Thieves of Light

CHAPTER SIX

"What was that all about?" Bhodi Li demanded as Parcival bundled him along the corridor.

"Let it ride until we get downstairs," was the terse answer. Then Parcival changed gears and said in a more friendly tone, "I hope you don't have any exotic tastes in food, by the way. The ground team prepares a food pickup anytime a ship calls at Earth, but the selection's limited, and most everything is frozen. Except the peanut butter."

By the end of that exposition, they had both reached the bottom of the climbway. "I suppose that means it's going to be a while until my next pizza."

"Until your next good one, anyway."

"If it gets to be more than a week, even a cardboard-crusted imitation-cheese-food special will start looking good," Bhodi Li said. "Do I get an answer to my question now?"

"Let's go sit a minute in my quarters," the youth said with a jerk of his head.

Parcival's berth was a case study in how much could be packed into one of the tiny rooms, especially if the occupant happened to be only four feet tall and sixty-five pounds. The right-hand wall was broken up by six fold-out storealls, each the size of the one Parcival had opened in Bhodi Li's room. Above the storealls hung several soft-sided pouches bulging with their burdens. The cot was folded down, and the space beneath it was filled with large silver-metal chests. A baseball bat was propped in one corner, a well-used glove dangling from the grip.

Bhodi settled on the cot while Parcival climbed atop one of the storealls and rummaged in the pouch above it. He came back with a matchbox-sized black box that he stood on end beside him. A small yellow light on top of the gadget began to wink on and off.

"It's a sound mask. Li-hon wouldn't spy on us, but I want to make sure he doesn't hear any of this by accident," Parcival explained.

"I don't understand."

"That's obvious. I can hardly believe it, but you're even dumber than you look. Haven't you got sense enough not to stand in somebody else's church and make fun of the liturgy?" Parcival scolded.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about what you were about to say to the Sarge a few minutes ago."

"You heard the line he was giving me. Don't tell me you believe him."

Parcival sighed and pulled his legs up into a yoga lotus cross as though settling in for a while. "You were in school twice as long as I was, and you still didn't learn anything."

A hot flush crept up the back of Bhodi's neck. "Hey, I've had about enough of your smart talk. Maybe you are some kind of born genius, but that doesn't make it okay to dump on people that aren't."

Parcival stared, then hung his head. "You're right," he said simply. "I get impatient with people who are slow on the uptake. I always have. I'll try to watch it."

"Okay," Bhodi said, taken aback by the youth's contriteness. He noticed that his own fists were clenched and unclenched them, wondering in passing if Parcival had backed off to avoid having to fight him-and if there was anything to his boasting, having to hurt him. "So let's try it again."

"All right," Parcival said. "Do you know what the word photon means?"

"Uh-it's got something to do with light. Wait, isn't it the little particles light is made of?"

"More or less. The photon is the fundamental unit of radiant energy. To these people it's something even more fundamental than that. They've personified and deified light into the First Principle of the cosmos. What you heard from Li-hon is what's called a cosmogony-an explanation of the origin of things. By the way, what's yours?"

"What's my what?"

"What's your explanation for the existence of stars and human beings and peanut butter?"

Bhodi Li struggled to dredge up some scraps of abandoned memory. "Well-in science they told us something about the big bang. And then a few million years later there were these little water animals in the ocean and then evolution took over-dinosaurs, and Neanderthals, and then us. There were ice ages, too. Peanut butter was George Washington Carver," he added with a grin.

"I don't think I've ever heard it compressed quite that ruthlessly," Parcival said, answering the grin with a wry smile. "And your time scale is off by a factor of a thousand. What about God?"

"Well-that's another story. How does the creed go? 'I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible'-something like that."

"So answer my question. What's your explanation? What do you believe?"

Bhodi Li was beginning to feel like he was taking an oral exam. "Well-I guess I believe that the big bang was when God started everything. And everything that happened after was part of His plan. You know, evolution was His way of making us. I don't guess I've really thought about it much."

"Typical," Parcival sniffed, with a hint of his earlier condescension. "So what you believe is a mixture of facts and guesses and things you take on authority, like the idea there even is a God, and they don't necessarily fit together smoothly. Just like what you heard from Li-hon."

