Dark Planet: Soldier's Home by Loren Cooper

Mark is an artist and astronomer who lives and works in Sussex, England.
Loren works as a technical coordinator for Hewlett-Packard.

One

I had always thought of myself as a soldier. Born into a war fought bitterly long before my conception, knowing that war would eventually take my life, I gave myself to nothing beyond the limits of the conflict. I served my time faithfully, expecting only that one day death would welcome me into an endless, icy embrace.

That was before Erebus.

Careful to control the force of each step under Erebus' lighter gravity, I nodded slightly to the guards standing casually outside the door to their Imperator's private residence. I resisted the urge to sneer as I tolerated the obligatory casual inspection. Emphasis on the casual. The Imperator must have been a popular ruler, since with his security any serious enemy would have long since cut short his shuffle 'round this mortal coil.

When the portal hissed open, I carried the tray into the rooms beyond with delicate precision. Lush carpeting absorbing the sound of each footstep, I skirted an abstract freefall sculpture and spotted my target relaxing at a long table and staring into the rainbow mists of a glittering veil of water. He looked up as I entered, almost mincing with the cumulative effects of the carpet and the gravity.

Thick eyebrows creased over a heavy face in gentle concern. "Alberto sick?"

I bowed slightly, shook my head, and set the tray in front of him. The Imperator uncovered the dish himself, fresh steam boiling around the edges of the cover as the static seal relaxed. He leaned forward in the heavy wooden chair and inhaled deeply, pure bliss crossing his coarse features as he eyed one of those gourmet concoctions so rich that the diner can almost see the animal still writhing in pain. A big man, I would not have called him fat, though if this were an example of his regular diet that day could not be too distant.

He tasted the first forkful delicately, anticipatory bliss becoming tangible ecstasy, nodded dismissively to me without more than a glance in my direction, and tenderly pierced one of the hapless molluscs that had selflessly given its all for better government through epicureanism.

I cleared my throat slightly, and he gave me a sharp look. I waited until he finished chewing, wishing that this had been an assassination. Of course, my life has never been that easy. "I have a message for you."

His chewing slowed, sudden speculation crossing his features. I chuckled. "Don't worry. If you were slated to die by my hand, I wouldn't be standing by you at the time."

Anger glinted in his eyes, but none showed in his face. Good. I'd been told he was a smart one. "A message from whom?"

I made sure both of his hands were visible and relaxed slightly. "An interested party. A neighbor of yours."

A bitter smile crossed his features. "Concilium rep." Contempt colored his voice. "Say what you've been sent to say."

I ignored his tone. "It has come to the attention of certain parties that you have been dabbling. It would be unwise for you to choose the wrong side at this particular time."

"I'm neutral." His voice was flat.

I nodded internally, knowing that he had responded to the prod with anger. A small push now should be sufficient. I let my voice become slightly hard. "Best you stay that way. As you can see, your continuing health is not necessarily guaranteed."

I turned to leave, and heard the crash behind me. I looked back slowly, lifting a curious eyebrow as I saw him standing and breathing heavily. Behind him the rich wood of his seat lay flat against the marbled floor. "Damn you. You don't own me."

I gave him a nasty smile, goading him. "Don't we? We can have you and this world any time we stretch forth our hand. Do you doubt me?"

Anger turned to hatred in his eyes as he almost shook with the effort of containing his rage. A crimson stream of wine from his thrown goblet ran undisturbed under the illusory waterfall while he stared at me. I deliberately turned my back and walked out.

I ran the small risk that hot blood would overcome cold calculation and he would have me killed before I cleared the grounds. Since I stepped into the streets with no impediment, I knew that he had as much control as Operations had told me. Before day retreated from oncoming night, he would be in contact with the Movement's local elements. Within a fortnight, the Movement, armed with the information we had carefully fed him and possibly reinforced by elements of his own defense forces, would attack a ConArm convoy headed for the blockade at the Gap. And before the year had died, using the pretext provided by the attack on the convoy, the Concilium would annex this sector and establish a full ConArm presence.

All in a day's work.

Taking advantage of the groundport cubicle rented a local month before by a resident exporter, I divested myself of considerable biochemical alterations to my physical appearance, added a few select implements of destruction, and walked out the front office looking and feeling significantly different than I had less than an hour earlier.

I sighed, flagged a local driver, and settled into the soft rear bench. My secondary assignment completed, I could now give full attention to the reason Operations had chosen me rather than another to come to Erebus. I had to see an old friend.

