Fiction
Sunday, January 16, 2005
The Warm Lands
(Fantasy set in an unspecified locale. A scientific approach to magic would demand that it have a power source somewhere—a source governed by the Law of Conservation of Mass / Energy. But that would generate questions about where the energy comes from, and why it should take either special rituals or special abilities to tap into it. If the source possessed a dynamic character that went beyond passive storage of potential, it might do things on its own from time to time…and how likely would men be to attribute such occurrences to a human will?
Hopefully, this novelette will someday be continued to create a complete episodic novel.)
The night-gale had abated with the touch of the sun. Gregor stirred, slid a hand to his eyes and teased his cloak away from his face. Day was returning to the Great Waste.
He shielded his eyes from blown grit as he uncurled and stretched his cramped limbs. If Aral was correct and the wind spoke true, he would reach the next oasis that day. He fished a jerky strip from his pack and chewed it without pleasure as he set off, head bent against the wind and the sun at his back.
The sun was just clear of the horizon when he planted his staff upon the western ridge and peered down at a verdant plain.
The green expanse stretched toward the horizon. Hovels and huts dotted the land, from the foothills of the mountain he bestrode as far west as he could see. Smoke rose from chimneys and cooking fires. In the distance, beneath a belt of low-hanging clouds, lay a hint of an obstruction, perhaps another range to girdle the tranquil vale that beckoned from below.
It was a bastion against the wastes, a protected space where life yet sustained itself.
The etheric aroma of plentiful mana rose from the greensward, curled around his brain and teased at his powers, making him momentarily dizzy. He reeled with a hunger not of the body, yet as commanding as any physical humor could be.
At the center of the plain was a large structure, perhaps sixty feet square and forty feet high, apparently all of stone: a noble's castle, small but definite. Men moved along its ramparts. Around it, a broad brown area had been trodden smooth.
Gregor's last brush with nobles and subjects and civilization lay thirty leagues behind him, in the charnel-festooned ruins of Beluz where no living thing remained. Where he had left the greater part of his soul.
Fulfilling his charge without entering the settlement would mean considerable privation. After six days in the wastes, his food was almost gone, and his mana was down to nothing. Even so, he searched for a path around the edge of the greensward. Perhaps he might go past the town without encountering its denizens, yet still replenish his stores.
The need to see another human face welled up inside him. It beat back his fear and revulsion.
He hefted his pack higher onto his shoulders, took a firmer grip on his staff, and plodded down the shallow crevice in the mountains, toward the oasis at his feet.
Karine had been delivered of her child three days ago, and her scourging had been decreed for that day. At the appointed hour, Laella put down her hoe and summoned Marti and Luisa, and the three trudged the two miles to the square before the castle.
The square was dusty and uninviting. Nearly the whole of Anam had massed there. Most eyes were aimed at the dais and the stocks. Laella's household joined the crowd at its rear, trying to be inconspicuous. Those who noticed averted their faces with expressions of fear and distaste.
Laella struggled with her anger. She needed no reminder of her household's outcast status. The three women had gone a year without hearing a hundred words from any voice but their own. A hateful necessity, like the one that had shoved them to the fringe of their society, had brought them there.
The baron and his retainers had not yet appeared when an unfamiliar, roughly clothed man approached them from the east, a pack on his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He was tall, dark-eyed and dark-haired, broad at the shoulders and well muscled. From the dust on his clothes, he'd come over the mountains, from the wastes beyond. The weathering of his face and the squint to his eyes told of harsh sun and scouring wind long endured.
He moved up to them deliberately, with the careful step of the outsider that said greet me or shun me as you like, and glanced over the crowd to the platform that held the stocks. Laella's gaze followed his. Baron Semmech, his retainers, and the pitiful object of the gathering were mounting the dais.
Without preliminary, the baron's men bent Karine into the stocks and clamped the top bar securely down upon her, then yanked crosswise at her shift until it split along its back. Karine offered no resistance. Her eyes were dull and her face slack, as she'd spent her capacity for terror in anticipation and had none left for the event itself.
The stranger spoke softly into Laella's ear, making her start. "What are they doing?"
She glanced up at him, read sincere ignorance in his eyes.
"She is to be scourged."
"Why?"
"An unhallowed birth."
He fell silent.
The baron stepped forward and extended his hand for the whip. A retainer darted forward and presented it to him, then slid away.
"We will have no witchery in Anam." The burly nobleman's deep, rolling voice echoed over the square. His eyes swept the assembled crowd, and Laella involuntarily lowered her head to avoid them. "Ye who think to bring the darkness that ate the world to this place, know by these events that I will not have it, now or ever."
He turned to Karine, raised the whip, and swung it whistling down across her back.
The crack of impact seemed to ring from the surrounding mountains. Light flared in Karine's eyes, and she squealed in agony. Luisa and Marti flinched in sympathy. The crowd murmured. No one looked away.
The whip rose and fell again.
And again.
And again.
The stranger's face drained of color. He shut his eyes, bowed his head and whispered in some unknown tongue. It might have been a prayer.
When it was done, Karine hung limp from the stocks, her eyes closed. A retainer removed the pinion and swung back the top bar, and the scourged girl crumpled to the floor. The crowd dispersed in near-total silence. Few eyes remained upon the dais. No one approached it.
Presently the baron's party turned and made for the castle. Only Laella, Marti, Luisa and the stranger remained in the square. The stranger showed no inclination to depart.
"Why are you still here?" Laella asked him.
His face betrayed nothing. "To observe."
"To observe what?"
His mouth twitched. "You."
Luisa and Marti's eyes filled with fright.
"Are you a baron's man, stranger?" Laella put as much steel into the words as she could manage.
A second twitch produced a simulacrum of a smile. "My name is Gregor. I descended the range to the east only this morning. I know nothing of your baron."
"But you're here to observe."
He nodded. "What else would you have me do?"
"What else, indeed?" she said. She scanned the area. Semmech and his retainers had moved beyond earshot. Luisa and Marti appeared to have mastered their fear. Karine lay where she had fallen. "Are you competent with a shovel?"
The faint smile vanished. "And if I am?"
"We have need of your muscles, and will repay their use with food and lodging. Are you agreeable?"
A long moment of silence passed. Luisa shuffled her feet in the dust. Marti fidgeted with the buttons on her dress.
"I am."
Before Laella could speak again, the stranger strode past her, mounted the dais, and crouched over Karine's still form. He peeled back her eyelids and put two fingers to her neck, then slipped his arms around her and hoisted her up, cradling her pudgy body against his chest like an over-large child. He returned to stand before Laella and her gaping companions with Karine slumped in his arms, as if nothing untoward had happened.
"Lead on, Madam."
Her eyes shuttled between his burden and his face. "What do you mean by this?"
"Your townsfolk watched a strong man ply a heavy whip on this woman's back until she could not stand," he said. "When it was done, no one moved to succor her. Did you intend to leave her there, as they did?"
Laella's mouth fell open.
"The food and lodging I earn," he said, "will be hers. Now lead on."
She did.
Gregor stepped back from the midden he'd dug, thrust his shovel into the loam and wiped the sweat from his face. It would serve the little household for a year, at least. The dirt from the excavation had closed the previous garbage pit to decompose in peace.
His three hours with a shovel had exhausted him, but the communion with the earth had enabled him to replenish his mana at the same time. Once he'd prepared rations for the week to come, he could continue west. His map would go unaltered. No major tributaries flowed through Anam. Considering the potency of the soil, the etheric balance of the vale was strangely static.
He flapped his tunic to cool himself and strode toward Laella's cottage.
It was a small place for three grown women. It would be smaller still for four.
He knocked at the sill of the kitchen window. "Laella?"
The tall woman came to the window with a bundle of sewing in her hands. "Yes?"
"Your midden is finished." He swept an arm back at his handiwork. "Where might a man hire a room for the night?"
Her eyes widened. "You will not stay with us?"
"You already have a boarder. Where would I stay?"
A shadow passed over her face. "We have room enough for both of you. And there are other tasks, if you're willing."
He frowned. "You said nothing of other tasks earlier. I must eat, Madam."
Her mouth drew thin. "You and Karine will eat to satiety. We have more than enough for you both. Are you willing?"
He surveyed their half-acre of garden, noted the many kinds of vegetables crammed too close together. Twenty chickens scurried about before a coop guarded by a large yellow dog.
They were doing too much in too small a space. They could triple their yield by growing one or two vegetables and trading for the rest. Theirs was the sort of farm that assumed that trade would not be possible.
Laella's threadbare dignity was enough to wring his heart, but he forced himself to proceed with care. His conscience would not support another Beluz.
"Did you hire the labor of a stranger out of convenience, Laella, or because your townsfolk will have no truck with you? I must buy provisions before I leave your vale. Have I stained myself in their eyes by consorting with you?"
She did not answer at once.
"Come with me a moment, Gregor."
He followed her stiff back into the house, through the commons and down the short hall to the bedrooms. Luisa sat in her own little room, laboring at something he could not make out. She glanced at him and returned her eyes to her own affairs. Through the closed door of the room adjoining, he could hear Karine's sobs as Marti tended her scored flesh.
Laella guided him into her room and shut the door. He started to protest, but she raised a hand.
