Clark's Law, page 27
Mollari was laughing, sharing a joke with one of Refa’s aides. The other aides were fawning. The nurses were plumping his pillows and giggling at the humorous nonsense he was spouting.
Garibaldi found the whole scene somewhat disturbing. Mollari should be dead. He should be dead.
Then again so should Garibaldi.
Under different circumstances, Garibaldi would have grinned his butt off. But things were different now. Now the whole idea that a guy whom he had once considered a friend was not going to die after all held overtones he really didn’t want to think about too closely. No way. It was just too creepy.
That guy Morden now. What the hell was he on? How had he done what it was he must have done to save Mollari? For Jack’s sake, he’d seen the damn wounds Mollari had suffered. Three of them, one at least puncturing vital organs. There was no doubt about it: Mollari had been heading for the morgue-big-time. It should have taken all of Morden’s life energy to save Mollari-but not only was the guy still alive, he was still smiling.
So what gave?
Garibaldi’s thoughts were interrupted as Mollari caught sight of him. “Mr. Garibaldi!” He waved a bottle of wine to attract Garibaldi’s attention-in the process slopping some of it over the uniform of the nearest aide. “My good and dear friend Garibaldi-You have stopped by to wish me well, have you not? Come over here! I don’t believe you have met my friend Lord Refa.”
Garibaldi nodded and smiled uneasily. Hands thrust in pockets, he wandered casually over to Mollari. “Yeah. Hi. How’s it going, Londo?”
Mollari beamed expansively. “Oh very well, Mr. Garibaldi. Very well indeed, under the circumstances.” He shrugged. “Oh,
I could have wished for more flowers-but then there is a limit. After all we do live in a space station, do we not?” He dug the nearest person in the ribs-it happened to be Vir. The aides and the nurses laughed but Garibaldi noticed that Vir’s smile seemed forced. Refa maintained a cool air of aloofness.
He shrugged. “That we do, Londo.”
Mollari allowed his expansive beam to melt seamlessly into a drunken grin. “Have you brought me a get-well present, Mr. Garibaldi?”
Garibaldi raised his eyebrows. “Sorry.”
Mollari shrugged, glanced cheekily at the nurses. “No matter.
I have all that I need here. Wine, flowers, my friends”-Garibaldi counted seven people at the most-“and of course, my good friend Mr. Garibaldi! What more could a man want, eh?”
Garibaldi didn’t know what to say. Mollari was either five quarters drunk or so high on some drug you could hang a comsat from his hairdo. Maybe it was just the idea of being alive that did it for him. That wouldn’t be too surprising. “Look, ah, Londo… I just dropped by to say…” Why was Refa staring at him like that? “Well, just to say get well soon, I guess.” He shrugged. “Look, I gotta go. Catch ya on the flipside.”
“Wait! Mr. Garibaldi, wait!” Mollari took a deep slug of wine from the bottle. “Lord Refa was just inviting me to a celebration when I’m better. You’re my friend. Why don’t you come as well?”
Garibaldi glanced quickly at Refa. The Centauri official did not look as if he was in the mood to party.
“I really don’t think that would be advisable under the circumstances.” Refa’s voice was quiet. Garibaldi could tell he was hiding something. Impatience? Irritation? Annoyance?
“Nonsense!” Londo waved the wine bottle around some more to emphasize the importance of his words. “Mr. Garibaldi is my good and dear friend! Of course he will come. The planet in question is-“
Garibaldi managed a smile. “Look, Londo, I really gotta go. Um… about the party… why don’t you see me about it later? When you’re up and about?”
“‘Up and about’?” Mollari drained his bottle. “Why, how could I be more ‘up and about’ than I already-” He stopped. His face twisted into a kind of surprised frown. “Than I already…” His eyes rolled upward and he crashed drunkenly back onto the bed, to the accompaniment of another round of laughter from everyone except Vir and Refa.
