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Chapter Thirty

It reminded Hansen of the place, the plane, where the lords of the Consensus briefed him.


The resemblance wasn't physical. He stood in a hall of such purity that the walls and roofbeams bent the light without dimming it. The floor beneath him was black but so smooth that Hansen felt he was standing on the soul of nothingness, the ancient ether which science had long denied even as an ideal.


The Palace of Trade had vanished. The Syndics, the conquering warriors in their battlesuits . . . everything except Hansen himself was gone.


The lords of the Consensus had been vast bulks, hinting of whale shapes but vaster even than fluid oceans could support. Here there were dazzles of light along the sides of the hall's empyrean perfection . . . and Hansen knew at an instinctive level that it was the same.


"Fortin," said a voice from the veil of splendor at the end of the room, "you will explain to Hansen his task. As for the others of you—you've seen that I have the situation in hand. Leave it with me, then."


Hansen had heard that voice—that sort of voice, he meant, but it went beyond that—before. The fellow outlining the mission, with all the weight of power and certainty behind him, telling others what they would do and what they would not.


Hansen always thought he'd be that sort of man when he had the rank, but he'd been wrong. Commissioner Hansen, and people jumping when he spoke—but he'd never been certain of anything except himself, and he couldn't give a man an order and make it sound like he expected to be obeyed.


Obeyed or else, if it came to that; but it was the or else Nils Hansen believed in, and that wasn't the same thing at all. . . .


The iridescent curtains were moving, shifting toward the doorway; moving faster than a man could move over the distance . . . if the distance were as great as if seemed, which instinct suggested it was not.


"Penny?" said the voice of insouciant command. "You've recovered your necklace, I believe?"


"What if I have?" whined a girl's voice, almost close enough for Hansen to touch the speaker though the nearest of the auroral veils was/seemed a hundred meters away. Then the same voice, sulky, "Yeah, Fortin found it for me. Why . . . ?"


"To borrow, as you know. Because of Diamond. Because it's necessary to achieve balance."


For all the assurance with which the male officer spoke, Hansen could read the slightest doubt underlying the words. This I ask, the doubt admitted, and though I would like to command it, I cannot. . . . 


The tone of a man who knows he must depend on others, but hopes they won't realize the fact.


Hansen began to smile.


The rainbow veils swept out of the hall like sun-struck sea mist scattered by a breeze. From the mass of them came a male figure, huge, walking toward Hansen with something winking from the fingers of his right hand. As he came closer, he shrank until he stood before the ex-Commissioner as a person no taller than Hansen himself. . . .


But that was not the surprise.


"Solbarth," Hansen said. "What are you doing here?"


The pigmentless, beautiful android lost his look of superior disdain for an instant. He glanced toward the single shield of light remaining, the one at the end of the hall from which the commanding voice rang.


"What?" the android said. "I'm not Solbarth. Any Solbarth."


"You're Solbarth," Hansen said. His assurance was suddenly no more than a ploy, a tool luck had offered him to get more information. "You're a criminal, and I captured you on Annunciation."


He grinned. "You haven't forgotten me."


The android blinked. "My name is Fortin," he said. "As for being a criminal—I'm a god."


Fortin's laugh barked harshly, falsely. "It may be that you knew a batch sibling of my mother," he said with empty dismissal. "I'm half android, you see."


Laughter boomed from behind the veil of light.


Fortin shook his head to clear away discomfort and settled the mantle of disdain about his visage again.


"No matter," he said. "We've brought you here to restore balance in—"


"I brought him here," interrupted the commanding voice.


Fortin smiled. Enunciating as clearly as the notes of a jade bell, he resumed, "My father brought you here to restore balance in the Matrix. You will be inserted into Ruby, a portion of phased spacetime. You'll be disguised—"


Fortin hefted the necklace in his left hand. Hansen had a sudden vision of himself in drag, dripping with jewelry and his hair done up with ruby-studded combs.


"—but they'll be awaiting you. And they'll probably have warning of an impending attack."


The hidden speaker said, "Their threat warning system is very good. On Ruby, everything to do with war is almost ideally good. Wouldn't you say so, Fortin?"


The minuscule fluttering of the android's—half android's—nostrils was the only sign he'd heard the interjection.


"Your task," Fortin continued, "will be to penetrate Ruby's Battle Center. The main computer there has already been programmed to carry out a particular phase shift. You must—"


"No," said Hansen.


Fortin's face froze. "Don't think to cross me, human," he said.


His malevolence would have surprised some listeners; but not Commissioner Hansen, who'd spent three years tracking down one Solbarth, a criminal of almost incredible savagery. . . .


"No," said Hansen. "There's no 'must' from you for me. You—"


He tapped out with a fingertip that stopped just short of the android's chest "—can't order me to piss on your boots. Though that I might do for fun."


Laughter rocked and boomed from the end of the hall.


Hansen whirled on the sound.


"D'ye think I'm a gun you can point?" he shouted. "Do you? Well, you're fucking wrong!"


"Do you remember Diamond, Hansen?" the voice asked. "Where you first entered our continuum . . . not at our request."


It occurred to Nils Hansen that this pair was going to threaten harm to the gentle folk of Diamond unless Hansen did their bidding. An extortionist's trick, a hostage-taker's strategy.


And Hansen would have to react in the only way his soul would permit—kill Fortin, kill the voice behind the curtain of light; kill and keep killing until they killed him.


And perhaps the survivors would be less quick to use that gambit again with a man who was every bit as ruthless as they.


Fortin saw the look in Hansen's eyes; something close to an expression of sexual climax suffused the perfect android features. It froze Hansen and sickened him, as if he'd entered a room with murder in mind and found his intended victim eating a plateful of feces.


"This is what happened to Diamond," said the hidden man. "This is what you must avenge, Commissioner Hansen."


The hall vanished. Hansen hung in nothingness surrounded by the common area of the city-building where his capsule had landed. The room was full of standing, singing people, but he saw them as photographic negatives while something else printed through in their place.


Then he was truly among them, seeing Lea and remembering how her body had touched his with a warmth that was no flirtation. There was the little boy who'd waved and called Hansen's name, and—


He saw their flushed faces and the tears streaming down their cheeks as they sang of joy and sunlight.


The sun was a black pit out of which thundered a platoon of tanks rolling through the singing innocents rather than over them, grinding away the substance of their universe and not merely their bodies.


In place of the open park was a canyon walled by black houses as massive as coastal forts. Citizens in uniform danced in the street, firing slugs and streaks of ravening light into the air. Through all the celebration, the tanks roared triumphantly.


"You remember Diamond," said the commanding voice. "This is Ruby, which destroyed Diamond. I brought you here, Commissioner Hansen, to destroy Ruby and preserve balance."


The vision was gone, the hymn that was worse than the screams that should have accompanied the descent to some spicule of nothingness and death. . . .


Hansen shuddered uncontrollably. He worked his hands, watching the fingers bend and the skin mottle with strain over the knuckles. "Go on with the briefing," he said.


Fortin laughed. "We thought this was a job you'd be willing to do for us," he said smirkingly.


Hansen looked up. The android stepped away reflexively.


"I won't do anything for you," Hansen said. He spoke very distinctly. "I'll do the job—this job. But not for you."


"Which is all we ask . . . Kommissar," said the voice from behind the veil.


 


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