in search of solace. “Yes,” she said, barely audibly.

“Terrorists of the self-styled freedom movement,” Desai stated, his voice crisper than he felt. “They had already assassinated a number of Aeneans who supported the government. Your turning to us, your disclosure of a plot which might indeed have pried this sector loose from the Empire—you, the embodiment of their visions—could have brought them to murder again.”

Ivar sat mute for a time. The bells died away. He didn’t break the clasp he shared with Tatiana, but his part lost strength. At last he asked her, “What did you do?”

She gripped him harder. “I persuaded them. I never gave names … Commissioner Desai and his officers never asked me for any … but I talked to leaders, I was go-between, and—There’ll be general amnesty.”

“For past acts,” the Imperial reminded. “We cannot allow more like them. I am hoping for help in their prevention.” He paused. “If Aeneas is to know law again, tranquillity, restoration of what has been lost, you, Firstling, must take the lead.”

“Because of what I am, or was?” Ivar said harshly.

Desai nodded. “More people will heed you, speaking of reconciliation, than anyone else. Especially after your story has been made public, or as much of it as is wise.”

“Why not all?”

“Naval Intelligence will probably want to keep various details secret, if only to keep our opponents uncertain of what we do and do not know. And, m-m-m, several high-ranking officials would not appreciate the news getting loose, of how they were infiltrated, fooled, and led by the nose to an appalling brink.”

“You, for instance?”

Desai smiled. “Between us, I have persons like Sector Governor Muratori in mind. I am scarcely important enough to become a sensation. Now they are not ungrateful in Llynathawr. I can expect quite a free hand in the Virgilian System henceforward. One policy I mean to implement is close consultation with representatives of every Aenean society, and the gradual phasing over of government to them.”

“Hm. Includin’ Orcans?”

“Yes. Commander Yakow was nearly shattered to learn the truth; and he is tough, and had no deep emotional commitment to the false creed—simply to the welfare of his people. He agrees the Imperium can best help them through their coming agony.”

Ivar fell quiet anew. Tatiana regarded him. Tears glimmered on her lashes. She must well know that same kind of pain. Finally he asked, “Jaan?”

“The prophet himself?” Desai responded. “He knows no more than that for some reason you fled—defected, he no doubt thinks—and afterward an Imperial force came for another search of Mount Cronos, deeper-going than before, and the chiefs of the Companions have not opposed this. Perhaps you can advise me how to tell him the truth, before the general announcement is made.”

Bleakness: “What about Aycharaych?”

“He has vanished, and his mind-engine. We’re hunting for him, of course.” Desai grimaced. “I’m afraid we will fail. One way or another, that wily scoundrel will get off the planet and home. But at least he did not destroy us here.”

Ivar let go of his girl, as if for this tune not she nor anything else could warm him. Beneath a tumbled lock of yellow hair, his gaze lay winter-blue. “Do you actually believe he could have?”

“The millennialism he was engineering, yes, it might have, I think,” Desai answered, equally low. “We can’t be certain. Very likely Aycharaych knows us better than we can know ourselves. But … it has happened, over and over, through man’s troubled existence: the Holy War, which cannot be stopped and which carries away kingdoms and empires, though the first soldiers of it be few and poor.

“Their numbers grow, you see. Entire populations join them. Man has never really wanted a comfortable God, a reasonable or kindly one; he has wanted a faith, a cause, which promises everything but mainly which requires everything.

“Like moths to the candle flame—

“More and more in my stewardship of Aeneas, I have come to see that here is a world of many different peoples, but all of them believers, all strong and able, all sharing some tradition about mighty forerunners and all unready to admit that those forerunners may have been as tragically limited, ultimately as doomed, as we.

“Aeneas was in the forefront of struggle for a political end. When defeat came, that turned the dwellers and their energies back toward transcendental things. And then Aycharaych invented for them a transcendence which the most devout religionist and the most hardened scientist could alike accept.

“I do not think the tide of Holy War could have been stopped this side of Regulus. The end of it would have been humanity and humanity’s friends ripped into two realms. No, more than two, for there are contradictions in the faith, which I think must have been deliberately put there. For instance, is God the Creator or the Created?—Yes, heresies, persecutions, rebellions … states lamed, chaotic, hating each other worse than any outsider—”

Desai drew breath before finishing: “—such as Merseia. Which would be precisely what Merseia needs, first to play us off against ourselves, afterward to overrun and subject us.”

Ivar clenched fists on knees. “Truly?” he demanded.

“Truly,” Desai said. “Oh, I know how useful the Merseian threat has often been to politicians, industrialists, military lords, and bureaucrats of the Empire. That does not mean the threat isn’t real. I know how propaganda has smeared the Merseians, when they are in fact, according to their own lights and many of ours, a fairly decent folk. That does not mean their leaders won’t risk the Long Night to grasp after supremacy.

“Firstling, if you want to be worthy of leading your own world, you must begin by dismissing the pleasant illusions. Don’t take my word, either. Study. Inquire. Go see for yourself. Do your personal thinking. But always follow the truth, wherever it goes.”

“Like that Ythrian?” Tatiana murmured.

“No, the entire Domain of Ythri,” Desai told her. “Erannath was my agent, right. But he was also theirs. They sent him by prearrangement: because in his very foreignness, his conspicuousness and seeming detachment, he could learn what Terrans might not.

