How many of those choices had been good? More than half, she hoped.... She moved to the side railing, gripping its cool ceramite. Certainly rebuilding the heavy lifter counted as one of the good choices; and then using it to recover the robotic factory from the remains of Coffin Island. Those, in turn had lead to the glittering sprawl of streetglobes, hab complexes, and industrial nodes that the lifter now flew over. After the escape of the Burning Heart, there had been less than three thousand human colonists. Now, two decades later, there were more than twenty thousand, co-mingled with countless Khafra, living and working symbiotically. There were a few individualistic humans and Ferals who refused to participate, but that was their choice—and everyone lived with the consequence of their choice, as Jenette knew all too well.

  Was decision possible without regret, she wondered?

  A pneumatic door shushed open. Footfalls approached. Jenette caught the reflection of radiant words in the lifter's handrail.

  <>

  <>

  <>

  <> four voices flashed.

  Jenette turned to face four bipeds, Kayli, Shona, Soren, and Gall Hedren. They were Pact humans; their hair had fallen out and their follicles turned into glowbuds. And they were special Pact-humans. These quadruplets, who had cemented the peace between humans and Khafra, were also heirs to the wisdom of Balance, trained by the four Khafra Judges whom Jenette had come to know so well. Where the old Judges had blocked their earpits to block out the impure verbal language of secrets, one each of the four Pact-human Judges blocked a different sense: sight, sound, taste, or smell. That way at least one of their number was always immune to an imBalancing influence, no matter what sense it originated from; they also meditated upon the voids caused by the loss of those senses, hoping to become wise.

  The old Judges were gone. A very old Tlalok had dispatched these Pact humans, their successors, to serve as witness for him this night when the air felt expectant, as if awaiting the coming of an electrical storm. But the only storm was within Jenette.

  Jenette said to them, "Changing one's mind is a woman's prerogative." Kayli and Shona smiled, faintly. "And a Prime Consul's," Jenette continued. "But I will not change mine tonight. I will make my choice. The only unknown is how it will be received."

  All four Pact-human Judges nodded and tallied their beads.

  In many ways, Jenette reflected, New Ascension humans were becoming more Khafra than the Khafra were becoming human. Two-thirds of the newest human generation had made Pact. The rest survived on fugue and had not made the mutation, but even they cold not avoid the alien influence around them. Within the next generation, New Ascension science and technology would be predominantly human, as it was now, but the culture... that would be something altogether different. A fusion of human, Pact-human, and Khafra. It was the fourth and final prophesied gift: the Gift of Gamut. The future that grew out of it would be a just future, Jenette knew. Balanced. Better. Jenette had fought for it at every opportunity.

  But, after this night, would she have a part to play in it?

  Jenette's hand went to a breast pocket, feeling through the fabric to a vial secreted within. It held one-half of the answer to her question. The lifter's destination held the other. Apart of Jenette feared to reach that destination; Kayli, Shona, Soren, and Gall were not the only ones who had changed.

  What would he think of what she had become?

  Time passed, brooding. Settled areas dropped behind. The continent grew dark beneath the lifter as it plunged toward the heart of Gnosis. That heart appeared, lit by four spectral crescent moons in the sky, a great somber mass of bone and hide, pallid and undead looking, rising from the wild preserves surrounding it. At its foot, was a single, tiny mourner.

  Jenette's heart leapt into her throat. The reports were true!

  The lifter set down. Automated boarding stairs unfolded.

  Before she could change her mind, Jenette climbed to the ground. She adjusted her close-fitting burgundy jumpsuit, which she had picked out especially for this night, and walked the fifty paces to the mourning figure. Its head shifted at the patter of her approaching boots.

  "Hello," said a voice from long ago.

  The sound swept Jenette into the past; into a tumultuous time, a formative time, perhaps a best-of-times. Many of the twists and turns of her life were anchored in that brief period. She would have liked to savor the reverie, but all too quick, she was back firmly in the present, staring at the white-uniformed back. Please don't turn around. Don't look. Jenette resisted the urge to flee.

  She cleared her throat. "I heard a rumor you might be here."

  "I have always been here...."