"Are you saying that what I believe would sound as cracked to Li-hon as what he said did to me?"

"It might. But if it did, he'd be being as unfair as you were going to be to him." Parcival paused to collect his thoughts. "To Li-hon, to the whole Alliance as far as I can tell, what he told you isn't a religious belief. It's the way they look at the Universe. It's part of what they are. They accept it as unquestioningly as we accept breathing and eating and sleeping when it's dark."

"But they are wrong."

Shaking his head, Parcival said, "They're like the old human societies that worshiped the sun as God the lifegiver. They weren't all wrong. And neither is Li-hon. But it does affect how they look at the war. It may even be the reason for the war."

"Really? How?"

"Would you like to hear the Gospel according to Parcival? I haven't got it all figured out, but I've got a pretty interesting working hypothesis."

"Can we get something to eat first?"

Parcival hopped off his perch. "Good idea."

"I know it is," Bhodi Li said. "Even we morons have them every now and then."

Over a surprisingly good cheeseburger with a fresh Red Delicious apple on the side, Bhodi Li listened attentively to Parcival's version of the Photon cosmogony.

According to Parcival, it began with a race called the Ylem. To them, the big bang was not an act of God-it was the creator God itself, giving up its own life to bring life to the Universe. The stars were remnants of God in its purest form; the life-forms populating the planets the fulfillment of God's final wish.

When the Ylem became spacefaring they also became evangelists, carrying the Truth of Photon to the other inhabited worlds. With their starships and other technological miracles to validate their status as special messengers of revelation, they brought answers to beings which up to that point had only questions. The Alliance was forged on the strength of the Ylem cosmogony.

But unifying all known life in one belief was not enough to satisfy the Alliance's sense of mission. To the Ylem and their converts, it seemed not fitting that there should be stars with no life of their own. They saw it as their holy obligation to colonize one world in every system, thereby helping to complete their Creator's final vision. Where there were no planets suitable for habitation, they made one over with the help of the Photon crystals.

"They regard them almost as religious artifacts, like the Eucharist or a piece of the Shroud of Turin," Parcival explained. "But they're really tremendous little chemical laboratories driven by microfusion and solar energy. What they do is modify a planet's atmosphere so it supports our kind of life."

"That sounds as much like magic as what Li-hon showed me."

"Oh, not at all. The elements that you need are almost always present on the borderline terrestrial worlds-just in the wrong place or state or proportions. The crystals provide the energy and guidance for the process. Depending on how much change is needed, five to fifty years later you've got a new world ready for the first colony ship."

In an empty galaxy, the Alliance could have carried on its missionary expansion until it ran out of will or worlds. But in time, the colonization efforts encroached on space occupied by the races Bhodi had seen depicted during Li-hon's presentation. Those races were then loosely organized under the rule of a dynastic clan. The world, the warlord, and their collective enemy were all named after the constellation they were found in: Arr, the vandal.

As a group, the Arrians viewed oxygen-breathers as little better than vermin and insisted they keep their distance. The Alliance decided that any creatures that rejected the truth of Photon and stood in the way of its spread where wholly evil and therefore not really alive at all.

There was as little chance for accommodation as for a compromise between flame and ether. War began with an Arrian attack on a crystal-siting team and had continued unabated for the better part of two hundred years.

"For all the fighting there's been, strategically it's been a stalemate until recently," Parcival noted. "The Arrians have learned how to reprogram the crystals so that they modify the planet's atmosphere to make it even more inhospitable to us. So where they used to just destroy the crystals, they now try to capture them and use them to deny us the worlds."

"Can't you just go in, shut the crystal down, fix the programming, and fire it up again?"

Parcival shook his head. "You remember how that warrior fired his phaser into the crystal to set it off? The phaser bolt triggers the microfusion capsule that drives the primary reaction. There's no shutting it off, and by the time it's exhausted the whole chemical momentum of the atmosphere has been changed."

"But you can change it back."

