Not forgot, just another thing I didn’t want to remember. The man looked at the dull chrome cybernetic hand at the end of his right arm. The hand was scarred and pitted by years of use, and he walked on a leg that was similarly tarnished. The old man has a habit of making people over in his own image.
He backed down the rock, away from Dimitri’s aircar. He was risking too much. Dimitri, the Confederacy’s chief executive, was a white-hot nova of unwanted attention.
Once he was out of view of Dimitri’s aircar, he put the optical binoculars back into their case.
He stayed immobile past the point where Dimitri’s car should have disappeared beyond the Martian horizon. He maintained as low a profile as possible. It helped that they weren’t looking for him.
No one was looking for him.
No one knew he existed.
He had spent nine years making sure that he had as little impact on the world around him as possible. It was very necessary that no one knew he was here. He was an anomaly, a temporal hiccup that could destabilize the events he was here to correct.
So much could be disrupted if he was discovered, if his crystalline caverns were discovered—and still, despite the need for caution, despite his fabricated—and all-too-real—nonexistence, he still made his pilgrimages to see the Face. He had braved this hive of academics many times over the past nine years, just to get a good look at the alien structure.
The Face reminded him of home.
He now knew the other reason he’d done it.
He had hoped to see Dimitri.
He had known about the old man’s obsession with the Dolbrians and the Face. Deep down, despite his efforts to remain unobserved, he had wanted to look upon the man who was responsible for everything. He wanted to see his former commander, a man he had respected at one time.
Now, at the Face this last time, he’d finally seen Dimitri as well. This close to exile’s end, it had been an unexpected shock.
And when he had finally seen Dimitri standing on the Cydonia plain, all he could think of was how easy it would be to kill the old man.
Even after nine years of self-imposed isolation, his hatred of the man who would give the orders was un-dimmed. Worse. If his sacrifice was to mean anything, he had to let that old man give the orders. To have a chance of saving anything, he had to wait until the orders had been given, wait until they had nearly been carried out.
Wait until it was nearly over.
But he had waited nine years; he could wait four more months.
At least, very soon, he could ship himself to Earth without changing anything. He had always wanted to see Earth.
After a long pause, when Dimitri and Ambrose were long gone, he started the long walk back to his camp, a crystal structure as impressive in its own way as the ancient polyceram of the Face. Unlike the Face, it was only nine years old and hidden underground.
* * * *
Dimitri’s meeting was a dozen kilometers away from the Face, in one of the abandoned academic stations clustered around the alien structures known as the City. The station was buried at the root of one of the ten-kilometer-high atmosphere towers, one of the more spectacular artifacts of the human terraforming effort. The atmosphere towers, built by intelligent self-replicating machines back when mankind felt safe using such things, dotted Mars like gigantic albino dandelions.
Dimitri liked thinking of the Terran Executive Command meeting under the roots of a weed. The metaphor gave one a sense of place in the universe.
The meeting room itself, chosen by Dimitri, was twenty meters underground. He had chosen it as much for security—all the TEC-commandeered structures on Mars were secure, by definition—as for his own convenience. Dimitri hadn’t wanted to alter his trip to Mars, and it was easier to have the TEC meeting on Cydonia than it was to reschedule it.
Such was bureaucracy.
Dimitri was the last one to arrive. The five delegates were already seated at the table, waiting for him. Five delegates, two distinct sides. Dimitri went through the pro forma greetings, shaking hands and nodding.
On one side of the table were Pearce Adams for the Alpha Centauri Alliance and Kalin Green for the Sirius-Eridani Economic Community. The Centauri and Sirius arms almost always acted together in Confed policy matters. Their capital planets of Occisis and Cynos were nearly as rich and central as Terra herself.
On the other side of the table were Robert Kaunda, Sim Vashniya, and Francesca Hernandez. Kaunda represented the smallest arm of the Confederacy, the Union of Independent Worlds. Vashniya represented the largest, the Protectorate of Epsilon Indi. Hernandez represented the insular Seven Worlds and was the first delegate to appear from that arm of the Confederacy in at least two decades.
Hernandez also wasn’t human.
Dimitri had to hold his breath when he held his hand out to her. She was a bipedal feline creature who stood taller than any human in the room. Her cat-face was totally unreadable.
The Confederacy would’ve liked to forget the past that the worlds beyond Tau Ceti represented. No one liked to think that humans once played around with genetics, creating intelligent creatures.
People could forget about the AIs. Those you could turn off. You couldn’t forget creatures like Hernandez. No matter how insular and xenophobic the Seven Worlds became, they were still there.
After the formal greeting—with the exception of Hernandez he knew all these people professionally— Dimitri slipped into the briefing on Operation Rasputin.
Like the handshakes and the greeting, his discussion of BD+50°1725 and the troublesome planet that circled it was perfunctory. Everyone here was aware of the planet Bakunin. Everyone here knew the economic drain it was for the Economic Community and, to a lesser extent, the Centauri Alliance. Everyone here knew Sirius’ proposed solution.
The reason the five delegates were here had nothing to do with Dimitri’s speech. It had to do with the vague permutations of physics. Confederacy law required a simultaneous vote on capital intelligence matters, and simultaneity was just not possible over interstellar distances, even if you used a planetary tach transmitter.
To satisfy both Confederacy and natural law all the voting parties had to be in the same reference frame. Which meant that Dimitri faced five individuals in this room, each bearing the proxy for one of the collective powers of the Confederacy.
Dimitri ended with, “It is important to remember that, since the planet Bakunin is not a member of the Confederacy, none of the legal constraints on Executive activity apply. None of what I’ve described to you is illegal under the Charter.”
Dimitri overheard Kaunda mutter, “Meaning we throw the Charter out the window.”
Dimitri ignored him. No one would like the precedent that this kind of invasion would set. No one but Sirius and Centauri, who were both in economic trouble even without the financial black hole of Bakunin sitting at their back door.
“If you’d please finalize your votes and pass me the chits.”
Adams and Green slid their cards over simultaneously.
Kaunda wrapped his dignity around him like a cloak and slowly slid his card to Dimitri. The gesture would have looked regal if it weren’t for that fact that Dimitri knew that the Union only had one vote to cast in this matter; they only had one prime seat.