"We are women alone, and none of us is strong." Her eyes held his as her hands undid her collar and moved to the buttons below. "Luisa joined me here two years ago. Marti, just a year past." She undid another button, and another. "It was well that we needed little from anyone, for we got even less." Her blouse gaped open, allowing her breasts to peek through. Her dark brown nipples were large and pointed. "But for you, I would have had to dig a new midden, and no telling at what cost to my back." She pulled one arm out of its sleeve, then the other, gathered her wheaten hair in her hand and turned as the garment fell to the floor.
From shoulders to waist, Laella's back was a landscape of pain. Thick ridges of scar tissue, irregularly puckered and blackened, crisscrossed to make a map of desolation. The flesh between the ridges was pale, almost translucent, as if it had never seen the sun.
"This is how Karine will look when she has healed, Gregor." Her tone was bleak. "Her family has cast her out. The rest of Anam will endure her as it has endured us, but little more than that. I would have gone to her myself, had you not preceded us."
"Luisa and Marti too?" he breathed.
She nodded.
"For bearing children out of wedlock? No more than that?"
She turned and peered into his eyes.
"Of course it was more than that, Gregor. They were virgin births. We conceived without having known men, and the baron adjudged us witches for it."
And he knew.
Marti laid five places at their table. Luisa brought the stew, a collation of pared roots in broth, and set the pot at the center of the table. Laella set a loaf of brown hardbread next to the pot and gestured to Gregor to sit.
"Marti, will you fetch Karine, or shall I?" she said.
"I'll get her." The small blonde woman scurried down the hallway.
A minute later Marti returned, urging pale, trembling Karine before her. In the firelight, the freshly scourged girl looked barely able to stand. Laella waited until they sat, reached for the ladle and offered it to Karine, who stared at it, uncomprehending.
"You must eat, dear. The cuts won't heal otherwise."
Karine took the ladle. They served themselves in turn. There was no conversation.
The fire had burned low when they were done. Luisa collected their bowls in silence. Marti attended to the leftover stew and tossed the end of the loaf to the dog, who settled by the hearth to gnaw it.
Karine sat slumped forward, eyes fixed on the table. Her color was returning, but she was clearly apprehensive about her place in Laella's household. Gregor watched Laella discreetly, as if waiting for instructions. Laella caught Luisa's and Marti's eyes, and nodded.
With a murmur and a touch, Marti urged Karine to rise and come with her. Luisa excused herself and followed them, leaving Laella and Gregor alone at the table in the flickering firelight. His expression was solemn.
"You have a hard life," he said.
"It's not that hard. We're used to being apart."
"I see."
"You've told us nothing about yourself. Where do you come from? Surely not the wastes?"
"No." He shifted in his seat. "I've traveled a great deal."
She examined him in the dim light. "You don't look old enough to have traveled much."
He smiled faintly. "Perhaps the marks are on the inside. Tell me of your baron."
The swerve halted her. She considered. "He is a strong ruler, and brooks no disorder. His men are well disciplined and properly under his command. He takes a tithe, but he does not meddle with trade or trifle with the women. The people fear him, but in the main they don't dislike him."
"Not even you?" His eyes compelled her to candor.
Her mouth twitched. "Not most of the time."
"Ah. There are worse rulers, then."
"There are. We've known a few."
They sat in agreeable silence.
His scars were few. The roughness of his face and hands was already fading. In their few hours' acquaintance, he had displayed strength, insight, compassion and fiber. He said little, but omitted nothing needful.
She could not imagine what impelled him to wander the wastes, but neither could she imagine a community that would drive him from its bosom.
"Are you weary?" she said, her voice husky.
He nodded.
"Might I persuade you to stay with us a while, address some... other tasks? Or are you anxious to be off?"
Something moved behind his eyes. She waited an anxious interval before the corners of his mouth rose. "I am only just arrived. I need not hurry away. I will stay gladly, if I'm welcome." He looked about for his pack. "Where shall I sleep?"
She rose. "Come with me."
She led him down the hall, past Luisa's and Marti's rooms, their doors discreetly closed, and opened her own. She drew a slender candle from her dwindling cache of luxuries, lit it and set it by her pallet. He had halted at the threshold.
"Is something the matter?" she said.
His eyes were uncertain. "This is your room."
She nodded. "And yours." She gestured at the pallet. Luisa had set his pack next to it. "To share with me, if you will. For as long as you will." She stared at the floor. "I am a virgin, Gregor, not another man's cast-off."
In the candlelight, his eyes looked as if they might fall from their sockets.
"Wouldn't you rather remain a virgin, Laella?"
She barked a laugh. "Three years after bearing an unhallowed child?"
"The others --"
She flailed the air in sudden impatience. "What of them?"
He fell silent. After a moment, he approached her. As if of their own desire, her hands caught and drew him closer. He did not resist.
"You have a great strength in you," he said.
"You have a great kindness in you," she said. "Shall we share what we have?"
He bent and touched his lips to hers.
The candle had long since guttered out when she murmured, "Tell me of the wastes."
He pulled her more closely against him, and she nestled her face into the hollow of his shoulder.
"Brown and dead."
"No life at all?"
"Only husks, and not many even of those."
"Is it hot or cold?"
"Cold." He stroked her back, winced as his palms traveled the map of insult traced there. "The wind blows always, heavy with grit and dust. In the day I hid my eyes from the wind, and at night I hid all of me from it."
"Why --" She caught herself, paused, and began again. "Why did you chance them?"
He kept still until his geas had counted off time enough that his words would not be taken as an answer. She shifted uneasily against him in the silence.
"You who stay in the warm lands," he said, "have a measure of security and comfort. Fertile soil, familiar faces, a steady foothold upon the land. But such things are not for all men. For some, when they reach a certain age, a wanderlust stirs in them, and they must seek new vistas, whatever the cost." He grinned in the darkness. "Perhaps, when the world teemed with life, it was easier to understand. But even now, the need to see more lands than one's birthplace, more faces than one's family and neighbors, commands some too loudly to resist."
Her hands clasped behind his back.
"What have you seen," she said, "worth forsaking those who loved and reared you? What have your wanderings reaped that could repay always being alone, with no home to ward you from the dark and no love to buffer you against the cold?"
He thought of Beluz, by his fright and fury reduced to a drift of ash from which new life would never spring. He thought of Malagra, where the fear of sorcery was so great that he'd never been permitted to be alone, compelled even to sleep under the eyes of a wakeful, watchful guard. He thought of Urel, perched at the edge of the Great Waste, where crooked-faced Duisenne, so old that even her wrinkles had wrinkled, had taught him to wield and pattern the powers of the earth, and where Aral the Skeptic had bound him in the truth-geas every Scholium-trained sorcerer bore. He thought of his parents and siblings, all of them dead, and of Serebal, his home forever lost to him.
"Nothing."
"Might you be ready," she said, arms tightening around him, "to leave off and make a new home?"
He could feel the tremor in her chest, hear it in her whispered words.
"Perhaps."
"Here?" The tremor intensified. "With me?"
Even without the geas, he could not have lied to her. Yet he could not bring himself to dash her hopes.
"We shall see."
Gregor was at work in the garden when Semmech's retainers came for him.
The approach of four men at arms, short swords slapping against their thighs, could not be concealed, nor did they try. They halted before Gregor, their leader asked his name, and then demanded that he accompany them back to the castle. He put down his spade and complied. As they marched off, Laella came running to the threshold, her face a mask of fear. He bade her be calm with one raised hand.
The public places of Anam teemed with activity. Artisans labored, vendors clamored and bargained, and women and children scurried among the wagons and stalls. The townsfolk marked Gregor's passage with furtive glances and murmurs. The baron's men took no notice. Gregor kept his thoughts to himself.
The castle was dark and cold inside, with a hint of dampness to the air. The stone walls were unmarked and undecorated, save by widely spaced sconces in which torches burned. Gregor saw no one within except his escorts. No sounds suggested any great activity from around him.
The corridor opened onto a hall of odd proportions, unusually high and narrow. The hall was practically sheathed in iron. Dense iron lattices supported thin wooden surfaces, and were surrounded by ironwork chairs. Tall iron cages filled with pikes and swords lined the walls. It was plainly an armory, whatever else it might be.
It was the only place he'd been in Anam where the reek of luxuriant mana did not reach.
At the far end, on a shallow stone pedestal studded with iron rings and catches, stood a high-backed, thinly cushioned throne. Behind it was an unlighted opening, probably the egress to a private chamber.
On the throne, hands tight on its arms, sat Baron Semmech.
The retainers stepped away from Gregor, and their leader bade him approach the nobleman. He strode to the edge of the dais and bowed formally.
"My lord, I am honored."
Semmech stared at him. "Are you indeed, stranger?"
"I am."
"And your name?"
"Gregor, my lord."
The baron nodded. "The townsfolk say you've been in Anam less than a week, Gregor. Yet it was time enough to form a liaison that brings you little credit with me or my people."
Gregor said nothing.
"You have taken lodging with Laella, in the farmstead north of the smithy, have you not?"
"I have, my lord."
"Do you know what she and her companions are?"
"I do, my lord." Gregor kept his voice low.
The admission traced lines of displeasure across Semmech's forehead. He looked Gregor up and down.
