Chapter 61: Beliefs

“You should not have threatened President Ferrill, Ellie.”

Ellie didn't grace Avalon with an answer. She had managed to avoid confronting him for nearly a week. Why stop now?

She stared out one of the great panel windows in the hall of Avalon's manor-like suite on Etemenos's third ring. From her angle, she could just make out the peak of the sphere of nanomachine gel that was the world-city's core, poking over the final defensive lines of the second ring.

Jack sat in a cell somewhere in that second ring.

Awaiting death.

She heard Avalon's stride behind her as he moved to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Ellie...”

She stepped away.

She turned to look up at the admiral. The color had started to return to the injured side of his face. His limp was almost entirely masked; the only way he could eliminate it entirely was to have his leg re-broken and rest properly while the medical nanopaste did its work.

But if anything, he looked worse than when he had been bound to his medical chair. Dark circles ringed his eyes and a deep frown lined his handsome face. He looked sad. He looked lost.

It didn't matter.

Ellie turned away. “You would let my husband die, and in dying lure my daughter into being used by your precious president. Don't touch me, speak to me or even look at me. Don't you dare try to advise me.”

“I have no choice,” Avalon said.

“You are a great mechaneer and a cunning commander. People follow you, even love you, just from hearing your voice.” Ellie laughed bitterly. “And you have no choice.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Save my husband. Warn my daughter.” Ellie met his gaze and held it, resisting the memetic influence she now firmly believed Avalon exerted unconsciously.

He looked away. “I cannot.”

“You mean you will not,” Ellie said.

“Yes.”

His frankness cut off her retort.

“I will not, Ellie,” he said, “because of all the things you said. I am skilled. I am influential. I manipulate people by the very act of opening my mouth and there is no mundane mechaneer who can match me in single combat. I could be a warlord, a king. An emperor, perhaps, if I wished it.”

Before Ellie could answer, he caught both her wrists and pinned them to the windowpane. His grip was gentle, but so surprising that Ellie's knee instinctively lashed out. He deflected the blow without ever wavering or even bothering to meet her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“Demonstrating.” He looked down the bridge of his aquiline nose, his amber eyes burning with a fire that seemed almost solar. “This is power, Ellie. Automatic, unconscious. I could have killed you just now, or rendered you unconscious, with a touch. You would never have known it.”

“You wouldn't –”

“No,” he said, “I would not.”

He released her to slump against the wall. She wasn't hurt, but her whole body shook from the shock.

“That was power, Ellie,” Avalon said. “To have power over another is not something desirable. It is abhorrent. It demeans the weak and makes monsters of the strong. I was created to be a weapon, Ellie, but I will not be.”

“You weren't created,” Ellie whispered. No, no, this was wrong. She should not say it. It was improbable, coincidental –

Consuming.

In anger, Avalon even seemed to her to resemble her child's father. There was little enough of the man Corin Basilios might have grown up to be in the admiral's appearance, but there was enough. The lines of his nose, the set of his jaw, his lean strength.

“What do you mean?”

“You were conceived,” Ellie said, and hated herself for saying it. Principle, why did she have to be so weak? “You had a mother and a father.”

“My genetic code would seem to say otherwise,” Avalon said. “I am partly hybrid, partly aristocrat. I am given to understand such a thing is impossible outside the laboratory. You and your husband, for instance, are genetically incompatible despite his being an ordinary human, and the hybrid strains were derived from such.”

“Jack and I aren't genetically incompatible,” Ellie said.

Avalon started. “Ah, my apologies. I believed spacers were in the habit of having large families and simply assumed –”

“I was capable of bearing a human's child,” she said. “An aristocrat's, even. Until a program not unlike the one in which you were made a living weapon decided my ability to do so was an affront to human, to Federal, sensibilities.

“They sterilized me,” she continued, her voice dropping into a monotone, “immediately after they tore the baby from my body and told me they had murdered my child.”

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“Ellie –”

She kept talking. Now that she'd begun, how could she do otherwise? It was too late to go back, too late to do the right thing and keep her fantasy to herself. “Given that such pairings were rare enough you didn't even know they were possible,” Ellie said, “I rather think they lied to me.”

Avalon didn't answer.

They stood in silence long enough for the reflected light from a frigate docked to Etemenos's second ring to play all the way across Avalon's forehead.

At last, he turned away. His hands curled into fists, his head dropped, and his shoulders shook.

Ellie reached for him. She could not hate him. She could not help but believe in coincidence. If Marcel Avalon was not her son, then her son had died in the same facility from which he escaped.

Very quietly, Avalon said, “How dare you?”

Her eyes widened.

“How dare you,” he repeated. He pounded a fist into a metal shelf, hard enough to leave a visible dent and draw blood from his hand.

He whirled on her, shaking. With fury, she realized now, and did not know why.

“I thought,” he said, his voice a rasp, “you were a good person, Ellie. I thought, for all that the pattern of our days might make us enemies, I could trust you.”

