I want to say something profound but I can think of nothing. Besides, the crowd is in no mood to listen. I tell myself that I can hear some cheers mixed in with the screams and shouts.
I tap at the flight designs and the hawking mat speeds out over the cliff and above the harbor. A Thomas Hawk lazing on midday thermals flaps in panic at my approach.
“Let them come!” I shout at the fleeing hawk. “Let them come! I’ll be thirty-five and not alone and let them come if they dare!” I drop my fist and laugh. The wind is blowing my hair and cooling the sweat on my chest and arms.
Cooler now, I take a sighting and set my course for the most distant of the isles. I look forward to meeting the others. Even more, I look forward to talking to the Sea Folk and telling them that it is time for the Shark to come at last to the seas of Maui-Covenant.
Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.
The cascade of light from the distant space battle continued. There was no sound except for the slide of wind across escarpments. The group sat close together, leaning forward and looking at the antique comlog as if expecting more.
There was no more. The Consul removed the micro-disk and pocketed it.
Sol Weintraub rubbed the back of his sleeping infant and spoke to the Consul. “Surely you’re not Merin Aspic.”
“No,” said the Consul. “Merin Aspic died during the Rebellion. Siri’s Rebellion.”
“How did you come to possess this recording?” asked Father Hoyt. Through the priest’s mask of pain, it was visible that he had been moved. “This incredible recording …”
“He gave it to me,” said the Consul. “A few weeks before he was killed in the Battle of the Archipelago.” The Consul looked at the uncomprehending faces before him. “I’m their grandson,” he said. “Siri’s and Merin’s. My father … the Donel whom Aspic mentions … became the first Home Rule Councilor when Maui-Covenant was admitted to the Protectorate. Later he was elected Senator and served until his death. I was nine years old that day on the hill near Siri’s tomb. I was twenty—old enough to join the rebels and fight—when Aspic came to our isle at night, took me aside, and forbade me to join their band.”
“Would you have fought?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“Oh, yes. And died. Like a third of our menfolk and a fifth of our women. Like all of the dolphins and many of the isles themselves, although the Hegemony tried to keep as many of those intact as possible.”
“It is a moving document,” said Sol Weintraub. “But why are you here? Why the pilgrimage to the Shrike?”
“I am not finished,” said the Consul. “Listen.”
My father was as weak as my grandmother had been strong. The Hegemony did not wait eleven local years to return—the FORCE torchships were in orbit before five years had elapsed. Father watched as the rebels’ hastily constructed ships were swatted aside. He continued to defend the Hegemony as they laid siege to our world. I remember when I was fifteen, watching with my family from the upper deck of our ancestral isle as a dozen other islands burned in the distance, the Hegemony skimmers lighting the sea with their depth charges. In the morning, the waves were gray with the bodies of the dead dolphins.
My older sister Lira went to fight with the rebels in those hopeless days after the Battle of the Archipelago. Eyewitnesses saw her die. Her Body was never recovered. My father never mentioned her name again.
Within three years after the cease-fire and admission to the Protectorate, we original colonists were a minority on our own world. The isles were tamed and sold to tourists, just as Merin had predicted to Siri. Firstsite is a city of eleven million now, the condos and spires and EM cities extending around the entire island along the coast. Firstsite Harbor remains as a quaint bazaar, with descendants of the First Families selling crafts and overpriced art there.
We lived on Tau Ceti Center for a while when Father was first elected Senator, and I finished school there. I was the dutiful son, extolling the virtues of life in the Web, studying the glorious history of the Hegemony of Man, and preparing for my own career in the diplomatic corps.
And all the time I waited.
I returned to Maui-Covenant briefly after graduation, working in the offices on Central Administration Isle. Part of my job was to visit the hundreds of drilling platforms going up in the shallows, to report on the rapidly multiplying undersea complexes, and to act as liaison with the development corporations coming in from TC2 and Sol Draconi Septem. I did not enjoy the work. But I was efficient. And I smiled. And I waited.
I courted and married a girl from one of the First Families, from Siri’s cousin Bertol’s line, and after receiving a rare “First” on diplomatic corps examinations, I requested a post out of the Web.
Thus began our personal Diaspora, Gresha’s and mine. I was efficient. I was born to diplomacy. Within five standard years I was an Under Consul. Within eight, a Consul in my own right. As long as I stayed in the Outback, this was as far as I would rise.
It was my choice. I worked for the Hegemony. And I waited.
At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best—destroy truly indigenous life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake-Turing-Chen Index. On Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long. As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect, that species would be extinct before the first farcaster opened in-system.
On Whirl we stalked the elusive zeplen through their cloud towers. It is possible that they were not sapient by human or Core standards. But they were beautiful. When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven’s Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds.
On Garden I was adviser to the arcology engineers who drained Grand Fen, ending the short reign of the marsh centaurs who had ruled—and threatened Hegemony progress—there. They tried to migrate in the end, but the North Reaches were far too dry and when I visited the region decades later, when Garden entered the Web, the desiccated remains of the centaurs still littered some of the distant Reaches like the husks of exotic plants from some more colorful era.
On Hebron I arrived just as the Jewish settlers were ending their long feud with the Seneschai Aluit, creatures as fragile as that world’s waterless ecology. The Aluit were empathic and it was our fear and greed which killed them—that and our unbreachable alienness. But on Hebron it was not the death of the Aluit which turned my heart to stone, but my part in dooming the colonists themselves.
On Old Earth they had a word for what I was—quisling. For, although Hebron was not my world, the settlers who had fled there had done so for reasons as clear as those of my ancestors who signed the Covenant of Life on the Old Earth island of Maui. But I was waiting. And in my waiting I acted … in all senses of the word.