A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [255]
He captured each frayed end and brought them all together into a marvelous, knotted tapestry. He drew the strands tight, reaching out to connect the lives of billions upon billions of Ildirans from all kiths…and reaching backward to smooth the fabric of history and knowledge. His own knowledge. The truth.
The medical kithmen worked quickly while Jora’h lay paralyzed and overwhelmed by all the knowledge that flooded into his brain. They stanched the flow of blood, sealed the incision, and removed what they had cut away.
With his incredible access to the collective Ildiran minds, and all the ancestral memories of his bloodline, Jora’h saw the complexity of the puppet strings and influences and strategies the Mage-Imperator and his predecessors had laid down—and at last he understood.
Ritual castration was a small price to pay for such revelations. The myriad plans, the interlocked and layered schemes, took his breath away.
In the audience chamber, he vaguely heard cheers and sighs of relief. His people—all Ildirans throughout the Empire—felt whole again. In their minds and souls they could sense that a Mage-Imperator sat on his throne once more, that the thism was intact, that their people were joined and safe. The Lightsource shone brightly on the Ildiran race.
As it should be.
Jora’h had a difficult time retaining any sense of himself or his mortality. Revelation after revelation swept upon him, faster than he could absorb what he now knew. So much had been kept hidden from him! So many reasons, so many terrible necessities! His mind spun with the unexpected flood, and Jora’h lay in the chrysalis chair, stunned and unable to speak.
Then finally—helplessly—he stared stonily into the crowd, realizing that he, too, had no choice.
130
CESCA PERONI
Though the asteroid cluster of Rendezvous had no specific day or night, the Roamers followed an Earth-standard active/rest cycle. Low-level lights still burned in the corridors of the bound space rocks. Ships arrived at all hours, and docking crews remained on-station to remove supplies and to welcome visitors.
Even so, during certain hours in the night cycle, the place was quiet and peaceful. When she had difficulty sleeping, Speaker Cesca Peroni often found solace in wandering through connecting tunnels from one asteroid to another. Her thoughts ranged farther than her feet could take her. Most of the entrances to private living chambers were sealed under yellowish standby lights; no one stirred as Cesca wandered past, her gaze fixed forward, her mind in turmoil.
As Speaker, she was constantly tasked with solving a thousand problems, most of them trivial, but others serious enough that they required patient negotiation and the ability to consider numerous innovative alternatives.
Just that afternoon, she had held an official meeting with a beaming and completely unruffled Kotto Okiah, who had brought her another set of plans. It had been only a week since his rescue from the fiery collapse of his Isperos facility, and his face still bore red patches and peeling skin from superficial burns—but he’d already sketched out a new scheme.
“If we go to an outer-system planet that’s cold enough,” he said, activating a playerscreen that displayed a space grid, “then the gases will be condensed out into a slurry, or even frozen solid. Not just water ice and carbon dioxide, which we can cook out of comets and disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen, but real methane lakes, maybe even pure liquid hydrogen. That’s orders of magnitude denser than the gases our skymines used to harvest!”
He punched a button and a spangle of planets was highlighted on the starchart. “Of course, we’d have to figure out how to live and work at Absolute Zero, and I’m not sure how I can make our machinery function in such an environment…but the ekti production should be highly efficient. I think.”
He grinned at her, his hair tousled, his sunburned