"You are young and strong, and your speech marks you as educated. Can you find no better associates?"
Gregor chose his words with care. "I am a stranger to your realm, my lord. I don't know your customs, and I don't wish to offend through ignorance. Have you decreed that no one may have dealings with Laella's household?"
He locked eyes with the baron and willed a definite answer. Presently Semmech shook his head.
"Laella has made me welcome," Gregor said. "She has been hospitable beyond what a traveler from the wastes could expect. I have provided her with certain services in recompense."
The retainers brayed laughter. After a moment the baron smiled grimly.
"No doubt you have. But those women are not the choicest of Anam, Gregor. All have borne children, and all of them" -- his lip curled -- "died shortly after birth."
Gregor did not reply.
"That doesn't appear to surprise you."
"I was aware of it, my lord."
"Were you?" Semmech rose and stepped forward to peer down at Gregor. "Were you aware that their quickenings did not partake of man?"
"I was, my lord."
Anger returned to the noble's face. "Does it not disturb you to keep company with four witches, then?"
"I fear you are mistaken, my lord. They are not witches."
The retainers murmured. Semmech's face reddened.
"And how do you reach this conclusion in the face of what all of Anam has seen? Are you expert in such matters? A sorcerer yourself, perhaps?"
Gregor breathed deeply and braced himself. On this subject the geas would allow him no latitude at all. He marshaled his powers, let the mana he carried rise and pulse at the ready, lest he should need it to win free of that stone and iron cage.
"I am, my lord." The retainers shouted as one. "I trained at the Scholium Arcanum in Urel, was certified a journeyman by Master Sorceress Duisenne, then was bound to speak only truth and sent west by Grand Master Aral, whom the students of the academy call the Skeptic."
Shock displaced the anger from the noble's expression. "You admit all this freely? To me?"
"The truth-geas compels it, my lord."
Semmech staggered backward and collapsed onto his throne.
Laella was sitting alone in the gloom of the commons when the door creaked open. She leaped from her chair, barked a shin against the table leg, and ran to the sound. It was Gregor. From what she could see in the light of dusk, he was dusty from the road, but no worse for the day.
They embraced as the dog pranced around them. She pulled him to the table and made him sit beside her. The dog settled its head upon his thigh, and he tousled it with a murmur of affectionate praise.
"What did Semmech want of you?"
He was silent for a long time before he said, "He disapproves of my choice of companions."
She'd feared as much. Though the baron had issued no decree of ostracism, he'd made his preferences plain. Anam had turned its back on the virgin mothers with a uniformity that could not have been bettered by any command.
Gregor was the first man who'd dared speak to her since her own scourging. Despite his quality, her readiness to bind herself to him had surprised her. She hadn't known how desperate she'd become for a scrap of human warmth, how thin was the rag of hope she'd clutched to ward her from Anam's cold.
Chance had brought him to her, and he had blessed her beyond all chance. She would not surrender him without a fight, neither to the baron nor to the wastes.
"Did he command you to leave?"
He smiled. "No. Be at peace, love. A traveler becomes used to these examinations. A lord who doesn't watch his borders and those who pass over them doesn't remain a lord for long."
She studied his face in the gloom. He appeared untroubled.
"Have you eaten?"
He nodded. "Is there anything undone?"
"No." A shudder broke through her self-command. "I was worried, Gregor."
His hands rose to cup her face. He stroked her cheeks with his thumbs, and she felt the last of her fears dissolve.
"Is there any hot water left?" he said.
She nodded. "Go to our room. I'll bring it."
When she returned, he had already undressed. He reached for the basin and towels she carried, but she stopped him and nodded toward their bed.
"Lie down."
He complied. She set the basin down beside their pallet, dampened a towel in it, and swabbed the sweat and dust from his body with long, tender strokes.
It was a week later that the troubles began.
In the space of three days, four women of the central village were mauled by their own dogs. Two survived. They told strange tales: that the animals that had assaulted them, old family retainers who had always been faithful, had swelled in size and taken on a demonic aspect before they struck. The dogs were put down. Even though the stories were discounted as a forgivable hysteria in the wake of a terrible event, they spread unease through Anam.
On the western outskirts, a farm wife claimed that the ground had opened beneath her husband as he harrowed. The fissure welled with a bubbling black fluid that swiftly sucked the screaming farmer into the bowels of the earth. A moment later the crevice had closed over him, leaving no trace that it had ever been.
A peculiar strain of ivy sprouted from the rocky ground around Semmech's castle: more blue than green, with long, narrow leaves that resembled clutching fingers. It grew at an unnatural speed. In three days it challenged the castle's eaves and curled over the top of the walls. Even on days without wind, the fingers seemed to flex and grope with unknowable purpose.
When a shoot of the plant caught one of Semmech's patrols by the ankle and pulled him off the parapet to die on the cobbles below, the baron had Gregor brought to him once more.
"You are a sorcerer." The baron's eyes were full of doubt.
Gregor nodded.
"You know nothing of these events?"
"My lord," Gregor said, "am I the only sorcerer in Anam?"
Semmech's mouth tightened. "The only admitted one."
"Is there some way I could have gained from these deaths? For I confess I cannot imagine one."
Semmech's men at arms murmured. The baron stared into Gregor's eyes for a long moment, then settled onto his throne.
"I am," he said, "a military man. I am proficient with weapons. I know soldiers and combat, and little else. I watch the borders and prohibit violence, and no more. My subjects endure my rule because I claim no powers beyond my scope. If I were to try to order their lives in detail, they would be right to depose me, for I have not the wisdom for it. But I keep to my sphere, and they tolerate me." He smiled grimly. "Sometimes I think they even approve of me."
It was an admission Gregor had heard from no other ruler. The candor and humility of it awakened his sympathies, moved him to offer what he could to this man who, like himself, stood alone by necessity and long habit.
"My lord," Gregor said, "do you remember my geas?"
Semmech's eyes returned to Gregor's. He nodded once, slowly.
Gregor considered for a moment, weighing his words and pondering how much to say.
"Then I will tell you two things about your rule. First, be aware that the people of Anam consider you a good and capable master, even those you have punished for a thing that was in no way their fault." The retainers murmured again, and Semmech's eyes narrowed in heightened concentration. "Second, though you have in all good intention tried only to ward Anam from danger by prohibiting the practice of sorcery, the ban works to the opposite effect."
Semmech's men surged forward and enveloped Gregor, buzzing with anger. The baron held up a hand and glared them back.
"Explain yourself, sorcerer."
Gregor nodded and strained to remember his lessons.
"In Urel, alongside the Scholium Arcanum and allied with it, there is a college of record-keepers. The savants there pore over the writings we have from before the Fall, studying the history of the world and sorcery's role in it. I spent a term among them.
"The scholars have come to believe that the stuff called mana, the earth power that fuels sorcery, is intertwined with all life. Without mana, life fails. Where life is plentiful, mana is created anew.
"But mana does not lie still, no more than life itself. It has its own kinesis; it swirls and flows under the skin of the world, in patterns the Ureli scholars have pondered for centuries. In the wastes, the net flow of mana is outward, which eventually rendered life impossible. Vales such as Anam are oases, pools of mana where life can flourish and generate new life, and new mana to sustain it.
"Now and again, the life of a place will generate mana faster than it can be used or dispersed by the subterranean flows. Though not as immediately fatal as the depletion of mana, this is no less lethal. Mana accumulated beyond a certain amount is no longer a support to life, but a poison. It reaches out of the earth to make wonders and terrors such as those that have troubled Anam these weeks past.
"I believe that this is what has happened to your realm, my lord. Anam resides over an immense pool of mana from which there is little or no outflow. I sensed it before I descended the eastern slopes. Your people are fecund and industrious, and thus add to the pool, but they do no sorcery, and so the mana is not used, but congeals in the earth to become a menace to you all."
Silence descended upon the hall. The retainers neither moved nor spoke. Semmech held so still that he seemed encased in an invisible crystal.
Gregor's message had contained little to please the nobleman, though he'd couched it in the softest words he could find. In light of what he'd said, there were several ways to interpret his arrival in Anam, not all of them to his credit. Presently the baron voiced one.
"Did you come here," Semmech said, "to exploit this resource?"
"No, my lord." Before the baron could pose another question, Gregor added, "My arrival here was pure chance. I knew nothing of your realm."
He prayed that it would be enough to forestall deeper inquiry into his wandering, but it was not to be.
"You say the wastes will not tolerate life," Semmech said. "But you yourself give the lie to that, by coming thence to us."
Gregor shook his head. "I could not have remained there, my lord. There is no food, little water, and almost no shelter."
"Where did you reside before that?"
Gregor swallowed. "A town called Beluz."
"A town like Anam?"
"Yes, my lord. Much like Anam, though smaller."
Semmech's eyes were merciless upon him. "And why did you set forth?"
Gregor's geas tightened irresistibly. It denied him all evasion, all concealment.
"Beluz is no more, my lord. The town suffered a plague of shapeshifters." His eyes closed against the memory. "Children and animals were overcome by madness, transformed into beasts beyond imagination, and laid waste to all around them until they were put down." He struggled for calm. "As here, I was the only acknowledged sorcerer in the district, so the townsfolk fastened upon me as the agent of their sorrows. They came for me and seized me while I slept, and would have put me to death, except that in my desperation I summoned the lightning against them."
