Seeklight

“I allowed you to find out the truth this way, thane—to pass from an ignorant youth into the full possession of your inheritance, your power—because you had to be assassinated in stealth before. I ordered the bad priests in the forest—they obey me as their superior—to take you to the abandoned palace and not to harm you. I wanted the thane to be alive again, risen from the dead, so that I could at last make you aware of your defeat.

Call that egotism, if you will, swelling pride. But such a vice is ours to claim now, as well.

“But I won’t kill you again. You deserve my respect for that which you tried to do. An heroic failure. Tragic, perhaps.

“The starship will descend soon, to pick up your people’s pitiful assortment of wares. I have communicated with it through the Academy, and arranged passage aboard it for you.

To whatever world beyond this one you want. Your destiny is here no longer—¦ go to some other world around some other star where your fellow human beings are still in charge of their own lives. You have the burden of your life to live out. Go, struggle to make something of it as other men do. In whatever time is left to them.

“Forget that you are a thane. There is no thane.”

The Regent’s last words kept echoing in his head. He sat with his back against the dead-end wall of a corridor in one of the buildings that ringed the massive circular landing pit for the starship. When the guards had taken him, unresisting, from the palace, he had looked up and seen the star brighter than all the others beyond it and growing still brighter as it descended slowly.

He had managed to wander away from the inattentive guards, out of sight of them and the landing crews waiting for the starship’s arrival. There was nothing about him to command their attention—just a young man, silent and tired-looking, being shipped off-world for a reason unknown to them.

And now he was lost for them. They might or might not find him, though it seemed of little concern to him. He had felt something shatter and dissolve inside himself as he had listened to the Regent. The power was gone—there was nothing he could com-mand any human being to do. His own body felt heavy and inert, resistant as stone to his will.

Daenek crouched at the end of the empty hallway, bringing his knees up to his chest. He was numb with exhaustion and despair, a hollowness that reached into his limbs, his fingers. It seemed now as if his life had dissolved, melting away to reveal the bones of its real nature. A series of corridors that ended here at this dead end. The Lady March was somewhere in one of the passageways, and Stepke, and Rennie and Lessup. Somewhere also in there was Daenek himself. A fragment that could never be found again. A father that did not exist, had been no more than himself.

The corridors had grown lighter or darker at times, but all had led to this final point. The point where death began from the inside out, a seed that would never stop growing until it dissolved everything into its darkness.

He turned his head and saw his face reflected in the shiny metal of the corridor’s wall. He saw the pain beneath the skin, and the corrosive knowledge below that. No longer a mask, no longer the face of a thane. It was his own face now.

For a moment, he thought he could hear someone, a woman, singing. But there was no sound in the corridor. He laid his head against his knee. He was too tired to even recognize the voice or the sad words it sang inside himself.

Epilogue

When he was carried aboard the ship we all knew he was going to die. Die, and be jettisoned between stars. Ship crews are a superstitious lot, and we won’t abide a corpse aboard. The blank eyes in the face that turned towards the wall beside his couch when anyone approached—something between them was already dead. I would bring his meals—set them down beside him. Hours later I would take them away untouched. I was glad when I was transferred to another section of the ship, so I wouldn’t have to be there when his body, both heavier and lighter the way the dead are, would be carried out.

But he lived somehow. He got off the ship in that city in that world to which his passage had been arranged—so I heard from the landing crew when we were outways again. I talked with the crew members who had spoken to him while he was still aboard and learned nothing. They were already forgetting about the man, the memory of him merging with our ignorance of his past.

I signed off at the next planetfall and spent the better part of my saved pay going back. A medic assistant can always find another berth. And I wanted to know how a man lives who has seen—I guessed—the things I was afraid to look at.