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Exordium: DESRIEN For a moment he considered walking back to get his father's attention. But he was reluctant to even look at the painting again; it aroused feelings of distaste in him. He turned around instead, looking down the hall. Maybe he could find something exceptionally fine to which he might call his father's attention. But it was as if the shadows in the ugly painting had bled into the hall, which seemed darker than it had. Osri glanced up at the clerestory windows, wondering if clouds had covered the sun. A flicker in the corner of his eye caused him to jerk around, wariness tightening his shoulders. The twinkling of stars in a broad field made him blink. Vertigo caught at him; for a moment, the painting almost looked real. But he laughed at himself, forcing the image to stay a painting -- -- and the stars slewed around in a loose spiral as he fell away from the mother ship. Osri sat up from the floor, his head aching. He looked out the viewport, terrified to see the big ship now falling away rapidly, in the vertiginous looping that indicated his ship had lost control. Hastily he sprang to the con and fought the little courier back into control. Still, it bucked and strained as the speed increased. Suddenly the viewscreen flickered and interference sparkled across it in nauseating swirls. "I command you to go to Rifthaven." Osri tried desperately to clear visual, but only audio came through, and mixed at that. Still, he recognized that voice -- the captain. "But I don't want to go to Rifthaven," Osri said. "I hate that place--" "You have to deliver the vaccine to Rifthaven," the Captain cut in, inexorably. "Do not evade me a second time." Second time? Osri whispered to himself, rubbing his aching head. Then he looked down at the ground, then up at the mother- ship, which was by now a distant star. Was that how he got this knot on his head? I don't remember-- Except there was something he ought to remember, and it wasn't a ship, it was....a church. "A church?" he squawked. The com ignored his interpolation. "You will take the vaccine to Rifthaven, or they will all die in the plague," the Captain said further. "I don't care if Rifters die of a plague! It would be great if they die in a plague, and the nastier the better!" Osri yelled at the blind com. "In fact, they are a plague!" But the viewscreen cleared to space, indicating that the communication was ended. "I don't understand," Osri said, shaking his head. He reached over and smacked the log tab with a trembling fist. There was the initial command. And then there was Osri refusing to go, and trying an evasion tactic. He'd been caught in the mothership's tractor... The ship bucked again, and Osri had to fight the controls. Tiredness strained his neck and shoulders, and made his vision blear. There was no fiveskip; the courier flew under geeplane, whizzing through system after system-- It's a dream! he thought, immensely relieved. It can't be real, there's nothing like this in the universe. I'm dreaming. Great! Superlative! He looked around the shadowy little courier. "I can wake up now," he said out loud. "I'm asleep, but now I'll open my eyes, and I'll find myself asleep, in my--" Where? Confusion closed in, to flee when the courier bucked and plunged, forcing his attention back to the controls. "Why me..." he muttered, slapping the scan magnification. "Why me?" Exhaustion and depression gnawed at him, so when at last he saw the familiar Bloodclot and Bruise, it was almost a relief. The relief disappeared very shortly. As he slowed for the approach to Rifthaven, he found himself floating past windows and corridors. "Who are you?" the com demanded. "Special courier," he said, staring into a window where an old man hunched over a console, hacking at his gangrenous arm with a knife. In the chair next to him a body, stiffening in death, sat in a grotesque parody of efficiency. "Who are you? Why are you here?" The next com was run by an ugly, scar-faced woman who huddled in her pod, the lower half of her body a rotting mass of bleeding blisters. "Special courier," he said again, anxious to get away. In silence she passed him through. Disgust churned inside him as he moved down the long, pitilessly lit corridors with their piles of corpses. The plague worsened as he went further; everyone was losing limbs, or hacking at extremities in a desperate attempt to fight the contagion. At last he reached a command center, which was a huge space filled with the dead and dying. Osri clenched his jaw to keep down the acid bubbling up his throat as he tried not to see the dead bodies lying along the walls, the dying near them, their limbs making worm-like movements, and the extremities with black- rotted connective tissue lying strewn