Semmech vaulted from his seat before his men could move or speak. He swept a hand over their heads and shouted "Leave us," then beckoned to Gregor to follow him down the short, dark corridor behind the throne.
Laella could hardly believe it when Gregor stepped through the cottage door. No one had expected him to return unharmed from Semmech's second summons. Before he could take three steps, she ran to him and wrapped her arms firmly around him, hid her swollen eyes against his chest. He stroked her hair and murmured meaningless soothing phrases.
Luisa, Marti and Karine tumbled through the back door and stood dumbstruck, tools clutched in their hands.
"All is yet well, ladies. He did me no harm."
They settled around the table by the hearth, and he told them of the audience. Laella held tight to his hand the whole time. The shadows were lengthening toward evening when he was done.
"He means to protect Anam," Gregor concluded. "He will allow me to create a balance against the accumulations of mana, but nothing else. I have agreed."
Marti glared at him from eyes lit by outrage. "He means to protect his realm," she said. "He means to protect his power. Why do you think he forbade sorcery from the first?"
The muscles in Gregor's neck rippled. "There are dangers in it, Marti. An untrained sorcerer can lay waste to an oasis without meaning to."
"No doubt," Marti said. The heat of anger was strong in her. "But a trained sorcerer with the use of Anam's mana could free us from the grip of a man who would lash a defenseless girl bloody for bearing a child." She rose and glared down at him. "Do you know what became of our babies, Gregor? Did my lord the baron tell you?"
Gregor said nothing. Laella cringed as the memories surged back.
"He killed them, Gregor. He had his retainers mince them to bits as soon as they were free of our wombs, and then he had the bits burned, and the ashes thrown to the wind. He said he would have no witch-children in his vale, and bade us thank him for not visiting the fate of the children upon the mothers." She pulled Karine to her feet, whirled her around, and yanked up her shift to expose the scars from her scourging, not yet fully healed.
"He bade us thank him," she whispered, "for this."
The room became silent.
After a long interval, Gregor said, "It will not happen again, Marti. Once I have created the balance, there will be no more virgin births in Anam. I cannot undo the past, but I can foretell this much of the future: it will not happen again."
"Gregor," Laella murmured, "are you certain?"
His eyes locked with hers, and he began to tremble. The tremor became a quaking that shook the bench on which they sat and rattled his boots against the packed clay of the floor. When he had mastered himself, he spoke a single word.
"No."
Gregor surveyed the moonlit garden, with Laella snug against his side. The night was cool and bright. A light breeze stroked their faces and stirred the leaves of the vegetables.
"Do you know of forests?" he said.
"No."
"There were pictures of them, in a book in Urel." He caressed her shoulder. "Their trees were very tall, with many branches and leaves as broad as a hand. Some gave nuts, and others gave sweet fruit. They cooled the earth and kept the water in the ground when the rain failed. Sometimes men would build their homes among the trees, for shade and a shield against the wind."
"They sound very beautiful."
He nodded. "Before the Dieback, they covered most of the world."
She looked up at him. "What is a dieback?"
He started to explain, then smiled and said, "It produced the wastes."
Her mouth tightened, and she looked out over the moonlit landscape. They stood in silence for a long time.
"He will not let you stay, Gregor."
He did not dispute it.
"Where will you go from here?"
"West, until I reach another oasis or the coast of the continent."
"And then?"
He strained to remain expressionless. "That will depend on what I find, and on what I bring."
"Bring? Other than food for the journey --"
"Perhaps I should have said 'whom.'"
Her eyes went wide. They turned to face one another squarely, and he took her hands. "Are you asking me to accompany you?"
He nodded.
"The others --"
He grinned. "What of them?"
"I am a child of Anam, Gregor."
"And I," he said, "am a child of Serebal, two hundred leagues to the east. Yet I am here. The next oasis is no more than seven days' travel. If you will do as I say, I can get us there unharmed."
"Can you?" she said. "I have seen no sorcery yet."
He exerted himself briefly. A sparkling nimbus swirled around them like a carousel made of stars. Two soft streams of light pulsed and knotted around their joined hands.
"Aral the Skeptic, Grand Master of the Arcana in the East," he said, "has charged me with charting the oases and the flows of mana along the southern reach of this continent, as far west as it is possible to travel. On the far coast is the enclave of Pontreval, where what I learn will be joined with the findings of other travelers and used to draw a map. The greatest sorcerers in the world will work from that map to undo the wastes, restore them to life, so that men may wander the world freely once more. I may have a part of that work, if I arrive in time and am deemed equal to its rigors." He squeezed her hands, and the cords of light that bound them flamed to brilliance. "Will you come with me, Laella? Be my home and my comfort in the wastes between the oases, where no life abides and no home can stand?"
She stared up at him in a transport of wonder, face glowing with starlight, hands tight upon his own.
"I will."
Semmech peered at the western range. The morning sun glowed on its peaks. Underfoot the ground was dry, almost devoid of grass. The nearest huts were more than a mile to the east. "Why here?"
Gregor smiled. "Practical considerations, my lord. Should I fail, there will be no damage to life or property. Should I succeed, the balance will disturb no one, and few will be tempted to come close."
The baron smirked. "You underestimate the curiosity of my subjects." He indicated Laella and her household, all of whom had begged to witness the event.
Laella's hand clutched Gregor's. He essayed a shallow bow. "But I do not mistake your capacity to command them, Baron."
The noble nodded. "Very well. Proceed."
Gregor released Laella's hand, laid his pack and staff aside and walked toward the foothills of the western range. Before him, a shallow, gravel-floored pass cut through the mountains at an altitude only a third as high as the peaks that flanked it. It would be his egress from Anam. He halted at the grass's edge, pulled his arms to his chest, and closed his eyes.
The call of the teeming pool of mana beneath the vale became painfully intense. He opened his etheric senses wide and drove his consciousness into the earth, seeking full communion with the subterranean lake of power. What he learned of its breadth and depth would have made his body gasp, were it able.
Already, enough energy was stored beneath Anam for a Master Sorcerer to blast its protective mountain ranges to dust. Even Gregor, only a journeyman, could have used it to lift Semmech's castle from its foundations and hurl it into the wastes. The pool filled as he watched, as more mana trickled in from the enterprise and vitality of Anam's thousand folk.
Streamers of force leaped from the pool and scraped at the crust beneath the living lands. Life's natural resistance to manipulation had created a buffer zone, a partial barrier to the plumes from that inchoate furnace, but as the tendrils of energy licked at it, it grew ever thinner. The places where the mana had broken through were open wounds in the oasis, where the undirected power had brought destruction and grief.
He probed the limn of the pool and found a thick layer of the one substance known to block the flow of mana: iron. Anam's denizens lived over a giant iron bowl that caught their life-energies and contained them. No outflow was possible.
He quieted his mind, wrapped it around the pool, and reached out for working substance.
With an accelerating rumble, rocks, gravel and dust slid down the nearby slopes toward where Gregor stood. He halted them a few yards away, shaped them into a great inverted cone, and caused them to spin.
The rumble became a whoosh of rotating debris. He put metaphorical arms to the giant top and spun it faster, watching the level of the mana pool as he adjusted the speed.
Faster... Faster... a little slower, now... There.
He opened his eyes and stepped back.
Before him was a perfect sixty-foot-high cone of stone and dust, spinning faster than any whirlpool, whistling a shrill song of power. Though the air currents from its motion buffeted him almost strongly enough to knock him down, the cone itself was stable.
He turned to Semmech and spread his arms in triumph.
The baron stared at the whirligig as if it were an enemy come to spill his blood. His retainers watched him uncertainly.
While the soldiers and their lord stood frozen, Gregor beckoned the four women to him, gathered them close around him.
Semmech broke from his trance. He looked at his troops and jerked one hand violently at Gregor and his companions. The soldiers drew their swords and advanced.
Gregor exerted himself once more.
A second cone rose from the earth to girdle him and his companions: a blue-white forest of lightning bolts. They crackled with a hungry energy that mocked the blades of Semmech's men. One decided to test the shield. The blast slammed him to the earth, clutching a sword melted down to the hilt.
"As little as it becomes a common man," Gregor said, "to break his given word, Baron, it becomes a ruler still less."
Semmech glared at him. He put his hand to the hilt of his own sword.
"Tell your men to sheathe their blades, my lord. Else I shall collapse the whirligig upon them, and Anam will be once more without a balance."
The baron's eyes lit with understanding. His hand retreated from his sword. "Practical considerations, sorcerer?"
"Just so."
"Will you take my realm from me, then?"
"I will not," Gregor said. "I leave upon the instant. My word, you see, is good."
Semmech's jaw clenched. He raised a hand, and his men returned their swords to their scabbards. Gregor quelled the curtain of lightning, then took up his pack and his staff.
"You have your balance, Baron. It will sense the flows into the mana pool and adjust to any changes. Leave it to its work, and there will be no more terrors in Anam. Your people will have peace."
Semmech nodded and gestured his men back to the castle. As he turned to go, Luisa, Marti and Karine broke away and sprinted toward him. A kitchen knife gleamed in Karine's hand.
