Federations Page 5

  And she got herself picked—she got picked above every one of them; she was the most skilled diplomat who ever lived. She could work out anything, I bet.

  There’s an engineer down five levels who looks good to me, is smart enough, and we get married. We have two kids. (Someone will have to watch over the Yemennis when I’m gone, someone with my grandfathers’ talents for calibrating a needle; we’ve been six generations at Wren Yemmeni’s side.)

  We celebrate four hundred years of peace. All the delegates put a message together, to be played in every ship, for the civilians. For some of them, it’s the first they’ve heard of the other languages. Everyone on the ship, twelve thousand strong, watches raptly from the big hangar and the gymnasium level, from the tech room and the bridge.

  They go one by one, and I recognize our reception room as the camera pans from one face to another. They talk about peace, about their home planets, about how much they look forward to all of us knowing the message, when Carthage comes.

  Wren Octa-Yemenni goes last.

  “I hope that, as we today are wiser today than we were, so tomorrow we will be wiser than we are,” she says. Dorado 216 looks like he wants to slap her.

  She says, “I hope that when our time comes to meet Carthage, we may say that we have fulfilled the letter and spirit of its great message, and we stand ready for a bright new age.”

  Everyone in the tech room roars applause (Yemennis know how to talk to a crowd). Just before the video shuts off, it shows all the delegates side by side; Octa is looking out the window, towards something none of us can see.

  One night, a year before she’s due to be expired, I find Octa in the development room. She’s watching the tube where Ennea is gestating. Ennea’s almost grown, and it looks like Octa’s staring at her own reflection.

  “Four hundred years without a war,” she says. “All of us at a truce, talking and learning. Waiting for Carthage.”

  “Carthage will come,” I promise, glancing at Ennea’s pH readout.

  “I hope we don’t see it,” she says, frowns into the glass. “I hope, when it comes, all of us are long dead, and better ones have taken their places. Some people twist on themselves if you give them any time at all.”

  Deka and Hendeka are in tubes behind us, smaller and reserved, eyes closed; they’re not ready. We won’t even need them until I’m dead. Though it shouldn’t matter, I care less for them than I do for Ennea, less than I do for Octa, who’s watching me.

  Octa, who seems to think none of them are worthy of Carthage at all. She’s been losing faith for years.

  None of these copies are like Alpha. They all do their duty, but she believed.

  At the fifty-year mark, Octa comes in to be expired.

  She hands over the recording device, and the government guys disappear to their level to put together the memory flux for Ennea, who will wake up tonight and need to know.

  “You shouldn’t keep doing this,” she tells me as we help her onto the table and adjust the IV.

  There are no restraints. The Yemennis don’t balk at what they have to do; duty is in their bones. But Octa looks sad, even sadder than when she found out that the one before her had loved someone who was already dead.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “It’s the best way—one session of information, and she’s ready to face Carthage.”

  “But she won’t remember something if I don’t record it? She won’t know?”

  Octa’s always been a little edgy—I try to sound reassuring. “No, she won’t feel a thing. Forget Dorado. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Octa looks like she’s going to cry. “What if there’s something she needs to know?”

  “I’ll get you a recorder,” I say, and start to hold up my hand for the sound tech, but she shakes her head and grabs my sleeve.

  I drop my arm, surprised. No one else has even noticed; they’re already starting the machines to wake up the next one, and Octa and I might as well be alone in the room.

  After a second she frowns, drops my hand, makes fists at her sides like she’s holding back.

  The IV drips steadily, and around us everyone is laughing and talking, excited. They seem miles away.

  Octa hasn’t stopped watching me; her eyes are bright, her mouth drawn.

  “Have you seen the message?”

  She must know I haven’t. I shake my head; I hold my breath, wondering if she’s going to tell me. I’ve dreamed about it my whole life, wondering what Alpha knew that made her cry with joy, four hundred years ago.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says, and her eyes are mostly closed, and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or just talking. The IV is working; sometimes they say things.

  She says, “I don’t know how anyone could take up a weapon again, after seeing the message.”

  Without thinking, I put my hand over her hand.

  She sighs. Then, so quietly that no one else hears, Octa says, “I hope that ship never comes.”

  Her face gets tight and determined—she looks like Alpha, exactly like, and I almost call out for them to stop—it’s so uncanny, something must be wrong.

  But nothing is wrong. She closes her eyes, and the bio-feed flatlines; the tech across the room turns off the alarm on the main bank, and it’s over.

  We flip on the antigrav, and one of the techs takes her down to the incinerator. He comes back, says the other delegates have lined up in the little audience hall outside the incinerator, waiting to clap and drink champagne.

  It’s always a long night after an expiration, but it’s what we’re here to do, and it’s good solid work, moving and monitoring and setting up the influx for Yemenni’s first night. Nobody wants a delay between delegates. You never know when the Carthage is going to show up. We think another four hundred years, but it could be tomorrow. Stranger things have happened.

  Wren Ennea-Yemenni needs to be awake, just in case; she’ll have things to do, when Carthage comes.