"Usually-but changing it back takes just as long. And you still don't have things the way you want them. Add it all together and you see they can keep us off a world for a hundred years with one reprogrammed crystal," Parcival said. "But that's not all. The really scary prospect is of them bringing one to Earth or Foppo or Nivia and destroying the ecosystem."

"So that's what the war is really about-not the final battle between good and evil."

"No. Territory and theopolitics and biological racism."

"It makes a lot more sense the way you tell it. I feel a lot better."

"Yeah, well, you haven't heard the kicker yet."

"The kicker?"

Parcival looked down at his feet and frowned. "I wasn't going to tell you this, at least not yet. But I guess you've got a right to know going in. There is one big mystery I haven't been able to lay a glove on."

"What's that?"

"I don't know who the Ylem are."

"What!?"

"There are seven different species in the Alliance. I've been able to rule out two of them. But I don't know which of the others is the Ylem." He hesitated. "If any of them are."

"One of them has to be."

"That's what I thought. Then I started trying to find out who built the First Guardian-who makes the crystals- who designed our ships-and discovered that everybody thinks it's someone else. Ask Li-hon where the crystals come from and you get an answer something like 'The First Guardian provides.' "

"You mean that the Ylem might be hiding somewhere and letting you fight their battles?"

"Sometimes I think so." He shrugged. "Anyway. I guess the point for you is that you can't take everything you hear from the Alliance leadership at face value. But you can't go around challenging it, either."

"So is Earth really in danger? Or is that part of the fiction?"

"No," Parcival said somberly. "That's real. Look, I don't know what your habits are, but I'm ready to sack out. Do you mind?"

"What time is it? My watch is still in my locker at the Center."

"Midnight your time-the twenty-eighth division in ship time."

"Geez. I didn't realize," Bhodi Li said, standing up. "Except I don't know how well I'm going to sleep."

Parcival slipped past Bhodi in the narrow aisle and flung himself lengthwise on the cot. "These are more comfortable than they look."

"I meant because of everything there is to think about."

"Don't think too much-you'll hurt yourself." It was said teasingly, with a hint of a smile and a twinkle in the eye.

"I'll be careful," Bhodi Li said. He turned away as though to leave, but stopped at the door and looked back. "I can't help wondering about you-how you got here. Were you drafted, too? Nothing personal, but I've never seen anyone your age hold their own in the arena."

"I wasn't drafted, exactly. I volunteered."

"Volunteered! How?"

Parcival twisted onto his side and propped his head on one hand. "Truth is, I was always more interested in how the Photon Centers worked than the game itself-the sensors, the radios, the infrared guns, the computers. I poked around after hours and discovered a little too much. The First Guardian decided that I couldn't be let go and sent a ship to pick me up."

"When was this?"

"Almost a year ago."

"How often do you get back? I mean down to the surface."

"I never do."

"But your family-"

"There's nobody there to miss me," Parcival said, sounding like a ten-year-old for the first time since Bhodi had met him. "This is the only home I've got. Look, I don't want to talk any more. I'm tired. Lights off," he added, and the room darkened.

"Sorry. G'night, Parcival. And thanks-for being straight with me."

"You owe me one," Parcival said, settling back on the cot.

"Fair enough." Bhodi slapped the touchplate and watched the doorway magically appear.

"Hey-Bhodi," the youth suddenly called after him.

"What?"

"You play baseball?"

"Sure."

Parcival nodded absently, staring at the ceiling. "Think I'll ask them to pick up a glove for you the next time a ship stops at Earth. We can play catch anyway, right?"

"If I stay," Bhodi cautioned.

"That's what I meant. If you stay." But the hint of disappointment in Parcival's voice said that he had already begun to count on Bhodi's company.

What the hell am I going to do? Bhodi wondered as he returned to his quarters. I'm a dozen light-years from home with a lizard-priest that wants to convert me and a boy genius that wants me to be his big brother, on my way to boot camp for a star army. I don't want to fight for the First Guardian of Photon. I only came along for the ride — a sightseeing tour of the galaxy. But the more I see and learn, the harder it is to think about going back and forgetting it all.

And tomorrow we'll be there — wherever there is. What am I going to do?