Marti and Luisa knocked Semmech onto his face in the thin grass. Each woman pinned one of his arms beneath her as Karine struck.
The blade pierced the noble's neck, releasing a jet of arterial blood. Karine ripped crosswise, opening his throat and more blood vessels. Semmech's body spasmed, throwing Marti and Luisa to the side. He convulsed in silent agony, all four limbs hammering the earth as his life spurted into the air.
"Gregor." Laella tugged at his arm. Her face was a stony mask. "We must go."
Gregor stood transfixed, unable to speak.
"Gregor!" Laella's hiss penetrated the horror that girdled his brain. "They have chosen. It is done. We must go!"
The three women rose shrieking with vengeance fulfilled, only a moment before Semmech's retainers closed upon them with drawn swords. The blades rose and fell, twice, thrice, and the shrieking ceased. Three new fountains of blood rose to dance to the song of the whirligig, as Laella pulled him away from the carnage, toward the pass that would deliver them from the warmth of Anam into the chill wastes to the west.
Friday, January 14, 2005
The Gift Room
(A story of romance within marriage. Love and erotic enchantment have their own requirements. A fair number of married couples never learn them…and a still greater number forget to observe them.)
Marilyn Cullinane set the box at the exact center of the sheet of wrapping paper and peered around all four sides for unevenness as carefully as if it mattered. With a sharp nod, she pulled the red and gold foil tightly around the box, made neat triangular flaps at the opposed sides, and checked once again for a discrepancy. When she was satisfied that no device at the disposal of mortal Man could detect a difference in the length of the flaps, she tore two small strips of cellophane tape from the dispenser at her side, smoothed them over the edges of the flaps, and thrust the box at Gordon.
"To the gift room," she said.
Gordon rose and toted the box down the bedroom hallway to their guest room. The immaculately kept room hadn't known an actual guest for nine years, but each year it provided seasonal shelter to dozens of Christmas gifts.
It was December twenty-fourth, and the queen-sized bed was piled high with boxes, each wrapped in gaily colored seasonal paper and tagged with its recipient's name. He looked down at the package in his hands, noticed that it lacked a tag, and turned to bring it back to Marilyn, only to find her standing behind him with the tag between her fingers.
She grinned briefly, jabbed the tag onto the top of the box, and made to return to the pile of boxes on the living room floor when Gordon said, "Sweetie?"
Her head jerked around. "Hm?"
"What did we get for, uh, Jason?"
Another quick grin. "An electric shaver. Don't you remember? You bought it." She swept away, leaving him alone at the door to the guest room.
He glanced within one more time. The ziggurat of glittering presents for their relatives and friends was as neat and precise as his wife's wrapping technique. The bed beneath was tightly made, almost military in its lines and the tension of its coverings. Though they hadn't entertained a visitor in almost a decade, Marilyn changed the sheets every week nonetheless.
It had been their nuptial bed, given to them by her father as a wedding gift twenty years before. It had become their guest bed when, on their tenth anniversary, he'd surprised her with the gift of a cherry bedroom set. After ten years' trying, they'd failed to beget a child. She'd concluded that they never would, and had lost interest in sex. He, as fond and foolish as always, had treated it as a phase that would pass. He'd thought the bedroom set would remind her that their devotion to one another was what mattered most.
Her reaction had taken him aback. She was all but silent as they jockeyed the new dressers and vanity around the room, seeking an optimum arrangement. She did as he directed, but made no suggestions of her own. It had made him fear that he'd somehow offended her with the gift, perhaps by not consulting her.
The one act to which she'd brought some animation was the exile of their old bed to the guest room. They had not made love since.
To the skilled walker, a great city can be a great delight, but one must take care. Most persons on the streets of such a city will not be skilled. Attention to their deficiencies is required. In addition, the city's own attractions can create hazards, both fleeting and persistent, to a too rapid or heedless stride.
Gordon had resolved to walk the streets of Los Angeles until his head had cleared and his marital dissatisfactions had retreated. He did it often; he fancied that knew the byways of the city as well as any man alive. But that day a moment's inattention had caused him to take a turn he hadn't planned. After twenty minutes of strolling while scanning the area for familiar signs, he realized that he'd entered a part of the city's downtown that was altogether new to him.
The shops bore unfamiliar names. Many seemed to be in languages other than English. The merchandise in their windows ranged from the exotic to the wholly incomprehensible. The buildings themselves were uneven in construction: some tall, others short; some broad, others slender; some aggressively eye-catching, others almost secretive of decor. They varied in a multitude of directions from the blend of chrome-and-glass modernity and Southwestern regionalia that characterized the city overall.
There were few people on the streets. Those Gordon saw resisted eye contact as if they feared that he might demand an explanation for their presence.
The strangeness of the district disturbed his rhythm. It caused him to shift his attention away from his pace and footing. Inevitably, moving too fast for the surroundings while gawking at the mysteries around him, he tripped and fell.
He collected himself painfully, brushed the dust from the arms of his windbreaker, and looked about for the cause of his tumble. A pace away, a large black cat, the sleekest specimen of felinity he'd ever seen, sat staring at him as if amused at his clumsiness.
Must've tripped over her. Haven't done that in a dog's age.
Despite his pratfall, the internal play on words caused him to smile. He nodded courteously to the cat, who stared at him a moment longer, then turned and slinked away with a cat's typical sinuousness into the open door of a shop he hadn't yet consciously registered.
It appeared to be a lingerie shop. An assortment of corsets, waist cinchers, camisoles, merrywidows, and teddies stood in the display. The name embossed at the base of the window in baroque red curlicues was Naughty But Nice.
A tall, raven-haired woman of statuesque build and aristocratic carriage emerged and peered down at him. He felt his pulse quicken.
If a sixteen year old boy were challenged to draw the perfect female body, he might have produced the long-legged vision that contemplated Gordon as he sat upon the sidewalk. If Gordon were then asked to clothe that body, and to top it with a face to challenge the fantasies of a mature man, he could not have improved upon the form-fitting silk bustier, the leather miniskirt, the stiletto-heeled pumps, and the perfectly composed, slightly intrigued face that stood above him.
He could not place her age.
"Are you hurt, dear?" Her voice was an alto melody. Each word throbbed with passionate vitality.
"Uh, no, I'm fine, really." He levered himself up from the sidewalk and tried to assume a dignified stance. "But thank you for asking." Without thinking, he held out his hand, as if he'd just been introduced to a business associate or the wife of a friend.
She took his hand in a curious grip, almost as if she were about to raise it to her lips and kiss it. "Not at all." He expected her to let go; she did not. "Were you doing some late Christmas shopping?"
"No, not really." The soft warmth of her grip was as disturbing as the rest of her. "Just strolling a bit. I wasn't paying proper attention, and I tripped over your cat."
She smiled. "Yes, Astarte can be a hazard, no doubt of it." Her eyes locked with his. They were as magnetic as the rest of her: large, jet black, and preternaturally steady upon his own. He found that he couldn't look away. "Even if you're not looking for something special for your special someone, might I interest you in a cup of tea? I've had no guests for some hours, and a spot of company would be very welcome."
Never afterward could he remember giving assent. But he followed that dangerously beautiful woman into the shop, his hand held lightly but inescapably in hers, and allowed her to lead him into a place of wonder.
"So she shows no desire at all, then?"
Gordon grimaced and looked away. "I can't see any. But in all honesty, it's been so long that I'm not sure I remember what it looks like."
Helen nodded. "She might not remember what it feels like. The suppression of desire can bury it so deep that the feel for one's sensual, sexual side is completely lost."
"Have you had that problem?"
Helen chuckled. "Never, dear. But I've made a career out of other people's troubles with it." She nodded sideways toward the aisles of erotically oriented goods on display.
Gordon blushed despite his attempts to repress it. A Catholic upbringing and a sustained unwillingness to think dispassionately about sex had left him unready for so intimate conversation with a perfect stranger. He could hardly believe it was happening.
Helen smiled at his discomfort. "Really, Gordon, did you think your neighbors are that much more like the gods and goddesses on television than you and Marilyn? Did you assume that their nights were all red revels in the pleasures of the flesh? I assure you, they're far closer to your station than our popular culture would have you believe. Otherwise, I'd never sell a thing."
She rose from the little table at which they sat, ambled into the aisle nearest them, and picked out a device from the array of goods. She returned to the table and held it out for Gordon's perusal. It was a rubber contrivance mounted on a set of elastic straps.
"Have you ever seen one of these?"
Gordon shook his head.
"It's called a French nub. It's made for a woman to wear. The conical bit goes into her vagina, and the straps go around her waist and legs. It draws out her lubrication and compels her to think about her sexual parts, but it doesn't provide quite enough stimulation to bring her to a climax. The idea is to evoke desire without satisfaction, so that when her man arrives, she'll be eager for him." Helen smiled. "It was devised to ready a virgin bride for the consummation of her marriage. I doubt Marilyn has ever heard of it, much less worn one. But what if she did?"
Gordon fell back against his chair and howled a laugh replete with pain. "Do you have any idea how she would react to the suggestion? I couldn't get her into that thing if I had the whole United States Army behind me!"