Then I had to kill him.

Two

The cab whirred away quietly behind me into the soft bustle of the suburbs as I studied Amphiar's choice of residence. The carefully patterned yard of short, dark green pseudoturf edged with curling black roses contrasted neatly with the rearing pile of white masonry that Operations had given me as the site Amphiar had chosen for his refuge. I stooped to pluck a single rose, stem smooth and slightly warm to the touch, tucking it inside my suit coat as I walked slowly up the path.

Either Operations was practicing self-deception even more than usual or they didn't know Amphiar the way I did. A full spectrum telepath has certain advantages when choosing to disappear, and any man as capable as Amphiar would have been able to vanish easily enough even without his not inconsiderable mental gifts. Those wandering slabs of stone marked the site of a planned confrontation. Knowing this, I resisted the urge to chuckle as I saw the deliberate similarity to a mausoleum.

I could have tried all manner of fancy entrances. Hell, I could have bombed the site from orbit. Considerably more secure, but not how I chose to say farewell. So (shaking my head as I thought about the two of us, still playing games on Concilium time) I stepped lightly up the opalescent stairway and rapped quietly at the door.

He answered the door after a polite interval and smiled. "Mopsus. I had hoped it would be you."

I returned his handclasp and stepped through the door. "Really?"

He closed the door behind me and chuckled. "No. Not really."

I lifted a curious eyebrow as he walked past me. "How many did it take to convince them?"

"Four."

"How perspicacious of them."

"Indeed."

I walked two paces behind his straight back, through a long white hallway and into a large sitting room. Multiple avenues of attack presented themselves, but taking him then was not a serious consideration.

He settled behind a large desk that dominated a room walled in bound books.

I dropped into a straight-backed chair that forced him to shift his own seat to regard me at an angle across the gleaming expanse of dark wood and grinned at him. "Any go the orbital route?"

He looked sardonic in the slanting light of Erebus' weak sun. "The last. He and his ship made pretty colors in the upper atmosphere for a short while. I have friends."

My grin died slowly, and silence settled over us. My eyes fell on a priceless wooden chess set, ornate pieces carved from the light and dark ivory of some nameless beasts and polished by centuries of use. He watched me quietly, until I broke the silence and the chains of my own memory. "Why did you do it?"

He looked innocent. "It was him or me."

I frowned at him. "Be serious. Why not retire? Why not disappear? Why openly rebel and then hang yourself out like a target?"

Sudden gravity aged his features by an easy decade. "I was waiting for you."

I cracked my hand against the table, the sound like a gunshot in the closed space. "Damn you!"

He leaned forward slightly, caught himself. "I mean that."

I took a deep breath, expelled it slowly. "Why?"

He shook his head. "Nothing easy to explain. Nothing I can really tell you that you'll understand. You'd have to see it for yourself."

I met his green eyes with a level gaze. "Amphiar, you know better than that. You used to debrief me. You'd never make it through my deep shields before I killed you."

He gave me a sour half-smile. "You misunderstand me. I remember your reflexes. Burn your brain to ash now and I'd still be as dead. And I would never kill you. But they forgot that a man without talent cannot truly shield."

He held up one hand as I shifted impatiently. "A minute longer. I'll try to explain. It came down to life. I've hated them, our masters, for as long as I can remember. Amoral children, the lot of them. But recently I came to the realization that they weren't necessary, or inevitable."

A curious echo came into his words, my hearing distorting. Pleasure, pain, and fear worked their way into my system, all mixed with cold intellectual speculation. I stood as he spoke, my budding anger running through the foreign stream of his emotions like an icy current. He stood with me, still speaking. "I'm not talking about the Movement. No real difference there. But the people! The abstract, manipulated masses! I'd never seen them before, no more than the others. You see, they live. They live quite well without us."

I looked at my own face, cold and white, looking at him, watching him watching me. Telepathic echo resonated through my voice inaudibly. "Dirty trick."

He smiled sadly as I closed to within arm's length. "I'm sorry."

His voice haunted me as I shrugged a short blade out of a wrist sheath and into his left eye. He folded like an empty suit of clothes, and the world tilted around me. Intangible senses burned me in a moment of incandescence. Something rose above me, all bright and burning, laughing at me through golden flames. Then I fell back from the light and into darkness.

