And sitting prominently on a corner of that desk was a calix.
I stopped short, my heart freezing inside me. "No," I whispered involuntarily.
"What is it?" Goribeldi asked, frowning at me.
I threw a quick glance at him, threw another out the door at my only escape route. But it was already too late. At my reaction the guards had suddenly stopped being ceremonial and were eying me like a pair of tigers already coiled to spring.
It was over. All over. And I had lost. The Kailth had gotten to First Ministri Goribeldi... and whatever the calix was supposed do to him had surely already been accomplished.
And knowing my suspicions about them, he certainly couldn't allow me to live. would just disappear from the Ponte Empyreal, with no one ever knowing what had happened.
Goribeldi was still frowning at me. "The calix," I said, with the strange calmness of someone who has nothing left to lose. "A gift from the Sagtt'ans?"
"No," he said. "From your superior." I blinked at him. "My superior? You mean... Convocant Devaro?"
"Yes, of course," he said, frowning a little harder. "He sent it here—oh, four or five weeks ago. A thank-you gift for my sending him a revised copy of our Sagtt'a report. Why, is there a problem?"
I looked at him, and the guards, and the calix. Then, as if moving in a dream, walked over to the desk. Devaro had ordered me not to touch any of the three new calices on my way back from Quibsh, and I hadn't. But I'd had four days to study them en route, and I had.
Goribeldi was right. This was indeed one of them.
I turned back to face him, feeling vaguely light-headed. "But why?" I asked.
"Why would he do this? It's a weapon."
Goribeldi shook his head. "I'm sorry, but I don't follow you."
"A weapon," I repeated. "It's programmed—programmed by touch. Whenever you hold it, it starts affecting you. It turns you from human into something else."
The guards took a step toward me. "Sir?" one of them murmured.
"No, no, it's all right," Goribeldi said, waving them back. "I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion, Mr. Markand, but you have it precisely backwards.
The calix doesn't affect you. You affect it."
I stared at him. "What do you mean?"
"It's your presence that changes the calix, not the other way around," he said.
"Your touch and voice affect the wood and crystal, altering the sculpture into a
sort of echo of your own personality. A beautifully unique art form, far more individual than anything else you could possibly—"
"Wait a minute," I interrupted him, fighting hard to keep my balance as the universe seemed to tilt sideways beneath me. "You know this for a fact? I mean, it's been proven?"
"Of course," Goribeldi said. "The scientists in our delegation studied it thoroughly. In fact, 'calix' was actually the priestians' name for it, coming from an old term for the Cup of Communion. Holding a reflection of your soul, as it were. I hadn't realized the Sagtt'ans had picked up on the name."
I looked back at the calix. "I'm sorry, your Ministri," I said, my face warm with a thoroughly unpleasant mixture of embarrassment and confusion. "I guess I—" I broke off, shaking my head. "I'm sorry."
"That's all right," Goribeldi said, waving the guards back to their posts.
Apparently, he'd decided I wasn't crazy. Me, I wasn't so sure. "Come, let me show you the priestians' report."
I still wasn't sure half an hour later when he escorted me back to the anteroom and thanked me for coming. One thing I was sure of, though: the calices did indeed seem to behave exactly as he had said they did.
Which meant they weren't the weapons that Convocant Devaro had thought they were. Surely if he'd read the Church's report he already knew that.
But he'd had that report at least a month ago. If he had read it, why was he still subjecting me to weekly brainscans?
Unless he still wasn't convinced the calices were harmless. But in that case, why would he risk giving a potentially dangerous weapon to First Ministri Goribeldi?
I puzzled over it as I headed down the street toward the magtrans station. I was still puzzling, in fact, right up to the point where the two large men came up on either side of me and effortlessly stuffed me into a waiting car. There was the tingle of a stunner at my side, and the world went dark. I awoke aboard a half-wing already driving through space. The two men who'd kidnapped me were aboard as well, the three of us apparently the only passengers. As jailers they initially seemed rather amateurish; aside from the control areas and their two cabins I had complete freedom of the ship. But after two days of searching for weapons or escape routes or even information, I came to realize they weren't so much amateurish as just casually efficient. They completely ignored my questions and occasional frustrated demands, and only spoke to each other in clipped sentences of a language I didn't recognize.
Finally, three days of flight, we came alongside an unmarked military-style full-wing floating quietly in space. A transfer tunnel was set up and I was sent through, where I was met by a pair of hard-faced men in SkyForce uniforms. No chattier than my jailers had been, they escorted me silently to the command observation balcony above and behind the bridge.
Waiting for me there, as I'd rather expected, was Convocant Devaro.
"So," he said without preamble. "Here you are."
"Yes, sir," I said. "Here we both are."
For a moment he studied my face. "You've figured it out, haven't you?" he said at last. "Something the priestians at the Ponte Empyreal said to you."
I looked past his shoulder through the balcony's twin-sectioned canopy.
Directly ahead, the view over the bow of the full-wing showed that we were coming in toward a planetary darkside; ahead and below, I could see down into the bridge and the SkyForce officers and crewmen at their stations. "I saw the calix you gave to First Ministri Goribeldi," I said. "He told me it wasn't a weapon." I looked back at Devaro. "He was wrong, wasn't he."
Devaro shrugged. " 'Weapon' is an unfairly loaded term," he said. "I prefer to think of it as a tool."
"A tool which you're using to invade other people's privacy," I accused him.
"Giving someone a calix is really no different than doing a brainscan on him.
Except that he doesn't know it's been done. All you have to do is give the wood fibers enough time to adapt to his personality, then take your five-micron core samples and read his personality matrix right off them."
Devaro laughed, a short animal-like bark. "You make it sound so easy. You have no idea how much time and sweat went into developing the proper chemo-mathematical transforms to use."
"I think I have some idea," I said stiffly. "After all, I was your guinea pig in the whole thing. If you hadn't had my weekly brainscans to compare with the calix's chemical changes you'd never have been able to work out your precious transforms."
He shrugged carelessly. "Oh, we'd have managed. It just would have taken longer, and required us to get hold of a calix on our own. Your providential return from Quibsh merely made it simpler." "Well, enjoy it while you can," I bit out. "When we get back to Earth, I'll see you in prison."
He lifted his eyebrows. "On what grounds? You signed a legal authorization before each of those brainscans."
"What about the calix you gave First Ministri Goribeldi?" I countered.
"A thank-you gift. Perfectly legal."
"Except when the gift's part of an illegal brainscan."
"What illegal brainscan?" Devaro countered calmly. "A brainscan is performed with a Politayne-Chu neural mapmaker or the equivalent. There's no such device in a calix."
"You're splitting hairs."