Hero! by Dave Duncan Page B

doing.”
    “Maybe I did. Thought so once. Still do, I suppose.” Tham rubbed his eyes wearily. “Didn’t you tell us that Abbot told you that the Brotherhood came from Scyth originally?”
    What was going on here? Was Tham deliberately playing dumb, or was this just part of his illness?
    “No,” Vaun said. “Abbot claimed that the Brotherhood did not originate on Avalon. And you know damn well that Abbot could have been lying. Scyth went silent—what? Thirty years ago?”
    “Thirty-three, our time.”
    “And twenty years after that—”
    “Nineteen.”
    “Nineteen years after that, a Q ship leaves the planet, heading for Ult.” Why hadn’t everyone panicked then? But Vaun had had no need to storm the fortress of Forhil and consult Commodore Tham to find the answer to that question. Because the ship wouldn’t arrive for years, so who cared? There had been lots of time, and everything else had been more urgent. Now the time was up.
    Tham coughed painfully. “Vaun, you’re as bad as Roker. In fact you’re worse. You both think I have some enormous store of secrets about the Brotherhood, and The Meaning of Life, and How to Feed a Family of Four on One Gushima Egg. He seems to think I’ve been confiding in you, for Krantz’s sake! Remember the Ootharsis of Isquat?”
    “Vaguely,” Vaun said, wondering if Tham was hallucinating. “Gibberish.”
    “Yes, gibb—” Tham coughed, and twisted in his chair, and coughed again. Zozo came over to him, and perched on the arm beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder.
    When he spoke again, his voice was an insectile rustle in the big, still room. “That is the secret, Vaun. The whole secret. That it’s all like that. Scraps and fragments. Languages we don’t understand. News that means nothing, and is hundreds of years old anyway. Static from the Q ships blanks most of it, and the rest is gibberish. Every world is an island, Vaun. We’re on our own.”
    Vaun remembered the loudmouth lieutenant at Maeve’s party the previous night. The boy had been right, in a way—why did everyone not worry more about this? Scyth was one of the closest worlds, yet it had gone silent and no one had done anything. They had all gone on with their own little lives and trusted the Patrol to do any worrying required. And beyond Scyth, all the way back to the origin, thousands upon thousands of worlds had inexplicably gone silent in the last thirty millennia.
    “But Avalonian Command say they’ve won, don’t they? The war there is over, the Brotherhood defeated?”
    Tham grunted, and rubbed his eyes.
    “Don’t they, Tham? Isn’t that right? They finally answered, and said they’d won?”
    “That’s what the com said.” Tham coughed. “It was garbled, though, and friggin’ short. Maybe the Brotherhood won, and faked the message, mm?”
    There was the problem—four elwies was too far to go to find witnesses. “Tham—tell me about the Silence? What took out the old worlds? Beasties? Destruction? Is it suicide, or murder?”
    Tham shook his head as though unwilling to waste his fading time on trivia. “You know all the theories as well as I do.”
    “Do I? I’m asking for the Patrol’s real thinking here, Tham, not what the civilians hear, or the stuff that gets taught at Doggoth. What do Roker and his cronies believe?”
    “Don’t know that they ever worry about it.” Tham closed his eyes wearily. “Same as everyone else, I suppose. Worlds just wear out, maybe. Like me. Or they invent something better than radio. And just talk to each other, not us. Or they stop caring. Like me. Why is everyone so anxious for my famous last words?”
    “What happened to Scyth?” Vaun demanded.
    “Plague?” the invalid mumbled. “They had a plague on Scyth.”
    “That was a hundred years ago!”
    “Close-run thing, though. Maybe it came back and next time took everybody?”
    “No plague ever takes everybody!”
    Tham wheezed for a moment. “Families?”
    “Families? I