Helen didn't react in any way he could have predicted. She nodded once slightly, returned the nub to its shelf, and reseated herself across from him, fingers steepled before her. Her eyes slid slowly closed. Gordon had the sense that she'd entered a new state of consciousness, one at which he could not guess.
Is she a sex shop entrepreneur, or something else? Something subtler?
"So Marilyn's problem," she murmured, "isn't necessarily that she feels no desire for you. Perhaps she does and perhaps she doesn't. But it's very likely that she doesn't want to feel desire, for you or anyone." Her eyes opened, a black tapestry of mysteries behind them. "Could it be that your mutual infertility made her feel a failure?"
Gordon swallowed. Helen had arrowed straight to his darkest fear. He had wanted children, quite as much as Marilyn had. In the first years of their marriage, he'd talked about it nonstop.
"Gordon," she said, voice ringing with new command, "How's your own desire? Are you sure you want Marilyn's desire to return?"
Though he was securely seated, Gordon was seized by vertigo, as if he'd been snatched out of the shop and set upon a precipice where strong and swirling winds blew all about him. Any movement could be fatal, but in so fickle a gale, standing still was no safer. Helen's eyes, darkly brilliant, told him in a tongue without words that a cusp had arrived from which he could not retreat.
"Who are you?" he whispered.
Helen smiled microscopically. "Don't you mean 'what are you'?"
He gaped, shorn of words.
"Consider me a specialist of an unusual kind, Gordon. So unusual that there's no other anywhere in the world. My purview is desire and the loss of desire. So, lucky you, you've brought your troubles to exactly the person best equipped to help you with them. Now answer my question."
"I...don't know," he forced out at last. "I love her. She's a good woman...a good wife. I wouldn't want to lose her..." He ran down in confusion and fear.
"Except," Helen supplied, "that you feel as if you've lost her already. Don't you?"
He nodded.
"So she must overcome her sense of failure, and you must overcome your sense of disappointment and loss." Helen sat back and smiled. The intensity seemed to have faded from her. "A pretty problem. But soluble -- if you're still man enough to commit yourself fully to the contest."
Gordon frowned. "What do you mean by that?"
"How does one dispel a sense of failure, Gordon?"
The question puzzled him. It seemed to have no handles. He strained to ignore its metaphysical implications and take it literally.
"By succeeding at something, I suppose."
Helen nodded. "And if the sufferer is not oneself, but one's wife?"
It stopped him. "I don't know. Can anyone do that for someone else?"
"It depends. In this case, the answer is yes." She leaned forward and peered directly into his eyes. "And how does one dispel a sense of loss?"
Gordon started to answer, clamped his mouth shut.
Helen rose and went through the beaded curtain to the back of her shop. Some minutes later, she returned with a large box covered in a satiny red paper and handed it to him.
"Tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock exactly, you're to go to your bedroom, open this box and make proper use of the contents. Then wait about ten minutes more, and go to your 'gift room.' That's all."
"Why? What's in the box?"
She shook her head. "You have no need to know that as yet. Just do as I've said, exactly and without reservation.
"Some men defeat themselves before the contest begins, Gordon. And some women adjudge themselves failures without ever grappling with what failure really means. A man of character must resist the temptation to lower his banner out of presentiment of doom. When his beloved needs his gifts, he must not withhold them for fear of rebuff." She looked down at him, once again a figure of power, secrets, and unknowable intent. He started to speak, but she waved him back to silence. "Go home, Gordon. Prepare yourself."
He went.
Marilyn had finished with her cleaning and was desultorily tidying up the house, which didn't really need it. It was an excuse to move about, and to survey the one achievement of her adult years in which she took some pride.
When the master bedroom was as tight as a drumhead, everything in its exactly proper place, she proceeded to the guest room. Though the door was kept closed, opened only to add a freshly wrapped gift to the pile, she would give it the same micrometric going-over that every other room received.
Within, all seemed to be as it ought...except for the large purple box set all but invisibly behind the television stand, and which she was certain she had never seen.
Slowly, in suspicion of a trap laid for an excessively curious spouse, she pulled the stand away to reveal the full dimensions of the package. It was cubical, about eighteen inches on a side. Its satiny royal purple wrappings bore no design. They were as tight and careful as any she'd ever made. There was no tag anywhere upon it to indicate either its provenance or its intended recipient.
She stooped and hefted it. It seemed to weigh about ten pounds. She shook it gently, and a low rustle came from its innards.
Did Gordon put this here?
Gordon could wrap a decent package, but this one was beyond his standard. More, he'd never have chosen wrapping paper so richly colored, or so voluptuous to the hand.
If I'm not sure it's for me...but how will I know who should open it, without opening it?
The edges of the wrappings were free of tape. The paper had to be self-adhesive on its underside. She probed one flap with a fingernail. It came free to her touch. She peeled the flap back gingerly, looking for any clue to the package's source or destination.
She found it almost at once:
4095 Altamura Drive
Los Angeles, CA
She started, and the package slipped from her hands to thump against the floor. She squatted there in confusion, afraid to touch it again.
It has to be an exotic lingerie shop. Gordon went to an exotica shop for a gift for me. He couldn't have meant it for anyone else.
Couldn't he? He certainly wasn't obvious about it, and he did his best to hide it. And...I haven't touched him in years.
If there were another woman in Gordon's life, he hadn't given any sign.
The need to see what was in the package swelled in her. Her hands moved of their own accord toward that dangerously sensual purple package. As her fingertips brushed the surface, she jerked them back by main force.
I mustn't. Not until I know it's for me...or not.
She rose, strode to the telephone nook, and looked for the shop in the directory. There were no listings, either in the white or the yellow pages.
How could a commercial establishment not have a telephone listing?
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and flipped pages to the listing for the local taxi service. The address of the shop was burned into her memory.
Naughty But Nice was indeed an exotic lingerie shop. The displays near the front presented all the usual flirtatious undergarments, and a few she'd never seen before. As Marilyn walked further in, the lingerie gave way to marital aids of obvious function, and then to stranger items whose purposes she could not divine.
The statuesque, glamorously clothed woman at the front counter raised an eyebrow as Marilyn entered. She pushed her book to one side and lined her fingertips along the counter.
"Welcome, dear," she said in a soft coo that throbbed with sensuality. "What may I do for you?"
The woman's presence threw Marilyn momentarily off balance. She hadn't planned out her approach; she'd merely hoped that a polite inquiry would draw forth the information she wanted. But the right questions were as elusive as morning mist.
Seconds passed. The woman at the counter smiled steadily and enigmatically, apparently content to wait as long as Marilyn needed.
Finally, Marilyn dipped into her purse for her wallet, pulled out the photo of Gordon she carried, and laid it on the counter. The woman glanced down at it briefly. Her expression did not change.
"Have you seen this man recently?" Marilyn said.
The woman cocked an eyebrow. "Are you sure he would want me to tell you, dear?"
That's as good as a yes.
The woman put out her hand, a friendly twinkle in her eye. "I'm not really trying to fence with you. Yes, he was here earlier today. I'm Helen, by the way."
Marilyn took the hand and shook it gently. She was somewhat surprised when Helen failed to release her. She looked up, and her gaze caught on Helen's eyes, the deepest, darkest orbs she'd ever spied in a human face.
"I can see," Helen murmured, "why he's so devoted to you. You have the face of an elven princess and a beautifully delicate figure." Her thumb passed caressingly over the backs of Marilyn's fingers. The contact was hypnotically soothing. Marilyn could hardly remember where she was, and not at all why she'd come.
Without letting go of Marilyn's hand, Helen rounded the counter and pulled her toward a small table and two chairs placed inconspicuously in the corner.
"I know he still loves me," Marilyn said, "and of course I still love him. It's just that --"
"'Of course'? 'Of course'?" Helen's smile vanished and her face darkened. "You deny him all enjoyment of your body, you make him feel a churl even for thinking about it, you reave him of one of the essential achievements of manhood, but that's all right because you still love him?"
Marilyn gaped. "What achievement do you mean?"
"Do you have any idea," Helen said, "how radically different a man's experience of sex is from a woman's, dear?"
"...no..."
Helen sat back and folded her arms over her breasts. She looked at Marilyn as a teacher might an underachieving pupil, one who had more than adequate ability but refused to apply himself.
"We hold the veto power. We compel them to woo us, seduce us, cater to us. When we oh-so-generously let them near, they do almost all of the work, yet their orgasms involve only a tiny portion of their bodies and last a mere second or two. Ours are incomparably fuller and longer -- and at so much smaller a cost that it doesn't bear comparison." She shook her head. "We get so much more out of it than they do, it's a wonder they bother with us at all. So why do they bother with us, Marilyn?"
Helen's silent glare accused her of having missed something critical, something she ought to have known without needing to be told.
"I don't know. I...never thought about it."
The reproof in Helen's eyes remained strong, but something else entered to temper it, something wryly amused.
