EPILOGUE

4352 C.E.

Looking out over the spacefield, Corin couldn't help but be reminded of his own arrival here eighteen years before. This time, however, he was looking in the opposite direction down the long avenue between the ranks of Imperial Guardsmen, toward a VIP shuttle that had just landed. He waited for its passengers to emerge and advance toward the reviewing stand where he and Janille waited with the rest of the assembled dignitaries.

His eyes automatically went to the figure at the summit of the reviewing stand. Roderick, unlike his father, had been just vain enough to have male-pattern baldness edited out of his genome. But his thick hair was quite gray now. Still, at fifty-six standard years he didn't look bad at all. Neither did the Empress Aline, standing a little behind and to his right with the twelve-year-old heir apparent—though in her case that was to be expected. Her hair was still uniformly black, but her face had a few more lines than the anagathics should have allowed for. Corin wondered if that had anything to do with the prospect of a lengthy widowhood, now growing a little more imminent than it had seemed when she'd so cheerfully accepted it.

Corin, now sixty-four and physiologically in his late forties, could fully understand. He, too, faced some decades in a universe which would no longer contain Roderick Brady-Schiavona.

But not for a while yet, he reminded himself, and turned his attention back to the panorama before them. Cheering had begun, and he could now pick out the conquerors of the Outer Domain, descending from the shuttle.

"Rather brings back memories, doesn't it?"

Corin and Janille both started at the murmured remark and turned to face its source. At a standard century-and-a-quarter, Jason Aerenthal was nearing the limits of the anagathics' efficacy. But Roderick had refused to let him retire. He still kept his hand in the work of the Inspectorate—and he still had his disturbing way of echoing people's thoughts. Their greetings, especially Janille's, held a coolness which he couldn't fail to notice. He smiled benignly.

"Set your minds at rest. It's not that." There was no need, in this company, to verbalize what "that" was. "It's just that I share your feelings of déjà vu. Still, quite a lot has changed."

"And not just the fact that there's no longer a distant palace floating over the Emperor's head from the viewpoint of new arrivals," Corin agreed. He let his mind range over the past eighteen years.

Ivar had been as good as his word, staying on for just two more years before departing into an honored retirement. Before that, the Tarakans of the Inner Domain had broken their earlier treaty with him. Hot with eagerness to take advantage of the upheaval the attempted coup must surely have left in its wake, they had cast ordinary military prudence to the winds and thrust straight through to Sigma Draconis, ignoring a score of light-years full of Imperial systems left lying across their communications. Their sheer, insane audacity had positioned them in the capital system's outskirts before anything more than the system's post-Restoration Wars garrison could be mobilized.

Heedless of the hysteria around him, Roderick had personally led that garrison out, to confront the vastly superior Tarakan armada with the news that Ivar still sat securely on the throne. Even more than that, the mana of Roderick's own name had held the Tarakans paralyzed by indecision until the appalling consequences of their own recklessness had dawned on them: Imperial fleets were closing in behind them, deploying across their lines of retreat. Balked of his expected immediate victory, the Araharl had asked for a renewal of the treaty.

With the salvation of the capital system to his credit, Roderick's accession had been even smoother than Ivar had dared hope. Afterwards, as Aerenthal had cynically foreseen, the glamorous young Emperor had gotten the credit for the success of Oleg's projects while escaping blame for their cost—an injustice about which Corin was not disposed to complain. Meanwhile, the Inner Domain had observed its treaty obligations—Roderick, working through Aerenthal, had kept it too distracted by internal dissensions to do otherwise. So matters had remained until 4340. Then a new Araharl had felt secure enough to renounce the treaty.

What had followed was now the stuff of legend. Roderick had led the Fleet in person, in defiance of all Imperial tradition save that of Basil Castellan's, whose disastrous last campaign wasn't the most inspiring possible example. Corin winced involuntarily at the thought. Roderick and Corin had smashed the Inner Domain military so completely that its surviving leaders had submitted without reservation, declaring the young Emperor the successor of the now-deceased Araharl. Never had anyone held both titles, and the Outer Domain's Araharl had not been amused. It might have led to trouble. But . . .

Corin looked the old agent squarely in the eyes and asked the question that had intrigued him for twelve years. "Were you behind the assassination of the Araharl of the Outer Domain, back in '40?"

"Ancient history, my boy, ancient history. Let's just be glad the Outer Domain was in no position to intervene, when our position in the Inner Domain was still precarious. Why question our good fortune? The point is, the Outer Domain broke up into squabbling factions, incapable of threatening our position."

