Chapter 18 Falling Darkness
As the work on the Atalanta proceeded, Hasmodai felt himself less troubled by thoughts of the team and the mission. Random thoughts that brought his former colleagues to mind tended to provoke more anger and resentment than guilt. He remembered every rebuke, every act of disrespect, every time one of them had hurt him or failed him. Then, he let thoughts of them go completely. There was no room for those people in his life now.
If Pirya had not been there, Hasmodai felt he would have loved the Atalanta with all his heart. The ship needed him as much as the woman did, and it was beautiful and full of potential. It offered him challenges that, unlike the challenges of the outside world, he was always capable of handling. He explored every room, he examined every system for possible enhancement, he even reassembled Poromet's generator, though only from curiosity, and with no intention of ever activating it.
But in the presence of Pirya, Hasmodai felt he could spare little affection for anything as inanimate as a spaceship. Pirya was full of warmth and life. Her eyes sparkled when she laughed, glinted when she was angry, and softened into tenderness often. Hasmodai was impressed by her quick mind, admired her determination, and was amused by the tough, strict air she liked to put on. He even enjoyed their rare arguments.
Hasmodai began to build a matter transference system for the Atalanta, less because the ship really needed it than because he thought it would amaze and impress Pirya. The construction was far more difficult and complicated than anything he would have attempted to create alone before, and for just an instant, he almost wished he could ask for the help of Tarlant or Mel, as he would have when he was one of their group.
He pushed the thought away, though. On the level below, he could see Pirya working. She was restoring decayed softlinks with tools that had been invented hundreds of years after she left Greecia, using them as if she had been born with a wave emitter clutched in her baby fist. She felt his gaze, looked up, smiled at him. She was utterly enchanting.
How could this have come to be? Hasmodai marveled at the change his life had taken. Through the long years, the centuries of searching, it had so often seemed that life was nothing but a burden, an affliction filled with pain, suffering, loneliness and crushing responsibilities.
The reversal in his fate was almost frightening. He was free. It felt like waking from a terrible dream into a warm sunrise. It felt like finding a home you never knew you had. It felt like being given everything you had ever wanted. It felt like…like…
It felt like being lured by the Enma.
A chill entered Hasmodai's soul.
"I don't see how picking up garbage is going to help us find Ian."
"Just do it." Tarlant was lost. Things had always been so simple. He joined Agi's research team young and fresh out of the royal university, thrilled at the honor of working with such distinguished scientists on such a stunning project. Tarlant had worked hard, done as he was told (mostly) and followed Agi's lead. He wasn't the one who made the decisions, so when everything went to blazes, he at least felt free from the burden of guilt and responsibility that plagued the others. But he shared it with them and tried to help them bear it, because he was part of the team. He went on as he had begun, doing his best work, doing what he was told (mostly) and following Agi. In return, he expected the team to take care of him, and they always had.
Now he kept having the feeling that Belle was usurping his easy position as the baby of the family. Moreover, though there had not been any official hierarchy among the team, Tarlant was gradually moving into a leadership role simply by attrition. Tarlant had not the slightest wish to tell anyone else what to do. But now Agi was gone. Soreto seemed to be on her last nerve. Hesma was gone. Mel was gone. Palza was gone. Even Hasmodai, who had shared Tarlant's complete disinterest in leadership, was gone.
Who did that leave to deal with Belle's tantrums and denial and Tina's weird apathy?
Who was left for him to follow?
Tina worked silently, gathering bits of rubble and depositing them on the sledge. Belle worked noisily, fuming all the while. Last night's attempt to bring her into their circle seemed to have backfired badly, leaving her with the freely spoken notion that they were all obsessive and delusional.
"I don't see why the robots can't do the work," Belle grumbled.
"They can. But you'll stay warmer if you keep moving."
"So why aren't YOU picking up junk?"
Tarlant was tired. After his watch, he had stayed up to sit with Soreto on hers.
Whenever Kalie had been upset or miserable, his dog Wonder had come to him with uncomprehending concern and sympathy. She was incapable of understanding his problems and helpless to solve them. Her warm presence did nothing practical to help him, but it was sometimes the only comfort he had.
Tarlant had no idea why Soreto was so strung out. He had seen her handle a crisis before, had seen her take charge when Agi was away countless times, even some times that had seemed almost as desperate as the situation they were in now, but he had never seen her so close to the end of her rope. Tarlant had no clue himself what their next move should be. He barely remembered why they had come to this place. Weren't they meant to be looking for Soran? Didn't they all need to be sent back through the Zone to save Greecia? And how would that happen now, with Hasmodai dead as well as Hesma and Palza…and maybe Agi, Seth, Mel and Dumas…
Anyway, Tarlant could do nothing to help Soreto but sit with her, as Wonder used to sit with Kalie, and hope that his presence could give her a little comfort and strength.