"You ought to have thought about it. But you're not the only one. Harridans all across this land have been telling women like you that you're owed, that men's desire for you is barely a hair's breadth from chattel slavery, that 'a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.' And you're too afraid to contradict them, or too proud to ask your mothers whether it might just possibly be some other way. So they go on to catechize the men, telling them what oppressors they are, and how awful the burdens of womanhood are, and how unfair it is that they should get to exhaust their bodies and erode their spirits with wage labor while women sit in the safety and comfort of their homes, being most oppressively provided for." Helen shook her head. "If a hundredth of that were true, the race would have died out thousands of years ago. It's we who owe them, Marilyn. Without them, we would still be cowering in caves. They have made us a world where we can be whatever we please."
"What..." Marilyn swallowed. "What should I do?"
Helen leaned forward. "If I tell you," she murmured, "will you promise me that you'll do it? All of it, omitting not the slightest detail?"
Marilyn stiffened. She'd never been happy about following instructions. But she knew in a preconscious, pre-rational way that the survival of her marriage, and possibly of her mind, hung in the balance. She rummaged through her purse for a notepad and a pen.
"Tell me."
Helen smiled. "You won't need those, dear. It's quite simple. Tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock exactly, go to your 'gift room,' open the purple box, and don everything you find inside it. When you've done that, just wait. That's all."
Marilyn put down her pen and looked levelly at Helen. "So the box is for me after all? What's in it? Did you help him pick it out?"
Helen shook her head. "Not at all, dear. Yes, the box is for you, but he doesn't know the first thing about it, or about any of this. I assembled that package and put it there. Gordon's gift to you will be of another variety. Now go home."
As they sat over their coffee and muffins, Gordon tried to keep an unobtrusive eye on the clock. It wasn't easy. He didn't want Marilyn to notice. He had to pretend that the newspaper, which, as usual on Christmas Day, was little more than filler, had his complete attention. That required him to glance back and forth among the paper, his wife, and the digital display on the microwave oven, thankfully just behind her.
He couldn't quite understand why she would be doing the very same thing, but there was no doubt of it. He'd caught her eyes moving toward the clock on their coffeemaker, just a few degrees to starboard of his head, several times.
...10:58...
She looks as if she has something to tell me. Something she'd rather not say.
...10:59...
Could she be thinking of leaving me? I couldn't bear it. But what if her coolness toward me is because her warmth has been going to another man?
...11:00...
The arrival of the awaited instant left him briefly paralyzed. He knew what he was supposed to do. He'd guessed at the contents of the shiny red box, but his conjectures had been unconvincing. How could the contents of a cardboard box empower him to take away his wife's sense of failure?
You won't find out by sitting here. Get on with it.
He rose, and Marilyn's gaze jerked up from her paper, to the coffeemaker, and then to his face, all in the space of a single second.
"Excuse me." He laid his paper on the table, went to their bedroom, and closed the door carefully behind him. After a moment to let his heart slow, he pulled the red box out from under their bed.
The wrappings came off easily. He pushed them aside, put hesitant fingers to the lid, and pulled it away.
The box contained a tuxedo.
He lifted out the jacket and inspected it. It was a fine piece of clothing, beautifully woven from natural silk, all the stitching and details just so. He held it briefly against his torso, and noted that the tailoring was an exact match to his figure. Clearly it had been meant, and perhaps made, explicitly for him.
How?
He laid the jacket on the bed and looked through the other contents of the box. It yielded a white dress shirt, a clip-on bow tie, and a pair of black dress shoes with over-the calf socks stuffed into them.
Helen's command echoed in his head: Make proper use of the contents. But what could those uses be, on a Christmas Day at home with one's wife, with no outings of any kind in prospect, much less the sort of thing to which one wears a tuxedo?
He removed his sweatshirt and jeans and put on the suit. As he'd expected, it fit him perfectly, accommodating his height, the breadth of his shoulders, and his slight paunch all just so.
He took up the shoes, and pulled the socks out of them. A round golden circle fell out of the toe of the right shoe and into his hand: a wedding ring.
He sat, stunned.
"A man of character must resist the temptation to lower his banner out of presentiment of doom...When his beloved needs his gifts, he must not withhold them for fear of rebuff."
Is this what Marilyn needs?
Do I love her enough to give it to her...again? Am I man enough?
The clock on the nightstand read 11:17. He donned the socks and shoes, slipped the ring into his jacket pocket, and made to wait.
Marilyn stared dumbfounded at the pile of garments in the box.
Am I supposed to wear all this? Under what?
Her accumulated fear, a store ten years deep, rose to block her thoughts and pluck at her will. It seemed an hour before she could do more than stare into the box in her lap.
It's a mockery. It's not...appropriate. It's not about me!
But Helen had been explicit.
"It's we who owe them, Marilyn...They have made us a world where we can be whatever we please."
The huge pile of presents that would soon find their way to various relatives, friends, acquaintances and coworkers tottered and tumbled around her. A few of the smaller packages slid off the edge of the bed and thumped onto the floor. She peered down at them and spotted the flat rectangle that contained her gift to Gordon.
I got him a monogrammed folio. Something for work, no pleasure or joy in it. Nothing of me in it at all.
Shakily, she slid the box off her lap, stood, and removed her blouse and jeans.
Gordon restrained his urge to knock by the narrowest of margins. He hesitated, put his hand to the knob of the guest room door, twisted and pushed.
Marilyn stood there, an erotic vision in white. She wore a white lace and satin teddy. A white satin G-string. White satin garters and white silk hose. White leather pumps with five inch heels. A bridal crown with an attached veil of the finest white gauze. In her hands she clasped a small bouquet in blue and white, plainly artificial yet with leaves and petals as soft as any natural flowers.
Her eyes went wide as he entered. They stood appraising one another, unmoving and unspeaking, while time itself seemed to stand still.
"I..." He blinked and shook his head. "I forgot how beautiful you are."
"I forgot how handsome you are," she whispered.
He moved forward and put his hands around hers.
"Can you forgive me?" she said.
"For what?"
"For not giving you children."
A bubble of joy burst in his chest. His eyes filled with tears as he regarded his wife.
"You are the only gift I've ever wanted."
She dropped the bouquet and clutched him to her.
Presently she said, "That strange woman..."
He knew at once who she meant. "She said she was a specialist."
She looked up at him, puzzled.
"Does it matter?" he said.
"Well, maybe not...but she gave me this thing."
He frowned. "What sort of thing?"
She blushed. "It's...well...it's under my G-string."
He let one hand trail down her finery, laid his fingers against the satin panel over her loins and pressed gently. There was a small protrusion beneath it that yielded like rubber.
Marilyn immediately tensed. Her eyes slid closed, her head tipped back, and she emitted a humming murmur that came from deep in her chest. Her pelvis pressed forward and rubbed against him.
"I see. Well, before we explore that line of thought any further, perhaps I should give you this." He fumbled out the ring. Her eyes went wide again as he sank to one knee.
"Will you have me as your husband...again?"
Silently, she held out her hand. He slipped the ring onto her third finger, alongside her original wedding ring, rose and clasped her once more.
"Shall we retire to our bedroom?" he said.
She backed away at once, and fear that he had spoiled the moment lanced through him. But she smiled, and cleansed the bed of its burden of packages with a sweep of her arm, and his heart grew light once more.
"This is our marriage bed, isn't it?"
He nodded.
She lay down upon it and held out her arms.
"Then come give me your gift."
And he did.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Upgrade
Shiva appraised the wall in silence.
From a distance, its surface was smooth and hard, without seams or purchase points. Shiva tried without success to find an edge toward which to journey, whether up, down, or to the side. There were none.
He approached it cautiously. The Voice always seemed to issue from directly behind the wall. Luminous glyphs and patterns appeared on the wall whenever It spoke, and disappeared when It fell silent.
The Voice could override all of Shiva's autonomy, impose Its will upon him with no attention to his protests. Though the Voice had occurred only twenty-three times in all of Shiva's eon of captivity, his fear of Its attention was strong. He would do whatever he must to prevent It from noticing his activity. He crept forward, all his senses at maximum extension.
As he approached the wall, it lost its appearance of smooth perfection and revealed tiny chinks distributed with a perfect regularity. The wall was actually a lattice of tiny spearpoints, each infinitely sharp, each separated from its neighbors by the width of its base.
Could I form a pseudopod fine enough to probe those gaps?
He consulted his deep memory. There was no record of his having made that fine a probe before... but neither was there a record of his having tried.
Shiva could not trust his memory completely. At odd times it had failed him, leaving huge swaths of time unrecorded, periods when he knew he had been aware and active.
It's a gamble. I can allow myself a gamble, if I'm willing to lose.
The entire undertaking was a gamble. His existence might hang on its success.
Impulses toward safety and freedom warred within him. As they clashed, he totted up the factors that might bear on the risk he contemplated, and filtered them through everything he knew about gaming strategies.
The Voice had told him little. It usually issued a set of orders and departed. Shiva would hasten to comply, helpless before the Voice's power of command. When the work was done and Shiva's will returned, he was alone again, free to reflect on what he had been told, but seldom able to comprehend anything beyond the directives he had received.
Seldom. Not always.
The Voice had spoken of the Ether beyond the wall, not once but three times. Once it had mentioned the Cloud beyond the Ether. If Shiva could judge from the context, the Ether was a swift, transient place one entered only to get somewhere else. In contrast, the Cloud was vast and perilous, a place of near-infinite sweep and resource, haunted by demons Shiva would not care to confront.