Garibaldi shook his head, nodded to Vir, and turned to leave. Franklin was waiting at the entrance to Medlab.
Garibaldi jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at the Centauri. “Ever felt like you should have gone into the entertainment business?”
Franklin pursed his lips. “Tell me about it. I leave Medlab for a couple of hours and come back to find a patient who was dying demanding to know what was for dinner and why it wasn’t Oolian Bloodworm and why it wasn’t brought on time-and by a pretty nurse at that.”
Garibaldi raised his eyebrows in sympathy. He felt Franklin’s eyes on him. “What?”
Franklin pinched the bridge of his nose thoughtfully. “Why did you come here, Garibaldi?”
Garibaldi frowned. Good question. He rubbed his chin. The truth is, I’m feeling something I haven’t felt for a while. I’m feeling scared. Londo is Londo, and I’m me. We’re total opposites. But Morden saved us both. And that thought scares me to death.
“Would you believe heartburn?”
Franklin shook his head. “No way.”
Garibaldi shrugged, a little Sorry I can’t help you gesture. “Ah well.”
Before Franklin could say anything else Garibaldi left Medlab. He walked fast. Because the truth was somewhere back there. And the truth was that Morden thought he and Londo were both worth saving. In his mind they were the same. And Garibaldi had enough smarts to realize pursuing that line of thought would drop him so far back into the bottle they’d need a submarine to find him.
CHAPTER 25
John Sheridan placed one hand against the window of his office. His fingers, so tiny by comparison with the real size of the objects in view, were able to blot out vast tracts of the landscape beyond. A twitch of his ring finger and the Mosque was obliterated. A movement of his thumb and and the park surrounding the sports fields vanished.
Perspective. Sometimes it’s so hard just to keep things in perspective.
D’Arc. The Tuchanq. They’d lost it all-he’d lost it all for them. By carrying out the masquerade, by doing the moral thing, the right thing and saving D’Arc, he had made a very different future for her species.
He was damn sure it wasn’t the best future he could have offered them.
And he hated that thought. Hated and feared his own weakness, what he had learned about himself. That no one was perfect. That everyone got scared and did things they weren’t proud of. That there were no-win scenarios and in those scenarios, quite simply, you lost.
He rested his forehead on the windowpane.
Perspective.
The door bleeped.
“Come in.”
He turned as Kosh entered the room. The encounter suit glimmered softly. A quiet musical hum seem to emanate from within
Kosh glided around until he was standing in front of Sheridan’s desk. He waited.
Sheridan felt simultaneously drawn to the encounter suit and repelled by it. He very much wanted to touch it, whatever life was within it-but somehow felt he was already touching it-or him.
Kosh said nothing. Quite obviously he was waiting for Sheridan to speak first. Sheridan blew out his cheeks and half shrugged. He looked questioningly at the Vorlon.
Kosh said nothing. He remained still, reflecting all Sheridan’s curiousity, frustration, anger back at him like a mirror.
Like a mirror.
Fear is a mirror.
And suddenly it made sense. The whole lot. Look at it from Kosh’s point of view. From a Vorlon’s perspective.
Sheridan nodded, smiled, felt tension drain out of him. “Fear is a mirror. You said that to me the day before yesterday.”
Kosh said nothing.
It didn’t matter. He knew. “I understand now. Because I was scared I became devious. I took advantage of people and events to accomplish my own ends. I didn’t like the behavior in the President and I don’t like it in myself.” Sheridan paused. Sometimes the truth was hard to acknowledge. “My fear has enabled me to understand myself a little more clearly.”
Kosh said nothing.
“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it? That was the lesson. Fear is a mirror.”
Kosh spoke then, made no acknowledgment of Sheridan’s supposition, instead said something that brought all the fear and anger boiling back up to the surface as if to an open wound.
“You are the light, yet the hope of all darkness.”
Sheridan felt something tear loose inside him, felt it carried away on a wind of madness. “I don’t…” He nearly laughed, it was such a familiar line. “I don’t understand.”