"Until last year, when the nearer ones grew troublesome," Corin amended.

A new generation of admirals had led Roderick's forces beyond the Inner Domain, carrying his power to constellations no Imperial human had ever seen. Now they were marching toward the reviewing stand as Corin and Janille had, so long ago. Some of them wore the special version of Fleet uniform that had been authorized for Tarakan units in the service of their Araharl-Emperor. The Empire and the Inner Domain were still legally separate realms which shared the same ruler. Something would have to be done about that eventually, Corin mused. History was less than encouraging about the long-term survivability of such arrangements.

Aerenthal interrupted his thoughts. "I thought you might be interested in a bit of news that's recently come to my attention." He paused for effect. "News from beyond the Serpens/Bootes frontier."

Suddenly alert, Corin started to speak. But Janille blurted it out first. "You mean you've gotten new word from Garth?"

Occasional messages had arrived for several years as the Deathstriders had pursued an eventful course of employment, further and further from the remotest Imperial outposts. There was no tachyon beam network among the Beyonders—some of them had the technology, but the widespread political unity to protect the great arrays was lacking. The courier ships had come less and less frequently and by more and more circuitous routes. Then, finally, they'd stopped. Garth had seemed to vanish, swallowed by the infinite night. They'd never forgotten him, but their last hopes of any further contact had died long ago.

Aerenthal smiled and shook his head with the deliberation of the very old. "No. This is a very indirect report that reached me through several layers of sources in that part of space. By the time it filtered through to my office, it was little more than a vague story. But . . . it seems that very deep in Serpens—not far inside the boundaries of this spiral arm, in fact—a certain mercenary leader has made himself ruler of the first multisystemic political entity in that region of space."

All at once, all the noise and pomp ceased to exist as far as Roderick and Janille were concerned. So did Aerenthal, looking on with uncharacteristically kindly amusement as they stared into each others' eyes. She was the first to say it.

"So he's found his destiny."

And their thoughts went to the place where they'd first learned that destiny was not to become Emperor.

There was no living eye to see the yellow-white star DM -17 954 set behind its giant fifth planet. So some might have questioned, on philosophical grounds, whether the sight really existed at all. But it stood revealed to artificial senses that covered a spectrum far beyond the range of human optics, "seeing" X-rays and "hearing" heat.

And, at that, Omega Prime was observing it with only a tiny part of its vast, compartmentalized consciousness. Another part was surveying its own interior spaces, seeing the corridors—so echoingly vast to humans—alive with the comings and goings of great bronze-gold beings for whom they were just barely large enough. And it was reflecting that those phantom Luonli inhabiting its tachyonic database were the only ones it would ever see.

Omega Prime hadn't thought it necessary or appropriate to inform the children—as it couldn't help but think of them—that the Luon two of them had talked to on the world they called Neustria had been the last of its species. The Luon itself hadn't known. But Omega Prime had, by means it couldn't have explained to the humans even had it felt so inclined. And by those same means, it now knew that the last Luon was no more. There would continue to be "sightings" of Luonli on various human worlds for generations. But Omega Prime knew better, and for a long while it wished them farewell. Then it obliterated them from its memory, for it was not fitting that they should linger in an unnatural tachyonic limbo after their bright flame had guttered out and left the universe dark.

But not really dark, for there were other flames. Omega Prime turned its thoughts to the living.

It had still other sources of information, of which the humans had never learned. The last of the robot proxies had returned, and it now knew that the future it had accessed was, indeed, the future. Given the alternatives—each more nightmarish than the others—the news had evoked what could only be called relief, even though Omega Prime's emotions were not precisely comparable to human ones.

On a sudden impulse, Omega Prime summoned up the first human it had ever met.

"I have kept the promise I made to you in your dying moments, Your Imperial Majesty," it formally addressed the image of Basil Castellan. "Your dream has been fulfilled, and even though you were not to be the one to fulfill it, you played a role—not just through your legend, but through your flesh and blood . . . in two senses. And now the future of your race is secure. Humans are the successors of the Luonli. And they will surpass them."

But Omega Prime was incapable of being other than honest with itself, and it knew that the last statement was supposition, not inarguable fact. For its tachyonic circuitry held no data further ahead in time than this. For Omega Prime, the future was now as much a void as it was for any organic mind.

The implications were clear. There was one more thing that must be done. And there was no reason to delay.

Omega Prime bade its friend farewell, and gave a mental command. Deep within its physical housing, matter met antimatter.

There were no longer even any artificial eyes to watch as the dark side of DM -17 954 was bathed in a dazzling effulgence of light.