Because if Soreto collapsed, Tarlant would have to be in charge. And that was a terrifying thought.
"Just give me one good reason why we're doing this?" Belle demanded.
"If we can get some of these scanners working, they'll have a much wider range than the scanners on the robots or the pods," said Tarlant. "We'll be able to get information from places we aren't able to reach or see now, like inside the research stations, or maybe in caves in the ice."
"Why don't we just go to a research station ourselves? We could be sitting somewhere warm, drinking hot coca, while a PROFESSIONAL search and rescue team looks for Ian instead of a bunch of gorfy kids."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Three words," said Tarlant with a straight face. "Alien autopsy video."
Belle was too young to understand the dark side of humanity. She had never experienced war, seen torture, been hunted by a hysterical mob. In her young, movie-warped idea of reality, she saw nothing unusual in their Greecian technology, but if someone with a more realistic perception were to discover what they carried, someone whose greed exceeded their morals and honor, then they would be willing to commit terrible crimes to possess any piece of it. And the uses that might be made of the technology afterward were even more horrific to consider.
"Let's take a vote," Belle said. "Whoever wants to go to the research station, raise their hand."
"It's not a democracy," said Tarlant.
"That's right, it's a monarchy. Tina, you're the princess, right? Shouldn't you be the one giving orders, not Soreto?"
Tarlant couldn't see Tina's expression under the wrappings, but she stopped dead, the pieces of broken equipment she carried falling from her arms.
"What do YOU want us to do?" Belle asked triumphantly.
"I think," said Tina after a long pause, "it would be best to do what Soreto says."
Tarlant breathed a sigh of relief. Sedition in the ranks from Belle was one thing, but he didn't know what he would do if Tina mutinied. And after all…she WAS the princess.
Belle sulkily went back to hauling wreckage and complaining. Tina slowly picked up the items she had dropped and deposited them on the sledge. Tarlant was keeping an eye on Belle and didn't notice for a few minutes that Tina was standing beside him. Through the straps of thermal cloth covering her head he could see that her eyes, usually so serene, were troubled and filled with pain.
"She's right," Tina said. "I ought to be in charge. I've been letting all the responsibility fall on you and Soreto."
Tarlant struggled for a response. In ordinary circumstances, he might have cheerfully told Tina to go back to being a figurehead, that nobody expected direct command from a girl whose mind was off in la-la land most of the time. It seemed to him, though, that Belle was supplying more than enough childish brashness to go around without adding his own blunt remarks. And his usual alternate tactic of silence would probably only seem to be agreement.
He finally said, "I believe that if you started giving orders now, Soreto would think you'd lost confidence in her. We've always appreciated the way you let us work without interference."
His attempt at tact seemed to be successful. Tina brightened immediately and returned to gathering rubble. Tarlant sighed.
After living over five centuries, it was hard to finally have to grow up.
The wind was picking up by the time they returned to camp. Tina and Belle stayed in the shelter as Tarlant and Soreto struggled to piece together enough equipment to create a working sensor array in what was nearly a blizzard. In their past adventures, they had always had unlimited use of the energy packs. Now, with every spark of energy needed for survival, they were reduced almost to the resources of normal humans. If not for the strength and lifting power of the two robots, it would have been impossible to align the sensor panels at all.
Still, by the time the sun was descending, they had their array constructed, and had torn out the sensor controls from one of the pods and linked it to the salvage heap. It looked like a crash dump, but the power grid ran to every sensor, and every diagnostic scan came back positive. From shattered trash they had created a miracle.
Except that it didn't work.
He and Soreto checked every link, double-checked, swapped out parts, changed the angle.
Belle came out during a lull in the windstorm. "How are things going?" she asked. They ignored her.
"Is that any better?" Tarlant had changed the array configuration again.
"I'm still getting nothing," Soreto said. "Do you think the pod controls are incompatible with the sensors?"
"Maybe the operating systems are too different," Tarlant said. "There ought to be some way to get the controls to recognize the sensor data."
"Can you fix it?"
"I think we'd need Mel or Hasmodai for serious computer tweaking like this. Me, I build stuff…"
Soreto began tapping at the controls again, making adjustments, testing code changes.
Belle suddenly asked, "So, if you're the robot guy, and Ian's the leader, and Tina's the princess, and Hasmodai was the computer guy, what does Soreto do?"