  For twenty years Jenette and all non-Pact humans had depended on the fugueship, every six months making a pilgrimage to breathe fugue-thick air in chambers just inside its hull, to fall into fugue-coma and then be carried back out by Khafra. Long Reach had always been there to keep them alive. And Pilot Lindal Karr had always been there, too. No one saw him, even the slowtime Khafra, but they knew he was there. Jenette felt it keenly at each visit, so near and yet so far. But now that was changing. The vast cosmosaurus planetos was still, its heartbeats quieted.

  Long Reach was dead.

  Karr's head hung low. A Gattler lay on the turf beside him, its life-prolonging barrels and spheres untouched.

  "No more tricks," he said. "No more cheats. The suffering ends here."

  Age.

  Great age.

  Many feelings,

  More sweet than bitter,

  It feels as it slips away.

  The new parts of itself are long gone,

  To float and fly in diamonds of light,

  As it once did.

  As is right.

  It is weary, so weary.

  There is pain,

  As ending settles upon it.

  It has already ended, it senses, long ago.

  It is just catching up.

  It is not afraid.

  The tiny good has not gone.

  The tiny good makes the emptiness less.

  But the tiny good does not make the hurting less.

  Soon, it hopes, the pain will go.

  Soon the all-pressing-down weight will go.

  Final comfort tempts it.

  And it wants to be tempted.

  Do not hold me back, tiny good!

  Let me go!

  Karr's hands twitched, but he did not reach for the Gattler. "I stopped keeping it alive a couple days ago." Karr confessed quietly. "I owed it that much, after all I put it through."

  Jenette reached out as if to comfort Karr, but withdrew at the last second. It was so confusing, what he must feel, what she felt... and feared.

  Karr said, "I'm sorry, Jenette."

  "For what?"

  "There's no more fugue."

  "Oh, that. Don't be." Jenette fumbled into her breast pocket and withdrew a medical vial. "Our scientists finally biofactured a vaccine."

  Karr turned around.

  His expression was not as Jenette expected. Dried tears stained his face, but there were no tears now. Karr's countenance was philosophical, weary, as if from long hardship, but accepting. He stared at the vial of vaccine.

  "That is a great relief."

  And then he looked at Jenette. Her throat tightened as he stared. She wanted to speak, anything to distract him from looking at her. She wanted to tell him about the fugueship-spawn, how satellite scans showed they were feeding and growing large on the local gas giant's rings. She wanted to tell him how the colony had rebuilt its beacon and sent a message to the rest of the human universe, and that a message had returned ten years later from a Major Vidun. She wanted to tell Karr how that major and a certain Dr. Uttz were moving the Pilot Academy permanently to New Ascension to take advantage of a planet full of Pilot candidates, so that when the fugueship-spawn became full grown fugueships, they would not have to wander the galaxy alone. She wanted to tell Karr how much she had missed him, and how she desperately wanted him to say how much he had missed her, and that he still loved her. And she wanted to throw her arms around him and for him to hug her back and tell her that it was all over and now they would never be apart again. But Karr's mouth gaped open, and the longer he stared, the wider it gaped.

  "It feels like only twenty days to me," he said at last in a hush. "But it's not, is it? Everything changed while I was gone."

  Jenette's vision swam. Karr reached out to her, but she slapped his arm away.

  "Don't touch me!"

  "Jenette, what—?"

  "I'm old!" she sobbed. "I'm old and weak and wrinkled and disgusting! Don't tell me you don't see it because I can tell by the look on your face. I'm twenty years older and you're young and handsome and exactly the same! And you don't love me anymore, and I don't blame you because I'm old... old!" She was becoming an ancient, like Colonel Halifax and Dr. Yll and her father before they died. It was beyond horrible. Jenette wept uncontrollably.

  Karr reached out again, this time weathering her blows to grasp her shoulders. "Wait a minute—ouch! Stop hitting! Stop! Don't you think you're overreacting? Maybe just a little?"

  Jenette settled a little, but continued to glare at Karr. "Don't tell me any lies Lindal Karr! Don't tell me age doesn't matter to you!"

  "Okay," Karr said, not seeming to have the energy to get worked up about it. "That's fair. Age does matter to me, but not in the way you think." She started to squirm again. "Sssh. Think about it. How old were you when we first met? Well?"

  "You know very well that I was twenty-three standard years," Jenette spat.

  "And how old did I say you looked then, by off-world standards?"

  Jenette scowled, "Fifteen?"

  "Exactly," Karr agreed. "Fifteen. And now, twenty years later, do you know how old you look, by off-world standards?"