“You are touched by Shadows.”
Without waiting for a response, Kosh turned and glided from the office. Sheridan watched him go, then turned back to the window. He saw his own reflection mapped onto the landscape.
Touched by Shadows?
What the hell does that mean?
Do I really look that old?
And he knew then what he had only guessed at before. His life was not his own anymore. His destiny was not his own. His career, his friends, the station, Anna, everything and everyone he had ever known was as predestined as if he were a character in a novel.
Sheridan stared out of his window at the trees and fields and grass and flowers and worms. And he wondered for how much longer they would exist. If the saplings would grow into trees, if the fields would know the touch of lovers and the lovers know the cries of children.
He wondered if everything he had ever taken for granted was coming to an end. If the thousands of years during which mankind had wrenched itself out of the mud and leapt into the heavens would ever, ultimately, have any meaning beyond the simple drive of life to exist and continue at any cost.
Good questions to which he would probably never have answers.
In that moment of ruthless self-honesty John Sheridan, Earthforce Captain, husband to Anna, brother to Elizabeth, son to Jacob and Miranda, knew his life would end as it had begun: with awe and wonder, pain and terror.
And Shadows.
Always with Shadows.
Epilogue
Truth
Legal scholars will be debating all year whether the Senate did or did not today flatly and irrevocably rule to end Capital Punishment. The answer for all practical purposes seems to be it did. Confusion occurs because two of the five-man majority said that the state can never take a life. The key votes were those of Senators Sho Lin and Voudreau, both of whom indicated they might reverse their decision if anyone could ever show them a case where the Death Penalty can be morally justified.
-DeBora Devereau, Channel 57 News, evening edition. December 20th, 2259.
What do you mean EarthGov are subpoenaing the B5 footage? They can’t do that. It’s a breach of the public information act! Dammit, the public have a right to know what their President is up to in his spare time, cooking up one law for humans and one for the aliens. It’s racism I tell you, plain and simple! They’ve only voted against the Death Penalty now to cover up the scandal.
-DeBora Devereau, Channel 57 News.
Ten minutes prior to the evening edition.
December 20th, 2259.
*
Morgan Eugene Clark looked out from the Senate Chamber across the city once known as Geneva. The setting sun cast the city in gold and pale bronze. Shafts of light slipped across the mountains, through the atmosphere shield, through the window. He saw dust glimmer in the beams that shot through the Senate chamber.
From dust we are born, to dust we return. And when we are gone, what then? Do we simply vanish? Our souls, our experiences, everything that we are, gone along with our bodies? Or do we leave something of ourselves behind? A legacy. Words and actions the future may judge us by? Words and actions such as his own this afternoon, following the vote of confidence in which he had been called back into office by a narrow margin.
Dust in sunlight. It’s all we ever are.
Refusing, though he could not say why, to watch the sun slip beyond the distant hills, Clark turned his back on the light. He watched as the beams of sunlight glided slowly across the chamber, illuminating, just as the decorators had intended, one Presidential portrait after another until it reached the end of the line, the spaces which awaited his own visage and those of Presidents who would follow him into office.
He moved; for an instant saw his shadow cast directly into the wall space where his own portrait would one day hang.
Dust in sunlight. Discernible only by our shadows.
And Clark knew then a truth both awesome and terrible: that his words and actions of today would shape the lives of millions; that not only would he be remembered by the future, he would define it.
Life, death, the fundamental condition of existence.
The shadow of his actions would touch it all.
To wound the Land is to wound yourself, and if others wound the Land they are wounding you. Those that heal the Land heal themselves, and if others heal the Land they become brothers. People of Tuchanq: the Narn wounded your Land. We, the Centauri, have come to heal it. We are your brothers.
-Centauri Emperor Narleeth Jarn in a public speech immediately prior to the “Greening of Tuchanq” program carried out by Republic Navy terraformers.
December 22nd, 2259.