The girl had a positive genius for pushing Soreto's buttons, and she was heading for one of the big ones. "Soreto has training in an extremely wide variety of disciplines, making her singularly qualified to coordinate and synchronize the efforts of the team," he said. It was a direct quote from Agi.
"So, what you're saying," said Belle, homing in on target, "is that she's not REALLY good at any—mmph!"
"Let's go for a walk and look at the pretty snowflakes, Belle," Tarlant said hurriedly, one mitten clamped over the girl's mouth.
Before he had managed to drag her away to a safe distance she had twisted loose. "Let go of me! Why do you people do everything she tells you to? You all blame me for Hasmodai, but I asked him to come with me, and he wouldn't because SHE told him to stay there!"
Tarlant grabbed her again and dragged her into the ice dome where the pods were sheltered, letting her go with a shove.
"What is the matter with you?" he demanded. "You need to grow up, Belle. Now."
"Yeah. This from the guy pretending to be an alien."
"If you haven't noticed, we're in Antarctica. It's really easy to die here, and if we're going to accomplish anything, we need to work together. You say you want us to find Agi—Ian—but you seem to be doing your best to destroy us from within."
"Well, it's so stupid! And Soreto—"
"She is doing her best to find Ian. And your brother had a lot of respect for Soreto, so maybe you should lay off."
Belle bit her lip and looked away. Aha, Tarlant though. Her weak spot. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it before.
"Sooner or later, we WILL find Ian, if he's out there," said Tarlant. "Do you really want us to have to tell him what a selfish, whiny, disruptive brat his sister was being while we were trying to save him? What would Ian think of the way you're behaving?"
Belle sniffled.
"Now go stay in the shelter with Tina," Tarlant ordered. "If you can't contribute anything useful, just keep to yourself. Do not go wandering off in a sulk on your own, do not think of taking one of the pods and forcing us to rescue you, and stop undermining people who are trying to get something done."
He walked her to the shelter and left her there. He resisted the urge to tell Tina to watch her, fearing that might just make Belle rebellious again. But he did lock the escape pod hatches with a recognition code.
Soreto was still working at the control console when he returned. He hoped she hadn't heard what Belle had said about Hasmodai. Soreto had enough to cope with right now.
He didn't ask her if she was okay, because he was afraid of the answer. He didn't ask what they would do next if this didn't work, because he suspected there would be no response. He just sat there beside her, quietly. Like a good dog.
He was a fool.
He should have known.
The images of the past dead had failed to entrap any one of the Greecian scientists during their long search for Tina. Hasmodai himself had nearly been taken, would have succumbed if not for the aid of Agi and the others.
Even then, when the Chasemans had appeared to him, he had known exactly what was happening, and had struggled to resist it.
Was this why the Enma had been quiet for so long? Had they been developing new strategies? Traps that could not be recognized?
If so, Hasmodai had been pathetically easy to draw in. The lure of an abandoned childhood dream, a fairy-tale romance, the chance to be needed and useful and loved—was that really all it took to tear him away from everything he knew was important? Even the visions in the scanner had conspired to convince him to stay, driven a wedge between him and those who had helped him escape the Enma before.
Everything here was a lie.
He ought to have suspected from the moment the Atalanta appeared conveniently right before his eyes. Things did not happen that way. Magic wasn't real. Stories didn't become true just because you wanted them to be. Hadn't he learned by now that life was all about pain?
Pirya looked up again, smiled. He did not return the smile.
Inside the spacesuit, the energy pack was still attached to his belt. The old one, with the Enma blade programmed into its functions. If, implausibly, somehow, Pirya was real, it would not harm her.
If she was a deception of the Enma and he struck her down…all this would vanish.
He had known what the Chasemans were when they appeared. He had not been able to bring himself to dispel that warm and inviting illusion.
He was still weak.
Hasmodai had wondered, sometimes, what would have happened if he had simply given in to the Enma, accepted their illusion and let himself become Andrew Chaseman once more. Would they have left him to enjoy that happy illusion for eternity? Or just until the soul had been drawn from his body?
He would find out now. He would go on playing out their scenario. Hasmodai returned to working on the matter transference system. The joy had gone out of it, though, and the challenge. He knew the machine would work perfectly because this was, after all, his fantasy world, designed entirely to keep him happy and oblivious.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Pirya, or the image that presented itself as Pirya, come out of its workspace and stand looking up at him. He did not look back.
Some stories are too good to be true, and some things are too beautiful to be real.