  LIFE-SUSPENSION

  L. E. MODESITT, JR.

  L. E. Modesitt is the bestselling author of the Saga of Recluse, the Spellsong Cycle, the Corean Chronicles, and several other series, as well as a number of standalone novels, such as The Eternity Artifact, The Elysium Commission, and a new book, Haze, that’s due out in June. His short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, and was recently collected in Viewpoints Critical.

  “Life-Suspension” is set in a future where interstellar travel is possible, but where there is warfare over who controls the lines of interstellar communication. “It’s a story that shows how thin the lines between all human passions are, especially in war,” Modesitt said. “I was a military pilot, and I’ve tried to capture the feel of those situations, and the contrast between the times of action and the quiet civility of officers in between action.”

  I

  The S.R.S. Amaterasu had left Kunitsu Orbit Station 2 less than three hours earlier, and Flight Captain Ghenji Yamato was more than ready to eat when the junior officers’ wardroom opened at 1600 KMT. He wasn’t the first entering—that would have been most impolite—but he was far from the last when he took his seat halfway down the second table.

  He’d barely seated himself when his eyes registered a flash of white, and he glanced up.

  The officer who had just entered the mess caught his eyes immediately, not because she was full-figured, which she was not, boyish as her frame was, but because her short-cut hair was pure white, and her pale white face was almost unearthly in its beauty. He almost laughed at the thought. Unearthly? None of them would ever see Earth—and probably not even Kunitsu—again for years. Objective years, not subjective, he reminded himself. He found himself still looking at her. For all the white hair, she was probably younger than he was. He couldn’t help but stare before he looked down abruptly.

  She was ship’s crew—that was certain—and not one of the attack pilots for the mission ahead, because he knew most of them, except for the transfers and replacements, althou
gh her hair was cut every bit as short as that of the women pilots in his squadron. Yet . . . for all that he knew he had never seen her before; there was something about her. He just didn’t know what it was. He ate almost mechanically, although he did enjoy the black tea, probably a variant from the Nintoku Islands.

  As he left the mess after the meal, he glanced back, but he didn’t see the white-haired captain. As he looked to the corridor ahead, leading to the attack operations spaces—there she was, waiting and looking at him. Her eyebrows were also white, as were her eyelashes, but she had deep black eyes and red lips.

  “Hello,” he offered. “I’m Ghenji Yamato, Flight Captain.”

  “I know. Your name, that is, and your reputation as ‘the monk.’”

  “The monk?” Ghenji knew the allusion, but wasn’t about to admit it.

  “The flight captain utterly devoted to his duties once he’s shipside.” She smiled. “I’m Rokujo. Rokujo Yukionna.” She smiled. “I’m in life-support.”

  He thought he ought to recognize her name, but he hadn’t checked the roster of ship’s officers. He’d also never paid that much attention to names or where they came from. His educational background had been engineering, but he’d been fortunate, if one could call it that, to have been accepted by the service for training as an attack needle pilot. The current tour was his fourth, and, afterwards, he’d be eligible for promotion to major—and squadron commander, or the equivalent. With the time-dilation effect, even with military pay discounting, he’d even be able to retire, not that he’d ever considered that.

  Ghenji glanced at her green skinsuit—medical—and the senior captain’s insignia on the collars of her shipvest. “Doctor or technical?”

  “Does it matter?” She laughed ruefully. “At least you asked. Most of the pilots just assume tech because I look so young.”

  “You’re in charge of . . . ?” He thought he’d recovered as gracefully as possible.

  “Very good. I’m a recovery specialist, but I’m chief of the suspension and support.”

  “A most necessary specialty, especially for attack pilots,” he said with a smile. He couldn’t have met her before, but the sense of familiarity remained. “You didn’t study at Edo Institute, did you?”

  “No. Fumitomo, then Heian for my residency.”

  “Why did you decide on the service?”

  “I like the specialty. It fits me, and where else would I get this kind of experience? All planetside suspension facilities are either geriatric wards for the wealthy or holding pens for clone-replacement therapy, and there aren’t many of the latter.”

  Ghenji nodded. “In a way, it’s like attack flying. If you want to pilot anything outside the service, all you are is a tram driver . . . ”

  All in all, they talked for close to two stans before he had to leave to stand an ops-watch, not that doing so meant more than watching the system indicators.

  Ghenji didn’t see Rokujo the next day, but when he woke the following morning and rolled out of his cubicle, he decided that he would make an effort to encounter her, while he had time to get to know her . . . even though that was unlike him. But she did fascinate him, perhaps because of the calm, almost unblinking, way she viewed him, as if she were focused on him and him alone.

  Still, the Amaterasu would enter deep jump in three days, and in two Ghenji Yamato would climb into a cocoon and be hibernated until the ship re-entered normspace, not that he knew that destination, only that it was in the area disputed by the Mogulate and the Republic. After that, his real tasks would begin.

  For all his engineering background, he still found it hard to understand a universe where instantaneous—or near-instantaneous—interstellar communications were possible, but where interstellar travel was far slower. It did make for an interesting galaxy—and one that required the space service . . . and one Ghenji Yamato—or other pilots like him.

  Despite his interest in Rokujo, with his own duties and schedule, it was just before the evening meal when he saw her standing just outside the officers’ lounge adjoining the junior officers’ wardroom.