I still heard that laughter when I clawed my way out of the darkness. I rose unsteadily and took a moment to study his shell. At the edge of perception I could hear the mutter of distant, uncountable voices. I couldn't bring myself to remove the blade. So I looked at him for a long time, and cursed him silently.

And I say damn you still, Amphiar, for what you forced me to become. Kinder to have killed me.

Three

I functioned well enough. I did what I had to do, as I always have. I made the call from Amphiar's console, took the more expensive and conspicuous hopper. That was bad enough. The distant rumble of unvoiced dreams, fears, desires, wants, needs, prayers, lusts, and everything in between tied my body into a complex knot of tension.

At least the hopper was automated.

Stepping into the crowd at the station to pick up my orbital transfer exhausted what few reserves I had tried to build. I would have died then, raging against the faceless sea of torment until Erebus' armed security at last managed to burn me down, but Amphiar didn't leave me even that escape.

The Veils dropped around me with the inexorable strength of remorse. I staggered over to the nearest seat and buried my face in clammy hands. Through the sudden, aching stillness, I heard the rustle of the crowd, the murmur of voices, the soft sounds of people moving away from me. Silently, I blessed them for their instincts.

A body schooled to the will for decades responds even when the will has become a small thing, crying alone in the dark of night. My parasympathetic nervous system kicked in swiftly, driving my physical responses back to something resembling normality. So my hands were steady, sweat drying in spots of ice around my upper body, when I looked up into the professionally alert eyes of a young woman in a pilot's uniform. "You all right?"

I nodded, jaws clenching as a flash pierced the Veils. In a moment of unwanted perception, I saw genuine sympathy, trained caution, relaxed anticipation of the clean release of flight, and the distant ties of love and common interest, the reflections of occasional anger and buried hatred.

I stood, reflex taking me one step to the side, her own startlement carrying her back. She smiled sheepishly, and I held out a cautious hand. "I apologize."

She shrugged. "You took me by surprise. I didn't expect you to move so quickly. Are you sure that you're all right?"

I dropped the hand back to my side. "No. But I'll make it."

She looked uncomfortable. "It can be hard to fly."

"Yes." I spoke softly. "Don't be late for your shuttle."

She looked startled, glanced at the schedule wall, cursed, and sprinted down the corridor.

Not without considerable effort and jaw-clenching on my part, I managed to bury myself in the crowd. Fleeting contacts were inevitable, particularly as I discovered that proximity alone did not control Ambiar's "gift." Intense emotions, trivial thoughts, indecipherable bursts of information, involuntary insights into bright awareness, sights of beasts unclean and twisted all came to me without discernable pattern. Tears came to my eyes for no reason, standing and watching mother with child. Indifferent, focused on schedules, it took the girl's impatient tug to catch the abstracted mother's attention. Glancing down, smiling slightly and squeezing her daughter's hand gently, the sudden intensity of the bond staggered me.

One hand reaching, I touched a well of self-absorption that whirled to face me, one hand knocking my grasp away and severing the contact with mother and child. Pure reflex put one hand around his throat. I rose to face the petty tyrant, dwelling on the day's miniscule victories, and read pure fear as he met my black gaze. I let him stagger away and turned back to the counter. The others in line cleared away from me as I dropped one hand to the plate and watched the reservations for this particular identity crawl to life in lines of light written in the air.

Fear and disgust warred at my back, while the receptionist/security officer cleared my reservations. Below surface boredom he toyed with the idea of restraining the obviously drugged tourist, namely me, an idea he rejected after a moment of considering the sizeable expense account suggested by my reservations.

Surrounded by a sudden consciousness of alien perspectives, I made it through the shuttle flight. Worse, in the moments that the Veils dropped around me, were the times that I felt the urge to turn and speak to the dead man I could feel standing at my shoulder. At the station I retreated from the emotional minefield of humanity, found my borrowed yacht, and got the hell out of there.

Four

She spun lightly, light and shadow chasing one another across lines of smooth motion like Time's flowing tides. Exuberence and lithe energy, focused by art, burned in an instant of absolute celebration of youth, a momentary aching passion for life. Then fluid speed rippled into gentler motion, the dance itself dropping away from her as she settled gracefully into stillness.

Eyes stinging from tears I would never shed, I drew her to me, and kissed her, and gave her the rose I had not forgotten. "Charis."

She turned it in her hand, a smile playing around the corners of her mobile mouth. "Black. No thorns." She brushed it across the tip of her nose and sniffed, lightly. "Musky."

