The Chosen

tattooed on her right shoulderblade and memorized like her name. The ink from the fingerprinting stained her handkerchief as she wiped her hands.

The consul stepped forward. 'Sarah Jennings Kingman, as representative of the Republic of Santander, I hereby officially certify that your lapsed citizenship in the Republic is fully restored with all rights and duties appertaining thereunto; and that your son John Hosten as issue of your body is accordingly entitled to Santander citizenship also. . Where is the boy?'

* * *

The universe vanished. John found himself in a. . place. It seemed to be the inside of a perfectly reflective sphere, like being inside a bubble made of mirror glass. He tried to scream.

Nothing happened. That was when he realized that he had no throat, and no mouth. No body.

No body no body nobodynobody-

The hysteria damped down suddenly, as if he'd been slipped a tranquilizer. Then he became conscious of weight, breath, himself. For a moment he wanted to weep with relief.

'Excuse me,' a voice said behind him.

He turned, and the mirrored sphere had vanished. Instead he saw a room. The furnishings were familiar, and wrong. A fireplace, rugs, deep armchairs, books, table, decanters, but none of them quite as he remembered. A man was standing by a table, in uniform, but none he knew: baggy maroon pants, a blue swallowtail jacket, a belt with a saber; a pistol was thrown on the table beside the glasses. He was dark, darker than a tan could be, with short very black hair and gray eyes. A tall man, standing like a soldier.

'Where. . what. .' John began.

'Attention!' the man said.

'Sir!' John barked, bracing. Six years of Probationer schooling had made that a reflex.

'At ease, son,' the dark man said, and smiled. 'Just helping you get a grip on yourself. First, don't worry. This is real'-he gestured around at the room-'but it isn't physical. You're still touching the meteorite in the crate. Virtually no time is passing in the. . the outside world. When we've finished talking, you'll be back on the dock and none the worse for wear.'

'Am I crazy?' John blurted.

'No. You've just had something very strange happen.' The smile grew wry. 'Pretty much the same thing happened to me, lad. A long time ago, when I wasn't all that much older than you are now. Sit.'

John sank gingerly into one of the chairs. It was comfortable, old leather that sighed under his weight. He sat with his feet on the floor and his hands on the arms of the chair.

'My name's Raj Whitehall, by the way. And this'-he waved a hand at the room-'is Center. A computer.'

Despite the terror that boiled somewhere at the back of his mind, John shaped a silent whistle. 'A computer? Like the Ancestors had, the Federation? I've read a lot about them, sir.'

Raj Whitehall chuckled. 'Well, that's a good start. My people thought they were angels. Yes, Center's a holdover from the First Federation. Military computer, Command and Control type. Don't ask me any of the details. Where I was brought up, experts understood steam engines, a little. Look there.'

John turned his head to look at the mirrored surface. Instead, he was staring out into a landscape. It wasn't a picture; there was depth and texture to it. Subtly different from anything he'd ever seen, the moons in the faded blue sky were the wrong size and number, the sunlight was a different shade. It cast black shadows across eroded gullies in cream-white silt. Out of the badlands came a column of men in uniforms like Raj's. They were riding, but not on horses. On dogs, giant dogs five feet high at the shoulder. They looked a lot like Vulf, except their legs were thicker in proportion. John whistled again, this time aloud.

The column of men went by, and a clumsy-looking field gun pulled by six more of the giant dogs. Then Raj Whitehall pulled up his. . well, his giant hound. A woman rode beside him, not in uniform. Her face was dusty and streaked with sweat, and beautiful. Slanted green eyes glowed out of it.

The vision faded, back to the absolutely perfect mirror. John looked back to Raj. 'Where was that?' he said. Then, slowly: 'When was that?'

Raj nodded, leaning his hips back against the table and crossing his arms. 'That was Bellevue, the planet where I was born. About a hundred and fifty years ago.'

'You're. . a ghost?'

'A ghost in a machine. A recording that thinks its a man. It's a convincing illusion, even to me.'

John sat silently for what felt like a minute. 'Why are you talking to me?'

'Good lad,' Raj said. John felt an obscure jolt of pride at the praise. Raj went on. 'Now, listen carefully. You know how the Federation collapsed?'

John nodded. Visager had preserved the records; he'd seen them in school. Expansion from Earth, then rivalries and civil war. Civil war that continued until the Tanaki Nets were destroyed and interstellar travel cut off, and then on Visager itself until civilization was thoroughly smashed. After that a long process of rebirth, slow and painful.

'That happened all over the human-settled galaxy. On Bellevue, the collapse was even worse than here. Center was left in the rubble underneath the planetary governor's mansion. Center waited a long, long time for the time to be right. More than a thousand years; then it found me. Bellevue's problem was internal division. We were set to slag ourselves down again, this time right back to stone hatchets, all the more surely because we were doing it with rifles and not nukes. I was a soldier, an officer. With Center's help-and some very brave men-I reunited the planet. Bellevue's the capital of the Second Federation, now.'

'You want me to unite Visager?' John felt his mouth drop open. 'Me? ' His voice broke embarrassingly, the way it had taken to doing lately, and he flushed.

Raj shook his head. 'Not exactly. More to prevent it being unified, at least by the wrong people.' He leaned forward slightly. 'Tell me honestly, John. What do you think of the Chosen?'

John opened his mouth, then closed it. Memories flickered through his mind; ending with the blank, caved-in faces of the dockers as the unconscious man was carried away.

'Honestly, sir-not much. Mom doesn't, either. I tried talking to Dad about it once, but. .' He shrugged and looked away.

Raj nodded. 'Center can foresee things. Not the future always, but what will probably happen, and how probable it is. Don't ask me to explain it-I've had three lifetimes, and I still can't understand it. But I know it works.'

maintenance of your personality matrix is incompatible with the modifications necessary to comprehend stochastic analysis.

John started and put his hands to his ears. The voice had come from everywhere and nowhere. It felt heavy, somehow, as if the words held a greater freight of meaning than any he'd ever heard. The sound of them in his head had been entirely flat and even, but there were undertones that resonated like a guitar's strings after the player's fingers left them. The voice felt. . sad.

'Center means that if I was changed that much, I wouldn't be me,' Raj said.

john hosten, the ancient, impersonal voice said, in the absence of exterior intervention, there is a 51 % probability ±6 %, that the chosen will establish complete dominance of visager within 34 years. observe.

John looked toward the mirrored wall.

An endless line of men in tattered green uniforms marched past a machine-gun nest manned by Land troops, Protege infantry, and a Chosen officer. Two plainclothes police agents stood by, in long leather coats and wide- brimmed hats, heavy pistols in their hands. Every now and then they would flick their hands, and the soldiers would drag a man out of the line of prisoners, force him down to his knees. The Fourth Bureau men would step up and put the muzzles of their guns to the back of the kneeling man's head. .

conquest of the empire, Center said. observe:

A montage followed: cities burning, with their names and locations somehow in his mind. Ships crowded with slave laborers arriving in Oathtaking and Pillars and Dorst. A group of Chosen engineers talking over papers and plans, while a line of laborers that stretched beyond sight worked on a railway embankment.

consolidation. further expansion.

A burning warship sank, in an ocean littered with oily guttering flames, wreckage, bodies, and men who still tried to move. Hundreds of them were sucked backwards and down as the ship upended and sank like a lead pencil