  “Good afternoon, Rokujo.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  “I was looking for you earlier, at lunch.”

  “We were running tests, and I didn’t get away . . . ”

  Since seating was not strictly by rank except at the formal mess dinners, they sat together and talked.

  “You know your names are almost contradictions of who you are,” she said, taking a quick mouthful of rice.

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I’m an engineer.”

  “Yamato was an emperor, filled with courage, and willing to commit the most treacherous acts possible in search of honor. Ghenji was a schemer and a lover and the first non-divine Shinto romantic hero—as depicted by a woman. You certainly have courage, but your honor is that of a monk’s, and I doubt you could betray anyone.”

  “That’s a fault?”

  “I didn’t say that it was, so long as honor doesn’t preclude love.”

  “What about you?”

  “Let us just say that I have two natures, hot and cold, and I’m always seeking balance while believing in absolutes . . . ”

  After spending the meal mainly listening and just watching her, Ghenji realized that it was one of the more enjoyable he had spent in a service wardroom in years, if ever.

  Unfortunately, afterwards, Rokujo hurried off to deal with some sort of system glitch in the suspension diagnostics, but that, as Ghenji knew all too well, was more than typical for anyone who had to deal with systems. His turn would come once they entered the combat zone.

  He turned, debating whether to stay and play speed-chess, when another pilot approached.

  “I saw you with Captain Yukionna,” offered Hotaru, the flight captain in charge of Kama-three.

  “What about her?” asked Ghenji cautiously.

  “Oh . . . nothing.”

  “What you’re not telling me isn’t nothing,” replied Ghenji with a grin.

  “Well . . . if you want to be with her . . . don’t even think about being with anyone else.”

  “Oh . . . ?” For Ghenji, the implications were appealing. He’d never liked it when women, especially officers, played off men against each other. “Is that a return flight?”

  “If you’re hers, she’s yours, and no one else’s. I’ll see you later.”

  Ghenji stood, watching. He thought he heard Hotaru murmur something else but he wasn’t certain. What was certain was that Hotaru could have said more. There was also no doubt he had no intention of doing so.

  On threeday, after his shift on the combat simulator, Ghenji cleaned up and made his way down to the life-support deck, with the rows and rows of cocoons. He found Rokujo system-linked, and sat down on the deck, cross-legged—monk-fashion, he supposed—to wait.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked, as she finished de-linking from the system.

  “Not long.” He stood and gestured toward the console. “What were you doing?”

  “I was checking diagnostics on the medical suspension cocoons.”

  “There’s not a problem, is there?”

  “No. That’s why now is a good time to check everything in detail. After you and the other pilots start flying missions, we’ll need them—that isn’t the time to find out something’s wrong.”

  “That makes sense.” He paused. “Would you like to join me for some tea, if you can . . . and, if . . . ?” How could he ask what he really wanted to know?

  She smiled, amusedly. “Are you trying to find out if I’m committed to someone in some way? I’m not. And yes, I’d love some tea, even what passes for it in the wardroom. Then, we’ll see . . . ”

  Ghenji hadn’t made that offer, although it was what he had in mind.

  II

  The space service was practical, but not given to more than acknowledging that humans, particularly with mixed crews, did require a certain privacy. Cubicles for one officer would fi
t two, but not with all that much room to spare.

  Rokujo, lying in Ghenji’s arms, or on his right arm, looked up. “Officers’ cubes have a cross-section that’s almost bell-shaped.”

  “It helps get rid of excess heat,” he replied languidly.

  “Or traps it . . . my not-so-monkish lover.”

  He stroked her short, silky, brilliant white hair.

  “I need to go,” she said. “I do have the med-section mid-watch.”

  “You didn’t . . . ”

  “I wasn’t about to. Your monkish concern with duty would have had you protesting that you didn’t want to interfere with mine.” Almost absently, she licked her lips, before smiling at him. “This way, you’ll get a good night’s sleep.”

  He had to admire the seemingly boneless way in which she slithered into her uniform skin-suit and shipvest before leaving him and the cubicle.

  He lay back, amazed at what had happened. In a way, she had almost coiled around him, he reflected, yet cool as she seemed, and as cool as her touch was, she also radiated warmth. How could anyone look so cool, even feel so cool, and then pour forth such heat? But then she had said that her nature was both hot and cold.

  Later, alone in his small cubicle, he finally drifted into an uneasy sleep, knowing that before long he’d be in suspension in transit to the combat zone, even if he had no idea where it was or exactly what the mission would be.

  He dreamed, and the dream was like all the others. He was awake and trapped in his cocoon, and, just as the shakes and shivers began to subside, the temperature began to plunge once more. He could not move, and at that moment, the face of a woman with flowing white hair and skin as white as porcelain, and lips like cherries appeared above him, and bestowed a loving kiss upon him—and the ice encased him with whiteness.

  He woke, not sweating, but chill. The face in his dream had been that of Rokujo. The chill in his soul intensified as he realized that it had been her face all along. Every dream about life-suspension he’d ever had was exactly the same—and it had always been her face. He just hadn’t known it.