I grinned. "The light there is pale, the colors rich. The gravity is low, the air sweet. The dew falls thick and heavy, and clouds race in thin herds across a velvet sky."

"Frontier?"

I did not flinch as Charis drew the rose lightly under my jaw, trailing down along the line of my neck toward my chest. "Close."

She laughed suddenly. "You cheat. Not yet annexed."

I traced the line of her jawbone with a calloused hand, suddenly sad. Truly, I did love her. "In fact, if not in name."

Her grey eyes had a certain hardness in them as they met mine. "Aren't they all?"

And of course we kissed, again, and loved, again, and in the time when the mercy of the Veils fell away from me, I listened to the metallic ring of her angular thoughts, and the current running below that neither of us could acknowledge, and hated Amphiar, again.

Later, Charis stirred in my arms and rose. I half-opened eyes undimmed by sleep and spoke thickly into the shadows. "Where are you going, love?"

She turned back toward me, her voice merry as she lied. "For a drink, love. For the rose and I."

When she had crossed through the doorway, I slipped from the uncurled cocoon and stepped noiselessly to the wall beside the door. When she crossed the threshold as softly as a ghost, pacer held lightly in delicate hands, I broke her neck cleanly. And when I crossed that threshold, hands still icy with death, I stopped to stare at a single black rose, set lovingly into a crystal vase, washed gently in the pale light of an artificial sun.

I took more time than I should have, triggering the system virus I had left slumbering in my ship, swept into the station mainframe when they dumped the ship's memory during debriefing. Leaving that place behind took more effort than I would have guessed, and again I cursed Amphiar as reluctant footsteps carried me into the curve of the station corridor. Then the reflexes of survival made a mask of my face, tightened my stride to a businesslike pace, and set my path toward the Operations Hanger.

I walked briskly, a certain grim satisfaction burring slightly in the unconcerned confusion drifting through the station. Here, recovering from their undeclared warfare on Concilium time, trained professionals became citizens. With no mission parameters and no idea that anything could touch the heart of Concilium strength, they felt no different to me than the people they killed and manipulated, save for a faint tinge of fanatic arrogance echoing in the dimness of their thoughts. Not one of them suspected that I walked among them apostate, and none dreamed that the security system had been compromised, my artificial ally even then feeding reassuringly misleading information to the Operations Center.

I nodded to the young security officers in their crisp ConArm full dress blacks on station outside the Hanger. They nodded back, relaxing only after I had passed a full scan. I stepped into the half light of the Hanger and walked between the looming rows of silent ships. No sound rose out of the vast place to greet me as the door cycled shut. My lips twitched, then I thought of Charis and the half-smile faded. Phantom footsteps haunted me as I walked in the company of shadows.

The light whisper of fabric escorted me down the line of ships, my soft shoes soundless on the tiled floor, until I stopped, turned, and addressed the dark place between ships. "Calchas."

He stepped out of the shadow, moving as silently as I. "I expected you."

"So I see. No weapons?"

He snorted. "Here?"

I smiled briefly. "I thought you might have special dispensation."

His mouth hardened. "Charis had that."

I nodded. "So she did."

"They should have let one of us take you. Charis was not meant for Operations."

I sighed. "They should have killed me in debriefing, and saved us all this."

He shook his head. "Preferable, they thought, to have you die in quarters. A suspicious death would have served them better than an execution. Such was your reputation."

I grinned mirthlessly. So we worked. "And you?"

"I'm backup. I set charges to take you if she failed, but I decided to do it this way."

The Veils parted, and I felt the sudden weight of unwanted insight. Hating myself, I twisted the knife. "Shame about Charis."

He lunged at me with the full force of animal hatred. I twisted, felt my left arm numb as my right hand caught his chin. I felt his hand close on my throat as I swept his legs out from under him and brought him down across my knee. I disentangled myself from his limp form and ran a finger lightly across the fire building on my collarbone. Wincing, I watched the light die slowly in his eyes, listening to him spend his last breaths on curses.

Moving slowly against the pain, I took time I had never thought to use clearing another ship with the help of my software golem. As long as that took, releasing the new vessel took considerably less time than clearing mine of boobytraps and charges. Chalchas had been thorough, and he had been good. If they had told him what had targeted me for execution, he would not have taken the chance he had. But they had not told him, and the love in him would not let him defile her body with fire, so he had died, and so I lived.

None of the patrols challenged me as I left that place. But I never left the memory, and the ghosts follow me still.