  "I don't know," Jenette said quietly. "Old?"

  "Thirty-five," said Karr. "And a very young thirty-five at that It must be the residual effects of all those hormone inhibitors. Don't you get it? I'm thirty-six. Your age is perfect."

  "But I'm really forty-three. I'm still older than you."

  Karr's mouth twisted, not quite into a full-blown smile. Karr's emotions had been beaten and bruised—were still being beaten and bruised—too much, for that. But it was a start. "Jenette, I'm eleven hundred years old. You have a long way to go before you're older than me!"

  Jenette sniffed, liking his logic, but still suspicious. "But the look on your face when you first saw me...?"

  "I simply couldn't believe how good you look as a full grown woman," Karr said. "I still can't. You're so beautiful...."

  "Really? No patronizing and no pity?"

  "Absolutely. I am too weary to beat around the bush."

  Jenette's eyes grew big. She leaned up and planted a long, tender kiss on Karr's lips, which he did not seem to mind.

  A throaty urrrrr carried through the night from the heavy lifter. "About time."

  Karr squinted at the alien in the cockpit. "Arrou?"

  "Arrou-Two," Jenette corrected.

  Karr blinked. Had he been gone that long? Yes, he supposed, he had. "Don't you mean Arrou the second?"

  Jenette shrugged. "I tried to explain it to them, but they wouldn't listen." She disengaged from Karr's embrace, so as to face the lifter, but stayed close. "There's also a Kitrika-Two, a Jenette-Two and a Karr-Two. They liked the sound of it."

  "Who liked the sound of it?" Karr asked, feeling as though his brain was running at half-speed.

  For an answer, Jenette keyed a comset on her collar. It bleeped and in response two old Khafra stepped out of the lifter's passenger module. "Arrou and Kitrika, of course. Duh."

  The old male raised his bullet snout and called out. "Five hundred knots!"

  Karr called back. "It's good to see you, old friend."

  "Arrou glad to see Karr, too. Arrou has lots of questions. Arrou flies satellites into orbit when Jenette not using lifter for personal trips. Hrrrrmmmph."

  Karr might have chuckled at the alien's annoyance, but water began to bubble behind him. He spun around. Long Reach was sinking. No doubt its iris-valves had relaxed, and the ship was filling full of water.

  This was the final sadness Karr had been bracing for. He hurried over and held his head and hands as close as possible to the descending wall of hide. Karr had spent his time away from the realtime world learning from a strange source: in-bob. It had taken some effort, some forgetting of old, regimented beliefs and the learning of new, more intuitive ones, but Pilot Lindal Karr could now feel the moods, if not the exact thoughts of his ship. It was not as hard as he had imagined. You just had to open yourself up, to trust. While Karr had been keeping Long Reach alive, against its desire and at great pain to it, he had spent a lot of time practicing to open himself up and trust and listen to what it would be feeling at this exact moment....

  It is floating away.

  Into the Light jewels of ending.

  But it does not forget.

  Gratitude it feels, as warm nothing embraces it.

  The hard, recent times are already forgotten,

  A speck of discomfort in a life of contentment.

  A wish it makes,

  For the tiny good it leaves behind:

  Do not be alone,

  Do not be afraid,

  Forever be un-sad,

  Forever and always.

  Ending comes.

  That was what Karr had needed to hear. Forgiveness. It was the end of an era. Now Karr's life could move on.

  "I'm not a Pilot anymore," he said, looking at the water-filled hole in the ground.

  "Are you sad?" Jenette asked.

  "Yes. But I will try not to be. Long Reach would not want me to be sad."

  "No," Jenette agreed.

  Jenette looked at Karr.

  Karr looked at Jenette.

  "I expect the colony elected you Prime Consul."

  "They did."

  "I expect that's a position that doesn't leave very much time left over."

  "It doesn't," Jenette grinned. "But I resigned yesterday."

  Karr managed a grin, too.

  "So," Jenette asked, "what do you want to do?"

  Karr looked from the hole in the ground, with the light of four lonely moons dancing on its surface, over to the heavy lifter. With a last farewell in his heart, he turned his back on the hole and held out his hand.

  Jenette took it, willingly.

  "Come on," Karr said, "we have a lot of catching up to do."

 

 

  Ivan Cat, THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

 

 

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