Empery by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Read Free Book Online Page A

Speaking frankly of his initial lack of commitment, his later selfishness, his subsequent obsession, Thackery laid waste to his own popular image as a self-directed hero.
    Wells was not obliged to accept Thackery’s own harsh appraisal of his worth. Clearly Thackery had succumbed in his later years to the imposter syndrome, that self-destructive suspicion that one’s success is due to luck and accident, not personal merit. Even great men grow weary, Wells thought.
    But Wells accepted enough of Thackery’s self-deprecation at face value to lay to rest a nagging puzzle. From the time he first began to study Revision history, Wells had been haunted by the conviction that there was more to the story than was being told.
    Wells could not believe that Thackery had not demanded to see the Mizari home world, to divine their nature. All he would have had to do is look out from the spindle and he would have seen them, as he had seen what they had done to Earth, as he had seen the death of the Weichsel ship, which in turn had brought on the death of the Weichsel. Thackery must have done so; the Service must be concealing what he learned. Of that Wells had been certain.
    That certainty had been one of several motivations that had led him to a career in the USS. If there was more to learn, the Service was the natural custodian of that knowledge. To share in it, he would have to become one of them. To learn, then, that even the Service knew nothing more had only compounded his consternation. The months-long search through the Thackery file had been motivated by the hope that they contained data lost or overlooked.
    Now, as Thackery the man rewrote Thackery the legend, it was easier to understand. Thackery had been afraid. He had been overwhelmed by what he had seen—no shame in that, surely!—and his time on the spindle had been cut short by his own inability to deal with the revelations granted to him. Consequently the things that Wells needed to learn, Thackery had never known.
    But the D’shanna knew. Looking out from the energy-matrix that flowed from the universe’s beginning and guaranteed its end, the D’shanna could provide perfect knowledge of the Mizari: what they were, where they were, and how they could be dealt with. The D’shanna could do at any time what Thackery had failed to do in his only opportunity.
    Yet in the century and a half since the Revision, no such collaboration had taken place. Thackery had reported that of all the D’shanna only Gabriel had taken note of the human species and an interest in its plight. And Gabriel had been crippled by the time of his encounter with Thackery and thereafter had either “died” or gone far uptime on the spindle to rejoin his own kind and replenish himself. Either Way, Gabriel was beyond reach.
    These were the givens: that Thackery’s experience had been unique and unrepeatable and that the D’shanna could not be counted on to do any more than they already had.
    But Jiadur’s Wake told Wells that Thackery’s feelings toward the D’shanna had not been sufficiently taken into account. One passage near the end illumed that more clearly than the rest:
… Somehow, because of our need for heroes, I have been credited for that which Gabriel did. If there was sacrifice, the greater sacrifice by far was his, for he owed us no loyalty save that which his morality imposed upon himself. For that reason, if there was nobility, it was Gabriel’s, not mine. My interests were selfish, his selfless. The human race has never had a better friend. Nor have I.
    For, while I was on the spindle, Gabriel and I were intimate in a way that I had never before nor have ever since experienced with another human. It was a quality of relationship that is beyond depiction, beyond description, just as the spindle itself cannot be understood solely in terms of. the matter-matrix. Without masks or barriers or deceptions each grasped and accepted the essence of the other. It was the purest moment