What people forget when they think of the Centauri as aggressors is the role of the carnivore in shaping our character and heritage.
-Centauri Emperor Narleeth Jarn in a personal aside to Ambassador Londo Mollari during the “Greening of Tuchanq” program.
December 22nd, 2259. (Attr.)
*
The Song of Freedom lifted above the Capital City of Ellaenn.
nuViel Roon galloped up the hill overlooking the city and stopped at the very top. She stood very still, then crouched onto all fours. She began to sing. She sang her Journey and her Being and that of the People. She sang life and death. She sang D’Arc, alone now with the Centauri, transferred to another ship on the way home, at the request of a human named Morden, for her own protection.
“After all,” he’d said, “She is a murderer. We wouldn’t want her to get hurt after everything Captain Sheridan did to save her.” nuViel sang D’Arc until her throat ached, and then joined in with the last refrain of her own Song of Freedom.
When at last the Song was ended, nuViel straightened, tasted the air with mixed feelings. The air was sick. The Centauri made it sick with their machinery, their very presence. But that machinery, their presence, was healing the Land. And that was good, wasn’t it?
The question was replaced by another: Was the good that came of evil intrinsically good, or would it eventually sour and turn to evil itself?
nuViel knew that the ability to judge these matters came with age. Her Song of Being was old, but it had never encompassed this kind of dilemma. Her job had been simple: to ensure that the Land was healed. That job had been accomplished. Songs would be sung of her now; it was because of her that Songs could be sung at all.
But somewhere deep in her heart nuViel knew fear: the Song of Freedom had begun again, but it was no longer the Song of Tuchanq. It was the Song of the Centauri.
No. Even that was wrong: because the Centauri were the mouthpiece for a greater power, invisible except for the shadows they cast over those whom they touched.
nuViel Roon tasted fear and sickness in the air and suddenly, instinctively, she knew the truth that was to define the People and Land, far into the future.
The Song of Tuchanq had become the Song of the Shadows.
Twelve hundred years ago Western man was paralyzed by the same set of fears being put about by bigots who pass for statesmen. The phrase “Mundus senescit, the world grows old,” reflected a dire intellectual pessimism as well as a “religious” conviction that the world was a living body which, having passed the peak of its maturity, was doomed, suddenly, to die.
Henri Focillon’s L’An mil quoted by Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines. 1st pub: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1987. 21st ed. pub: Pan Information Services, Datanet. 2201.
*
They came out of the gulf beyond the rim like ghosts: huge ships, more art than technology. By comparison the Wells Fargo jump gate-layer Eratosthenes was little more than a clutch of battered tin boxes bolted rather haphazardly around a less than optimal frame.
Earthforce Captain Johannes Varese had only seconds to register the presence of the aliens. It was more than enough. The alien ships were one-hundred-percent efficient. They were also utterly terrifying.
Because they screamed.
They screamed in his head.
They screamed as they attacked.
A knife edge of light; Eratosthenes shivered and fell apart at the midsection. The knives moved on, carving, almost casual. Metal vaporized, cabins depressurized, crew and passengers screamed and died, engines began a slow detonation.
Varese thumped a fist down onto the log recorder control, screamed aloud the truth that was to define the coming war in which the number of deaths would simply be too great to calculate.
“Mayday! Jump gate-layer Eratosthenes on rim survey Sector 913! We’re under attack! Ships I’ve never seen before! We’re under attack-and they fired first!”
Johannes Varese was never to know if his log recorder would be recovered. In the last seconds of his life, as the control deck opened to the vacuum of space and pain, and silence settled over his mind, a vagrant memory came back to him: a peculiar sense of deja vu.
I’ve said that bef—
He never finished the thought. Everything he was, everything he had ever been or could ever be, emptied into the dark gulf between galaxies along with the rest of his ship and crew, was ultimately reduced to its component molecules and scattered throughout the void.
It was Christmas Eve, 2259: the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind.
The Shadows were coming.