in his path. He carried a heavy case in both hands. He knew it contained the vaccine; the silver case bore a carved bird on it, a symbol of freedom for-- Ivard. The coin. What is this? It can't be real. Osri stopped before a great console streaked with drying blood. Transfixed across it was a naked woman, her face stiff and cold in death. Great claw marks had slashed down her body, the blood dark and congealed. Reth Silverknife. Osri thought, sickened. Jaim's Rifter mate aboard the Sunflame-- He shut his eyes. This was a dream, and dreams could be ended. He simply had to end it, open his eyes, and go back to his proper post, at the Academy -- The Academy is gone. That wasn't the dream. He shook his head violently, but when he opened his eyes, the young woman was still there before him, her eyes gazing sightlessly upward. "Why have you come?" a husky voice asked. He whirled around. Before him stood a hideous woman with one leg amputated and an eye sewn shut. "What do you hide there?' she went on, groping, groping. "The vaccine," he said. The bird on the top of the silver case gleamed and he felt a tug of possession, but he thrust the case with a forceful movement at the woman. "It's yours," he stated. "Take it." It's not mine! Why did I pick it up? "We accept your shipment," she cried, her gratitude unmistakable. Osri turned to leave, and found himself once more in the courier ship, maneuvering through the red-lit streets. Everywhere, deformed Rifters lurked or sidled, all staring at him as he floated through in his little ship. Disgust and fury grew in him until he finally found his way out of the labyrinth of horror. Then he tabbed his com and sent a plaintive message to the ship: "It's done, and you may's well hit me with a ruptor if I'm to be forced into any more worthless duties like that." He ended the communication, but the com lit anyway. "Why do you complain, Omilov? You took the duty, you took it yourself." Osri cut the connection again. He sat back, lifting his hands from the controls. For a time he was determined to let the ship continue on autopilot; if it made it, fine, if not, well, what was the worth of living in a universe where the decent people are being blown up by Rifters? But who will save the Rifters? They didn't deserve to be saved, of course, he told himself impatiently. By commiting the Riftskip they abrogated all their rights to the protection of the law. But not their rights as human beings. It was an inner voice, not an outer one. "I hate this dream!" he shouted. "I want it done!" He opened his eyes, blinking against the light of a sun. He reached to steer away, then dropped his hands to his lap. He'd force the dream to end--or he'd die. But as he neared the sun, the temperature in the cabin rose, until he was faint from the heat. Still, he sat back, enduring what he hoped would be the last of a humiliating life until the com came on, again without his having used the controls. "Omilov," the captain said, "where are you?" "Near a sun," Osri answered. "You've plotted a false course," said the Captain. "Correct it. Return to the ship. I have more for you to do." A false course--a dream. I have never plotted a false course in my life. "Why?" Osri said bitterly, to the swirling miasma of color in the viewscreen. "I'm better off dead." "What are you angry with?" replied the Captain. "The sun about to burn you up?" "At least it obeys natural law," Osri said. "I hate Rifters. They ruined the Panarchy." "The Panarchy is not yours to declare ruined, or not," was the reply. "Our duty is to save the third overculture. They need leadership. They have unexpected resources." Third overculture--that was the phrase Sebastian had used, long ago, in a conversation about Rifters. Sebastian. My father. Who thinks there are good and bad among the Rifters, just as there are good and bad among us... Suddenly Osri was standing before a vast painting, a panorama of a galaxy. Under his boots was stone, and around him the vast cathedral of New Glastonbury. Vertigo made him tremble. He blinked dry, itchy eyes, then rubbed them, trying to banish the terrible images still crawling through his mind. Something made him look closer at the painting, and he saw that in its foreground, tiny against the swirl of stars, was a small asteroidal habitat, a bubbloid, like Granny Chang's, lights glowing from viewports scattered over its craggy surface. Near it hung a decrepit ship painted in garish colors. Rifters again, he thought in disgust. Then he bent lower. Below, a small brass plate gleamed at the bottom of the picture's frame. "The stone rejected by the builders has become the chief cornerstone." He snorted. A damned daydream, he thought. That's all it was-- He turned to find his father.
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