Steven Harper - Trickster

"I don't know," he said at last.

Ben drew away. "Okay."

"No, Ben." Kendi reached over, grabbed Ben's hand. "Ben, I love you more than anyone in the universe. I love you so much that sometimes it hurts. I would do anything to make you happy- anything-because if you're not happy, I'm not happy. That's why I can't answer you right now. I'm scared that I'd be saying let's do it because you want it and not because we both want it. I need time to think. I'm not saying no. I just can't say yes yet."

Ben seemed to consider. "All right," he said at last. "I can accept that. It's a big decision. And these little guys aren't going anywhere."

"Do you know anything about where they came from?"

"Not a clue. I only know that they're all Silent and they're all healthy. And we-all twelve of us-share enough DNA to make us brothers and sisters. Originally there were eighty-seven embryos, but only eleven-twelve, counting me-are still viable. The readout says they were put into this cryo-unit thirty-odd years ago, but that's not necessarily when the embryos themselves were… created."

"Shouldn't you get a newer cryo-unit?" Kendi said, suddenly worried.

"Not really. I've checked this one several times and it's perfectly sound."

"Okay." Kendi stretched restlessly. "I should take a nap, especially if I'm going to do a pilot shift later, but I'm still wired. Pulling a con always revs me up. Fooling Markovi like that, yanking Bedj-ka out right from under the bastard's nose. All life, it's almost better than sex."

"Yeah?" Ben set the cryo-unit back on the table and ran light fingers down the back of Kendi's neck. Kendi shivered deliciously at the sensation. Then Ben kissed him.

"I did say almost better," Kendi pointed out several moments later.

"Let me show you the exact difference."

Four days later, Father Kendi Weaver leaned against the railing on the roof of the Varsis Building and stared out across the city of Felice. The Varsis was the tallest building in town, and Felice's thin skyscrapers and artificial spires moved out to the horizon in all directions beneath him. Ground traffic oozed over streets so far below that Kendi couldn't hear the sounds. Like Klimkinnar, Drim also put severe restrictions on air traffic, so no aircars buzzed between the buildings. Up here was just the sun and the wind and the quiet voices of the other sightseers who had come up for the view.

Kendi looked down at the dizzying drop. The talltrees on Bellerophon had nothing on the Varsis Building, but height wasn't everything. Bellerophon was a city among the trees, built to merge with the treescape and blend with the beauty. Felice grew from the ground like a glassy cancer.

And somewhere out there were two members of his family.

It seemed to Kendi that he should be able to see them from up here, get their attention if he shouted loud enough. The old longings came back, more powerful than ever. His last memory of his sister, brother, and father had been of them weeping as he and his mother were led away by Giselle Blanc. He could still hear punishing electricity crackle, smell the ozone in the air as Rhys Weaver reached out to touch his wife's hand one more time.

They were the last words Kendi had heard his father utter. And three years later when Kendi had been sold away from his mother, he had vowed to obey them. Despite many hours spent with counselors and therapists, consuming fury still snarled inside him like a rabid dingo whenever he thought about what the slavers had done to him and his family. He wept and worried about them, too, sometimes in Ben's arms and sometimes curled up by himself. And still he searched. How many false leads had he come across over the years? Now, at long last, he had a solid one.

It was a lead he had almost lost, too. During the Despair, the twisted children of Padric Sufur had pushed almost every person in the universe out the Dream. Without the subconscious connection provided by the Dream, all empathy and caring vanished. Some sentients had fallen into a deep depression. Others had been driven insane. All of them showed a total disregard for the lives and feelings of other sentients. If Ben hadn't freed Kendi from a self-imposed Dream prison, if Kendi hadn't managed to delay the twisted children in their attempt to destroy the Dream, if Vidya and Prasad Vajhur hadn't managed to put the children's solid-world bodies into cryo-chambers-if any of these things hadn't happened, the Dream would have been destroyed forever and all sentient life in the universe would have ended within a single generation. The thought still made Kendi sweat.

After the Despair, Bellerophon had been thrown into turmoil along with the rest of the universe. The Children of Irfan had responded to the crisis by falling back and retrenching. All field teams and operatives were to return to the monastery immediately. Some of the teams returned on their own, but many of them didn't, meaning someone had to go out and find them. Kendi, newly appointed to a command position despite the fact that he had only achieved the rank of Father, had run himself and his team ragged tracking down Child after Child. Some were assigned on planets or on stations. Others were members of teams like Kendi's and had ships of their own. The findings of Kendi's team hadn't always been pretty. Losing touch with the Dream had affected the Silent more strongly than other sentients, and several Silent plunged into homicidal rage or suicidal despair. Twelve Children with long-term off-planet positions had killed themselves, and twice Kendi's team had found empty ships floating in space, the crew's dessicated corpses floating in corridors and quarters. Through it all, however, Kendi couldn't stop thinking about what Sejal had told him just after the Despair. Every word was burned into his mind:

After six months of scrambling around the galaxy retrieving other Children and relaying emergency messages through the Dream, Kendi had finally had enough of waiting. What if someone sold his family? What if they escaped and vanished into the post-Despair chaos? What if they died? Every day brought a greater chance that this precious lead would dry up. Eventually, Kendi had gone to the Council of Irfan. They had been reluctant to loan him a ship, despite the fact that most of the missing field teams were accounted for and most of the Children, bereft of their Silence, had little or nothing to do.

"Everything is too chaotic," replied Grandmother Adept Pyori. "Governments and economies are collapsing. We need all our people close to home in case something happens."

"That makes this the best time for me to go," Kendi shot back. "It takes a lot of time for galactic governments and mega-corporations to collapse. I need to get out there before everything falls apart completely and my family vanishes forever."

The blank faces of the Council, however, said they were still unconvinced, and in the end Kendi fell back on emotional blackmail.

"I saved the lives of every single person in this room," he said. "I saved the lives of your family, your friends, and every living creature in this universe. All I want in return is a single ship and a crew to go with her. How can that be too much to ask?"

The Council had agreed, but with limitations. When they laid down the time limit, Kendi wondered what he would have had to do to get a ship for longer than two months. Create a new universe from scratch?

"We are not doing this to be difficult, Father Kendi," Grandmother Adept Pyori said, as if reading his mind. "Every Silent who can still reach the Dream is precious beyond measure. Have you considered what will happen to us in the next fifty or sixty years? The danger we are in?"

"I don't understand, Grandmother," Kendi replied.

"No new Silent are entering the Dream," she said solemnly. "And one day the remaining Silent who can enter it will die."