Five

People in mass have a certain feel to them, a flavor if you will. The herd reflects all of the contradictory elements that compose the individual, the mixture spiced by the environment in which you find them. The result is a dish that continually assaults the senses, a bastard concoction unnaturally thrown together by some criminally insane Cajun Chef, pulsating with bitter and sweet, salty and sour, the sensuous and the rancid, everything imaginable and some things monstrously umimaginable.

Too much of that, and insanity follows.

I had a problem. I couldn't control the shifting of the Veils, and probably never would. The focus of continually unwanted insight, the strength of the impressions varying directly with proximity and population; I would break quickly under the pressure of a large population center.

Alternatively, I needed numbers to mask myself, if only for a while. I needed to hide from both the vengeful Concilium and the loyal opposition. I needed a society loose enough that a false identity would not be too fully scrutinized, and I needed time to research my next step.

Damn all compromise.

Borderline hadn't been the Border of the Frontier for some two and a half centuries, but no one had told them that. Concilium control lay gently over the small world with the velvet touch of the single Transit Station. The small population, still hovering around 500 million, sprawled across the plains in blissful ignorance about the illusory state of their vaunted freedom.

At the edge of the seas of ivory grass, watched warily by the imported animals who had adapted so quickly to their environment that habitation engineers had regarded the work of their hands with wonder and not a little fear, small dwellings grew in wide rows. In such a place I found myself, sweating in the night under the touch of the distant fury of human passions, sweating in the day as I turned the gray loam around my hovel into fertile ground, breaking the routine of night and day to scroll rapidly through world lists and records. And, unwillingly, I grew to know them, the people I had once ignored and manipulated in a war fought ostensibly in their name.

I never grew to love them, understand, but I did grow to know them. Unlike Amphiar, I never began to hate the perpetrators of that war. I saw little difference between those above and those below, having tasted the lives of all. Only the scale of the games they played differed, though virtue did survive more easily among the powerless. Humanity would never become my favorite dish.

Worse were the silences of that small house, when the Veils wrapped me in soft stillness. At such moments I would hear movement, the echoes of soft laughter or quiet footfalls. I found myself walking the rooms, searching for the ones I knew would be waiting for me there. Though I entered rooms where echoes were just dying into uneasy silence, rooms where traces of a musky presence still hung in the air, I never found them. And so my time no longer belonged to me alone.

Though I worked constantly enough to have no still moments, I had yet to isolate what I considered a viable alternative to Borderline, interdicted planets not even receiving honorable mention on that list. Then two men in casual suits strolled into my stubbly yard. At that time I rested on the south side of the house studying pH gradients. My bacteriological allies had met increasingly stubborn resistance on that side, the spirograss refusing to break out of the seed pods. The computer maintained that soil toxicity had fallen to acceptable levels, so either I had been taken on the bargain Smarturf, or some mutant microorganism was pulling a fast one on the lawn monitor.

The Veils, unpredictable as usual, parted long enough to warn me only after my uninvited guests had already set foot on my property. After the first shudder of recognition, I stood and waited for them. When they rounded the corner of the house, I wondered idly if my own lack of weapons had been an unconscious bid for suicide.

I could tell by the way that they carried themselves that both men were armed. The taller man, his face a study in innocent neutrality, scanned the horizon carefully, one hand playing gently with the comset at his belt. He looked at his partner and nodded. His partner's face lit into a cheery smile. "Any luck?"

I felt tired. "Of all kinds."

He stepped closer and held out one hand. I looked at it for a minute before realizing what he wanted. I clasped his hand in a lackluster way. "What do you want?"

His smile broadened. "You know who we are?"

"I know who you represent."

He nodded, chuckling. "Of course, of course. That's the important part to men like us, is it not? You can call me Ramis. My partner's name is unimportant. And you, of course, are Mopsus."

I waited in silence.

He continued as if the silence did not exist. "You are the second highest member of covert ConArm to betray the Concilium. Aristodemus gave the White Lady her freedom and set the Movement in motion. What might you be capable of, shepherd of worlds, killer of men?"

"Compliments will get you nowhere."

For the first time his grin looked toothy, predatory. "You know a great many things. Were you not so heavily shielded, we too would know these things. But I have been told that while you can be killed, you can not be forced. So I am offering you a home, a place of refuge."

I shifted slightly, realizing how dangerous this man could be. Realizing how high in the Movement he stood. "I am out of this war."

All mirth fled his smile. "No one leaves this war, not even the dead."