“Why should Ythri do this?” he challenged. “Had we not fought a war with them, and robbed them of some of their territory?

“But that’s far in the past, you see. The territory is long ago assimilated to us. Irredentism is idiocy. And Terra did not try to take over Ythri itself, or most of its colonies, in the peace settlement. Whatever the Empire’s faults, and they are many, it recognizes certain limits to what it may wisely do. “Merseia does not.

“Naturally, Erannath knew nothing about Aycharaych when he arrived here. But he did know Aeneas is a key planet in this sector, and expected Merseia to be at work somewhere underground. Because Terra and Ythri have an overwhelming common interest—peace, stability, containment of the insatiable aggressor—and because the environment of your world suited him well, he came to give whatever help he could.”

Desai cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t intend that long a speech. It surprised me too. I’m not an orator, just a glorified bureaucrat. But here’s a matter on which billions of lives depend.”

“Did you find his body?” Ivar asked without tone.

“Yes,” Desai said. “His role is another thing we cannot make public: too revealing, too provocative. In fact, we shall have to play down Merseia’s own part, for fear of shaking the uneasy peace.

“However, Erannath went home on an Imperial cruiser; and aboard was an honor guard.”

“That’s good,” Ivar said after a while.

“Have you any plans for poor Jaan?” Tatiana asked.

“We will offer him psychiatric treatment, to rid him of the pseudo-personality,” Desai promised. “I am told that’s possible.”

“Suppose he refuses.”

“Then, troublesome though he may prove—because his movement won’t die out quickly unless he himself denounces it—we will leave him alone. You may disbelieve this, but I don’t approve of using people.”

Desai’s look returned to Ivar. “Likewise you, Firstling,” he said. “You won’t be coerced. Nobody will pressure you. Rather, I warn you that working with my administration, for the restoration of Aeneas within the Empire, will be hard and thankless. It will cost you friends, and years of your life that you might well spend more enjoyably, and pain when you must make the difficult decision or the inglorious compromise. I can only hope you will join us.”

He rose. “I think that covers the situation for the time being,” he said. “You have earned some privacy, you two. Please think this over, and feel free to call on me whenever you wish. Now, good day, Prosser Thane, Firstling Frederiksen.” The High Commissioner of the Terran Empire bowed. “Thank you.”

Slowly, Ivar and Tatiana rose. They towered above the little man, before they gave him their hands.

“Probably we will help,” Ivar said. “Aeneas ought to outlive Empire.”

Tatiana took the sting out of that: “Sir, I suspect we owe you more thanks than anybody will ever admit, least of all you.”

As Desai closed the door behind him, he heard the tadmouse begin singing.

Jaan walked forth alone before sunrise.

The streets were canyons of night where he often stumbled. But when he came out upon the wharf that the sea had lapped, heaven enclosed him.

Behind this wide, shimmering deck, the town was a huddle turned magical by moonlight. High above lifted the Arena, its dark strength frosted with radiance. Beneath his feet, the mountain fell gray-white and shadow-dappled to the dim shield of the waters. North and east stood Ilion, cloven by the Linn-gleam.

Mostly he knew sky. Stars thronged a darkness which seemed itself afire, till they melted together in the cataract of the Milky Way. Stateliest among them burned Alpha and Beta Crucis; yet he knew many more, the friends of his life’s wanderings, and a part of him called on them to guide him. They only glittered and wheeled. Lavinia was down and Creusa hastening to set. Low above the barrens hung Dido, the morning star.

Save for the distant falls it was altogether still here, and mortally cold. Outward breath smoked like wraiths, inward breath hurt.

—Behold what is real and forever, said Caruith.

—Let me be, Jaan said. You are a phantom. You are a lie.

—You do not believe that. We do not.

—Then why is your chamber now empty, and I alone in my skull?

—The Others have won—not even a battle, if we remain steadfast; a skirmish in the striving of life to become God. You are not alone.

—What should we do?

—Deny their perjuries. Proclaim the truth.

—But you are not there! broke from Jaan. You are a branded part of my own brain, hissing at me; and I can be healed of you.

—Oh, yes, Caruith said in terrible scorn. They can wipe the traces of me away; they can also geld you if you want to become domesticated, return to making shoes. Those stars will shine on.

—Our cause in this generation, on this globe, is broken, Jaan pleaded. We both know that. What can we do but go wretched, mocked, reviled, to ruin the dreams of a last faithful few?

—We can uphold the truth, and die for it.

—Truth? What proves you are real, Caruith?

—The emptiness I would leave behind me, Jaan.

And that, he thought, would indeed be there within him, echoing “Meaningless, meaningless, meaningless” until his second death gave him silence.

—Keep me, Caruith urged, and we will die only once, and it will be in the service of yonder suns.

Jaan clung to his staff. Help me. No one answered save Caruith.

The sky whitened to eastward and Virgil came, the sudden Aenean dawn. Everywhere light awoke. Whistles went through the air, a sound of wings, a fragrance of plants which somehow kept roots in the desert. Banners rose above the Arena and trumpets rang, whatever had lately been told.

Jaan knew: Life is its own service. And I may have enough of it in me to fill me. I will go seek the help of men.

He had never before known how steep the upward path was.