I saw the change come into Roosevelt’s eyes, locked on mine as we strained together, chest to chest. He staggered back, staring unbelievingly at his empty hands. Under my eyes, his face withered, his cheeks collapsed, his silks and brocades turned to gray rags that dropped away to expose gaunt ribs, the yellow skin of age. He fell, and his toothless mouth mumbled words, and his hands, like the claws of a bird, scrabbled for a moment at the stone floor. Then there were only bones that dwindled to dust.
The sword burned in my hands. I looked at it and saw how the light shone along the flawless length of the perfect blade, how the jeweled hilt glittered. I sheathed it and walked down the length of the empty chapel and out into the sunlight.
Chapter Eleven
Colonel Bayard was waiting for me in the Imperial Shuttle Garages when I rode the homing beam back. I spent a week in a nice bed under the care of as pretty a nurse as ever raised a temperature. Bayard spent a lot of time with me, filling in the details.
“We’ve pieced together most of the story,” he told me. “Seventy years ago, when the Blight wiped out most of our quantum of alternate world-lines, one man escaped from the general destruction. He was a high official in the government of the key world-line of the Blighted area. He’d been instrumental in the misguided shuttle experimentation that led to the disaster. He managed to coax a crude experimental machine across the Net to the Zero-zero line—one of the very few with a stable enough probability framework to survive the disaster.
“It wasn’t a world to his liking. At home, he’d been a power behind the throne of Orange that ruled half the planet. Here he was a nobody—though not without ability. In time, he rose to a top position in the Imperial Trans-Net Liaison Service. But his heart was never in his work. His real ambition was to reestablish the old empire. In his lifetime, he didn’t succeed, but he passed the charge on to his son and to his grandson after that.
“Obviously, it was impossible for one man to overthrow the Imperial government single-handed. The van Roosevelts needed another line, outside the Blight, in which to carry out their plan. They picked New Normandy. It was at an adequate technical level, was politically unstable and ripe for a strong hand—and it had a suitable historical base on which to build. Roosevelt’s intention was to foment rebellion, play the French against the Britons, and when both sides were exhausted and discredited, step in with a small but highly organized band of irregulars and take over.
“He soon learned the undertaking wasn’t as easy as he had supposed. The Duke of Londres was a powerful key figure, not easy to manipulate. He killed him—and discovered that by his interference from outside the line, he’d created a massive probability imbalance with the results you saw here, and at home. He had to restore stability. That meant stamping out the power of the Plantagenets, once and for all, because as long as one of them was alive, anywhere, the probability forces would concentrate in him, force him into the theater of events, and create a probability subnucleus around him. Roosevelt couldn’t have that: he needed all the probability energy he could command to make his chosen line stable enough to stand against the Blight.
“Just killing off the Plantagenets wouldn’t do. He needed their strength, their mana, added to his. That was where you came in. He used some very special instruments that his grandfather had brought with him in his original shuttle from the Orange line to trace the affinities across the Net—and found you. I know you’re just a fisherman, you know nothing about the Plantagenets. Buy the probability lines were concentrated around you. He intended to use you as a figurehead to restore the stability of the New Normandy line, let you destroy your power in a hopeless war, then offer you escape. The price would be your acknowledgment of him as master.
“He made his first mistake when he secretly arrested the Chief of Intelligence, Baron von Richthofen. Manfred has friends; we weren’t content with Roosevelt’s story of a sudden stroke. Either he was too soft-hearted, or he was afraid to break too many important life-lines in the Imperium. He should have killed him, and me, too. But he didn’t.
“They broke me out of the cell I was in a few hours after he left with you on his mission into the Blight. We tried to follow, but the storm blew up, and we barely made it back. When Roosevelt didn’t return, we started searching. Our instruments pinpointed him in New Normandy. When I arrived, it was all over—as you know. We haven’t found a trace of Roosevelt. I suppose he was killed in the fighting. You’re lucky to be alive yourself.”
There were a few holes in Bayard’s version of what had happened, but that was all right. It covered the main points; it seemed to satisfy everybody. With Roosevelt’s death, the storm had blown itself out. There were no more toadstools sprouting in the archives. And Imperial umpires were rapidly pacifying New Normandy under a free parliament.
But there was still something bothering Bayard. When I left the hospital, he showed me the city, took me to restaurants and concerts, fixed me up with a nice little apartment for as long as I wanted it. He didn’t mention taking me back home, and neither did I. It was as though we were both waiting for something impending hanging over everything.
We were sitting at a table at a terrace restaurant in Uppsala when I asked him about it. At first he tried to pass it off lightly, but I caught his eyes and held them.
“You’ll have to tell me sooner or later,” I said. “It concerns me, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “There’s still an imbalance in the Net. It’s unimportant now, but in time it will grow until it threatens the stability of the Imperium—and of B-I Three, and New Normandy; of every viable line in the quantum. The Blight is a cancer that can never be contained permanently. There’s an incompleteness there, and like an electric circuit, it must complete itself.”
“Go on.”
“Our instruments indicate that the aborted lines center on you, and in the sword Balingore.”
I nodded. “I’m not a part of the line, is that it? You’ll have to take me back to Key West, then, and let me get on with my fishing.”
“It’s not as simple as that. Seven hundred years ago a key figure in the ancestral line entered into a course of action that ended by creating the holocaust. Stability will never be attained until the probability lines that were scattered then are led back to their source.”
That was all he said, but I understood what he was trying to tell me.
“Then I have to go back,” I said. “Into the Blight.”
“It’s your decision,” he said. “The Imperium won’t try to force you.”
I stood up. The sunset colors had never looked lovelier, the distant music more appealing.
“Let’s go,” I said.
The technicians who checked us into the shuttle worked silently and efficiently. They shook hands all around and we strapped in, Bayard and I.
“Our target is the former master-line of the quantum,” Bayard said. I didn’t tell him I’d been there before. The shapes and colors of the Blight flowed around us, but for once I didn’t notice.
“What will happen afterward?” I asked.
“Our hope is when the Blight energies are canceled, the Blight itself will dissipate instantly. The ruined worlds will no longer exist in the Net.”
We didn’t talk any more after that. It seemed like only minutes before we clocked down and the hum of the drive died.
“We’ve arrived,” Bayard said. He cycled the lock open and I looked out into shifting fog. It shifted and blew away and the jungle and the ruins were gone, and gleaming towers rose up into sunlight, above green lawns and the play of light in fountains. Far away, a woman was singing.