I have only my father to thank, or blame, for making me realize that even the wise and noble Gneaus Julius Storm could be petty, arrogant, blind, unnecessarily cruel, and maybe even a little stupid. This latter revelation touched me far more deeply than did the other. After all, we all begin life under sentence of death. But nowhere is it written that our time on death row is to be spent compounding the idiocies and miseries of our fellow condemned.
Though I did not love him less afterward, I lost my awe of my father after witnessing his brush with my uncle. For a time just his presence made me suffer.
The loss of an illusion is a painful thing.
—Masato Igarashi Storm
Thirty-Six: 3031 AD
Gneaus Storm gradually drifted up into a universe of gnawing pain.
Where was he? What had happened?
His dying hand had reached the switch in time. Or the automatics had asserted themselves. Somehow, he had been enveloped by the escape balloon before vacuum could take a fatal bite.
He knew that he had not died. There was very little pain in a resurrection. When you died the docs gave you a complete overhaul before they brought you around again. You came out with the vivacity, spirit, and lack of internal pain characteristic of youth. If you did not die, and you came back by more mundane medical processes, you had to play it by Nature's old rules. You took the pain along with the repairs.
More than once Storm wished they had let him go. Or that Cassius had had the decency to return him to the Fortress for proper medical care.
Storm once returned to consciousness to find a worry-faced, exhausted Mouse hovering over his medicare cradle. "Mouse," he croaked, "what are you doing here?"
"Cassius told me to stay," the boy replied. "It's part of my training." He forced a smile.
"He begged me." Cassius's voice, through the additional filter of the intercom speaker, sounded doubly mechanical and remote.
"Son, you've got to go back to Academy," Storm insisted, forgetting that he had lost this argument once before.
"It's arranged," Cassius said.
Perhaps it was, Storm reflected. He was not remembering clearly. The past month was all a jumble. Maybe Cassius had used his clout with the War College.
He tried to laugh. His reward was a shot of excruciating pain. Vacuum had done a job on his lungs.
"He needed somebody to watch you and Michael," Mouse told him, unaware that his father did not quite realize what was going on. "That's not a one-man job even with Michael sedated."
Storm remembered some of it. He smiled. Michael really impressed Cassius. Dee was only a man. He had been bested as often as not. His greatest talent was that of weaver of his own legend.
"He survived too, eh?" He remembered most of it now.
"He came through in better shape than you did," Cassius said. "He took some elementary precautions."
"It was his boat that was off tune," Mouse added. "He jiggered it on purpose. A trick he learned from Hawksblood. Hawksblood sets all his drives so they're off tune with everything but each other."
"His first intelligence coup," Cassius droned. "Though anybody with computer time and a little inspiration could have figured it out. Give him credit for the inspiration."
Mouse reddened slightly.
"We're headed for the asteroid?" Storm asked.
Mouse nodded. Cassius replied, "Yes. There're still questions we might put to Michael and Fearchild." Then, "We won't be able to reach Michael by the usual methods. He's been conditioned to resist drugs and polygraphs. Primitive methods may prove more efficacious."
"Uhm." Storm doubted that they would, though Michael, for all his bravado and daring, was a coward at heart.
How had Dee obtained an immunization course against the subtler forms of truth research? The process was complicated, expensive, and highly secret. Confederation restricted it to its most favored and highly ranked operatives and leaders in the most sensitive positions. Mouse, if he could stay alive for forty years and achieve flag grade, was the only man he knew who had a hope of attaining that signal honor. "Curious, that," he murmured.
"How curious you can't imagine."
Inflections in Cassius's speech were necessarily hard to grasp. This time Storm caught it. "You found something?"
"I think we learned most of it. It will be interesting watching the Dees while we discuss it."
"You can't tell me now?"
"We're fifty-one hours from the asteroid. Take time to recuperate. You're still disoriented. The discussion will be a strain."
"No doubt."
For two days Storm slept or endured his son's vague, intriguing hints about what he and Cassius had discovered on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. He tried to make the best of it by retreating to his clarinet and Bible. One of his sergeants had risked his life to salvage them from the phase-disrupted wreck of his singleship.
His eye was too weak for the book, his fingers insufficiently coordinated for the instrument. Mouse read some for him. Time did not drag. He slept a lot.
Mouse wakened him once, so he could watch while Cassius blurred their influential backtrail in the field around a star. Walters meant to make a complete orbit, take hyper briefly while masked by the star's own field, then drift for a day at a velocity slightly below that of light. The asteroid lay in the cometary belt of the chosen star.
The maneuver was intended to shed any unnoticed tail. Perforce, any such shadow would be operating at the limits of detection and would quickly lose contact.
Storm had Mouse move him to the control room for the stellar orbit.
"Cassius, roll her so the sun'll be topside during orbit," he said.
"You've got it." The star wobbled slightly as Cassius adjusted the ship's attitude. It swelled to the size of a sun. Cassius dove in, sliding around so close that the horizon curves vanished and they seemed to be drifting below an endless ceiling of fire. It was an Armageddon sky from which flames reached down with stately grace, as if to capture them and drag them into all that fury. Even smaller sunspots appeared as vast, dark continents surrounded by vaster oceans of flame. Cassius put all his filters up and let Storm stare, brooding, into that furnace that was the ultimate source of all other energies.
Storm said, "How like life itself a star is. It pulses. It struggles to maintain itself in a boundless ocean of cold despair. Every atom vibrates its little nucleus out, fighting the vampire night sucking its life. And the star fights knowing the struggle is hopeless, knowing that all it can do is die defiantly, going nova as its last grand gesture."
Mouse leaned forward, listening intently. His father seemed to be trying to create some order out of his own nebulous philosophy.
"Entropy and Chaos, death and evil, they can't be beaten by star or man, but in defeat there's always the victory of defiance. This sun is telling me, Gneaus, the mortal flesh can be destroyed, but the spirit, the courage within, is eternal. It need not yield. And that's all the victory you'll ever get."
Mouse watched with watery eyes as his father fell asleep, exhausted by the effort it had taken to put his feelings into words. The youth stared up at the fire, trying to see what Gneaus Storm had seen. He could not find it. He rose and took the old man back to his medicare cradle.
Being moved brought Storm back to a twilight awareness.
All his adult life Storm had been anticipating a fierce and final conflict from which he could win no mundane victory. With almost religious faith he believed that the manipulators would someday push him into a corner from which there would be no escape but death. He had always believed that Richard would be the instrument of his destruction, and that he and Richard, by destroying one another, would spell the doom of their kind.