“You can, Marcel,” she said. “I don't understand –”

“You wish to turn me against the woman who raised me, who saved me,” he said. “You stand before me with this... this farce of a sob story! You would have me call you mother in place of the president. Who but my mother to turn me against the only mother I knew?”

Ellie's stomach lurched. “That's not what I want at all,” she cried. She wondered if she sounded as insincere as she felt. Her mind swore she didn't want to use Avalon's power, even to save Jack, if he would not give it.

Her heart agreed.

That didn't mean she didn't want to use him.

He was not her son. It was madness to think so.

To want to believe it so badly, still worse to speak it? Wasn't that using him, if only to fill a void in her heart she'd spent more than a decade trying to ignore?

“You are President Ferrill's enemy,” Avalon said. “You threatened her and all she holds dear. Now, when you have no power to effect your enmity, you seek to co-opt mine. It is vile to wield power, but still moreso to steal it!”

Instinct told Ellie she should back away. Avalon angered could kill her almost without thinking, and she had a responsibility to stay alive. Chloe needed to be warned. Jack depended on her to do it.

Ellie stepped forward.

Avalon's shaking hands extended, his amber eyes raged –

And with one last shudder, he stopped.

“If Rhetta Ferrill was a mother to you,” Ellie whispered, “if she loves you, Marcel, then she is your mother indeed. Just as I'm Chloe's mom, and Jack her father.”

Avalon swallowed.

“It was wrong of me to say what I did,” she said. “But I'll never be so wrong as to ask you to oppose your mother.”

Another silence fell over the chamber, broken only by the hum of energy flowing through every ring of Etemenos.

After a moment's silence, Ellie clasped her hands and bowed. She stepped back to the railing, straightened up and, wordlessly, walked toward the door to the Etemenos thoroughfare to which the manor-like suite was attached.

She reached the doors and paused for only a heartbeat. She wanted to say goodbye, but wasn't sure she had the right.

“Ellie,” Avalon said.

She froze.

“Was that story really true?”

“What I know of it is true,” Ellie said. “But to imply you –”

“You were captured, your child taken, your body sterilized?”

“Yes,” Ellie whispered. She refused to let herself cry. She did not deserve it, not in front of Avalon.

“And the father?”

“Corin Basilios. He was the son of my family's lord.”

“Then you are wrong about me,” Avalon said. He strode to the door and took her hand. “I do not carry Basilios DNA. The RAMSES Project had only one derived from that strain, and he...”

Despite herself, Ellie couldn't quite stifle a sob.

“I am sorry, Ellie,” Avalon said. “I couldn't save him.”

Ellie tried to form some kind of protest. Avalon himself had been a tiny boy. Young in body and mind, despite whatever abhorrent process had been used to accelerate his growth. Without that, he should’ve been a toddler.

She couldn’t speak.

All she could manage was to bury her face in her hands and weep. She felt his arm around her shoulders and let herself lean against it. Her son was truly dead. He had been taken from her and murdered, just as they had told her. But his murder had been a thing of months. He had been told he didn't have a mother at all.

Walls that had been cracking in Ellie's mind for months shattered, and they had been dams penning up her tears.

When she recovered herself enough to stand, she gripped Avalon's hand and, without daring to meet his eyes, whispered, “Tell me about him.”

“He was my friend,” Avalon said. “They called him RAMSES-14, but he was Alexander to the rest of us. The second or third most promising candidate, I think. He won as often as he lost in wargames against me, so we were often matched. We were both glad, I think. We enjoyed the challenge.”

Alex, Ellie thought. My son had a name. If only for a little while, he had a friend.

Ellie found her tear-stained face curling into a smile. Sad, perhaps, but a smile all the same.

Rhetta Ferrill was wrong. The Principle could be merciful.

Not seeing, Avalon continued. “He won more often, not as often. He must have been better. If I'd been at rest and he the one exercising... if I'd been a little faster...! Pure chance, that it was I who lived. Dammit, it should have been him standing here talking to you!”

“He... Alex... would've said the same for you,” Ellie said, “wouldn't he?”

Avalon nodded.

“Then be happy, Marcel, that he can be happy for you.” For a wonder, her words didn't sound hollow even to her ears.

Avalon shook his head. “I am not a Theist.”

“I'm not much of anything,” Ellie admitted, “but it's got to be better to try to believe, even if we don't always manage to.”

“Even if we're wrong?”

“Especially if we're wrong.”

Avalon matched Ellie's wan smile.

“Thank you, Marcel,” Ellie said. “Thank you so much.”

“Don't,” he said. “Not yet.”

She cocked her head.

“I could not save your son, Ellie,” Avalon said. His mouth set, his eyes narrowed, his voice was like the ice of a comet's heart. “But the pattern of the rest of your family's days is not yet known to us.”

“No! What about all those things you told me? What about President Ferrill?”

“I will not go against the law she loves, Ellie. There is nothing within in it that Marcel Avalon or even the Federal Navy's second admiral could do for your husband or your daughter.

“But by the Principle,” Avalon said, “the same may not be true of the Divine Auric Drake!”