I relaxed and waited, while both of them tensed. I could feel him considering his options, watched the tall man lay light fingers on a snapdraw holster. The short man sighed, his smile turning rueful. "I tried. One more thing, before we leave. Just as we have contacts in the Concilium, so we know that they have parasites on the body of the Movement."

They turned and walked out of my yard. Before they had cleared the street, I had unlocked my uniscoot and left that place behind.

ConArm didn't hit me before I made it to the station. They didn't even hit me when I broke a false bank account clearing an old scoutship. I had thought to have more time and more subtlety. As I rolled with the course of events, I rode the wave of foreign emotions long enough to put my hands on the ship, the speed with which it cleared confirming that the Movement had smoothed the way for me.

Plotting alternatives in a ship limited by the absence of a jump engine, I lay in a course through three Transit Corridors, praying to the tutelary dieties of bureaucracy that the obscure priority code I used had not yet been invalidated. The world called Elysium hadn't even made it to my list of possibles, but no one would follow me there, only two open and one limited access corridor stood between me and it, and my options had become so limited as to be nonexistent. Damning my survival reflex, I fled.

An unmarked ship hit me at Cyanaea. As traffic cleared out of the route for my second Transit, the authorization code evidently still potent, a gray jumper folded itself into existence and moved toward me with lethal grace. Since I had no jump capability, I settled back and almost smiled. Then two ships in the waiting mass hit the newcomer, and while confusion raged the Corridor opened, taking me with it.

At the automated station still on duty at the deserted mining outpost of Virgo's Belt, I did not wait long for the corridor to open. Spat out above the inviting green world of Elysium, I studied the view and thought about the rumors surrounding this place, one of the few naturally habitable worlds ever discovered.

I spiraled down. I had no other alternatives, since the Transit Station at this place had been removed within that disastrous first month on Elysium, which had seen both the establishment and dissolution of the colony.

I landed in the shadow of the mountains, under the gleaming silver leaves of spreading trees. I walked out of the lock without bothering with an environment suit. I wouldn't have been able to maintain one indefinitely, and if Elysium's surprise were bacteriological, I figured that I might as well give it as early a start as it wanted.

Out of the corner of my eye, as the wind tugged gently at my sleeves, I saw a single figure standing in the distance. Sighing, I began climbing to where the rock faces burned with the light of the setting sun.

Above, staring into Calchas' accusing gaze, I heard the boom of a ship cutting through Elysium's thick air. Turning, I saw the plain below explode with the unleashed wrath of high technology. I felt his hand fall on my shoulder as I watched my ship burn, while the Concilium jumper fled back into the darkness.

Epilogue

"Your move." He sits back and grins at me nastily.

"You still cheat." The white knight has lifted itself in a gentle curve and now protects the bishop. If he takes the threatened pawn...

While I consider my rapidly dwindling options, he leans forward. "Have you decided yet?"

I look at him sourly. "Give me some time, dammit."

"I meant about us. Whether we are reflections of your own mind, godlike aliens wearing the clothing of your own memories, or ghosts?"

I study him briefly, watching the sunlight slant through ruddy clouds and cast half of his face into shadow. "I've decided it doesn't really matter."

Amphiar nods. "It's a start." He stretches. "Now if you'll just learn how to play a decent game of chess."

I mutter something impolite, and he laughs. So we play, and we talk, and he proceeds to beat me soundly, as usual. I take my leave of him and walk, studying their faces as I pass them by. Most of them I recognize, though only some of them know me. Sometimes Calchas walks silently at my shoulder, but on this day he turns away as I approach and walks rapidly into the trees. He has not yet forgiven me enough to speak, though I have forgiven Amphiar. Almost.

I do not know what they are. I know only that they are all shades of my own past in one way or another. My dead. But when the Veils drop in this place only waiting silence comes to me.

The mountain calls, and the fertile lowlands fall away behind me. The sun has fallen and rivers of stars pour into velvet night. In the warmth and shadow I see graceful movement on the slopes above me. I hesitate, straining to pierce the darkness. I take another step and feel something give underfoot. Stooping, my hand encounters crushed petals. I lift the thornless rose and breathe the musk of memory, then let the rose fall and begin the long climb toward the summit to search for the dancer in the cold darkness.

Now Charis dances for me every night under the light of distant suns, when daylight fades and the ghosts wait silently for me in the valley below. And I am content.

I am home.

Back to the Planet's surface.