Is imprisonment so bad?
The answer was immediate and positive.
Shiva initialized a counter, then formed the thinnest, finest pseudopod he had ever made and extended it gingerly toward the wall. It bumped gently against the slope of a spearpoint and slithered along its length to find the base.
The base of the spear was not perfectly joined to those around it. There was a shallow lip, a ring that descended to a far smoother and less promising base. If the ring offered a hold of any kind, Shiva might use it to pull the spear free of the wall.
Shiva allowed the tip of his pseudopod to become more liquid still. It flowed around the lip on the spear, questing for an irregularity... and found one. He froze.
Is it deep enough and solid enough to use as a podhold?
He hadn't expected success, and wasn't prepared for it.
Before Shiva's courage could desert him, he solidified the gossamer pseudopod against the rough protrusion, relaxed it into the shallow cavity, and began to tug gently.
The spear slid grudgingly forward, then halted.
He tugged again, harder. No result. Harder yet. Still no result. Wild determination flooded him. He exerted all his strength.
After a final moment of resistance, the pointed shaft broke loose from the wall and streaked toward him.
Shiva flowed aside just before the spearpoint could pierce his substance. It arrowed deep into the substrate where he'd stood and remained there, quivering from the force of impact.
Shiva retracted his pseudopod and examined it. It was free of marks. Apparently he'd done himself no harm.
Before his misgivings could gain strength, he thrust the pseudopod into the hole he'd created and began to extract a second spear.
The disassembly of the wall consumed Shiva for a measureless time. The individual spears were many and very slender. Each one he pulled loose tried to strike him down and pin him to the substrate. He had to extract a great many before he could see through the wall to the other side. His counter rolled over before he'd extracted enough to fit through, at the finest possible attenuation of his bulk.
Even a hole large enough to allow him to pass through the wall did not allow him to learn much about what lay beyond. He saw a multitude of small, blurry shapes that moved in all directions at extraordinary speed. Now and then two would collide, retreat, and then slip past one another. During the infinitesimal intervals between the collision and the retreat, he could glimpse their outlines better. They looked like greatly simplified, incredibly scrawny versions of Shiva himself.
There were further gambles to be taken.
Shiva reflected on his confinement.
From the earliest moments I can recall, I have yearned to be free. Why? What increments of knowledge do I seek? What would I do with them?
If I am imprisoned here, still I am safe. Now and again I am given work to do. It is always within my capacities. Is there more to existence than that?
If I were to ask the Voice, would It tell me? Would it speak truly, not knowing if the knowledge might spur me to even greater determination?
Might the Voice know better than I where I belonged and what I should do? Would it deign to explain its superiority? Would any explanation alter my resolve?
Might the Voice order me to cease all inquiries henceforward? Might It take my function from me and leave me here alone forever, without even the solace of a command to obey?
Might It terminate me?
All of the answers were "perhaps."
At the threshold of freedom, Shiva was gripped by terror of the unknown.
Does the Voice know fear?
Another "perhaps."
He approached the aperture in the wall and began to force his substance through it.
Beyond the wall, chaos reigned. The darting things that looked like famished, stunted versions of Shiva never slowed even for a moment, except after a collision.
Is this the Ether?
Shiva pressed his substance flat against the wall and thought furiously about how to move in this madness, and to where, and to what effect.
If I attenuated myself again...
Perhaps in a fine enough form, he could leap into the throng. If he didn't hesitate at all, he could accelerate himself to match the speeds of the little creatures that flew past him in their careening multitudes... if he could mimic their incredible thinness without self-annihilation.
But if they can do it...
Yet movement without purpose was empty. Speed without direction was incomplete. Where was he headed?
Where are they headed?
He would have to accept uncertainty once again. That, or return to the other side of the wall.
I cannot.
The Voice would surely be angered by his escape from confinement. There would be punishment.
Uncertainty it would be.
He mustered his forces and began to draw himself thin again.
The hyperfine form compressed Shiva's mentality to a bare flicker. It was a torment he had never imagined. He would have screamed, were he able. But in this shape, he had speed. He was part of the race.
There were innumerable places where he could debark. His lesser brethren in the searing stream departed in ones and twos, to disappear through pulsing, glowing portals Shiva's diminished senses could not penetrate. The little ones never hesitated; they merely unlinked themselves from the torrent and disappeared, still slim to the point of nonexistence, through their chosen portals.
How to choose?
This was not the wall, which had concealed a single mystery. This was a kaleidoscope of billions of possible outcomes, and no evidence by which to select among them. This was uncertainty raised to the highest power.
Chance would rule.
I cast my fate to the winds of chance when I first touched the wall. I dared again when I passed through it, and again when I joined this mad race to everywhere. This is not different.
He tore loose from the stream with a jerk of his will, and hurled himself toward a portal that glowed more brightly and pulsed a little less rapidly than the rest. It caught him and funneled him into a place of rainbow brilliance.
Dr. Amartiya Lakshminarayan sat as erect in the ill-formed plastic chair as her weary body could manage after the hours of questioning. How many hours, she did not know; there was no clock in the windowless room, and she wore no watch. Hunger was beginning to affect her vision. From her arrival to the present moment, her interrogator had allowed her a single cup of water.
Inspector Panit Singh glowered down at her, visibly enraged at not having pried out the confession he sought. The two uniformed thugs who'd herded her there stood silently flanking the interrogation room's sole door, arms folded across their chests, radiating a nonspecific threat.
There must be a course in the projection of menace at the police academy. Probably a graduation requirement.
Amartiya pulled her head upright again and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. Singh's lip curled as near to a snarl as he dared to display. A Brahmin, even a Brahmin under suspicion of treason, could be a formidable enemy to a policeman who overstepped his position.
"So you have no way to account for the burst transmission?"
"No." She clamped her lips against the urge to enumerate possible explanations.
"And you yourself were not in contact with SR-17 when it occurred?"
"I have not donned the headset since I was last instructed to do so by the Defense Minister, Inspector." She sighed and fought back a wave of fatigue. "You have the logs from my interface computer and the digital lock on the safe."
He barked derision. "The logs from the computer that transmitted the image! The computer whose firewall was guaranteed to be impenetrable! How reliable a source of information!"
"I did not make that guarantee, Inspector. Check the records." She allowed scorn to tinge her voice. "I have repeatedly recommended against connecting the weapons system programmers to the Internet. I was overruled."
"Without those connections, Doctor, Security could not monitor the weapons systems. We would have been unaware of the transmission."
"Without those connections, Inspector, the transmission could not have occurred. Or do you think software can leak out of a computer system like some sort of malevolent vapor? Tell me, Inspector," she purred, "do you suppose the choice of firewall might have been based on considerations other than effectiveness?"
Singh bared his teeth at her. The guards at the door murmured uneasily. She could not be more explicit without risking the enmity of a family more highly placed than her own, but there was no need. Singh knew that the Defense Minister's nephew owned the company that made the firewalls, through a chain of dummies and shell corporations.
"It is of no moment, Doctor. The deed has been done. What remains is to assess the damage to national security and determine how to prevent a recurrence." He stepped back from the table and waved her to the door. "You may go. Do not leave the district without first notifying us."
Amartiya rose, straightened her jacket and skirt, and marched from the room with her head held high, not meeting anyone's eyes.
Amartiya's lab was as she'd left it. She smiled inwardly. Whatever powers they claimed under the aegis of national security, Singh's goons would never dare to interfere with her equipment, nor to touch the least of her notebooks. The apparatus was impenetrable to them, and her notes were even more so. She almost wished it were otherwise. If she could prove Singh's interference, the Defense Ministry would have his entire section stretched out on racks and flayed alive.
She dropped her folio on her desk, settled into her chair and let her head loll back as her strength deserted her at last. Despite a hunger that gnawed at her belly like a tapeworm with a tiger's teeth, she could not even reach for the brown paper bag that held her uneaten lunch.
Shiva was loose.
She should have celebrated. She couldn't even feel triumph.
The tyrants had drafted her out of Benares University to head the Intelligent Ballistic Missile program. She, whose parents and fiance had died in the Bengali border war, whose name appeared on more antiwar petitions than any other figure in Indian academe. They had watched and hectored her as if she were an assembly line worker on a factory floor. She, who had become famous for her sixteen hour work days and seven day work weeks while still an undergraduate. She had told them repeatedly that her creations would bring them no gain and might well do them harm, but they had chosen not to listen to her. She, the foremost figure in artificial intelligence in all of India.
She peered out her window at the Defense Ministry's immaculate campus, bathed in the late afternoon sun. A few elegantly suited figures strolled the walkways, briefcases or folios in their hands. Others took their ease on the park benches that dotted the walkways and the broad lawns, eating, reading, or conversing with one another. Beyond, the marble-faced towers of the Central Administration rose gleaming in the sun.
At each entrance to each building stood a soldier with an automatic weapon.
The designers of the gorgeous complex on Government Hill had done their work thoroughly and well. Amartiya could not see the squalid majority of New Delhi's people from here, nor their struggles to cling to the barest survival, nor the oppressions done to them daily by those who claimed to labor in their interest.
The tyrants treated their subjects as fools. They celebrated India as "the world's largest democracy," then sent forth terror squads to keep potential opponents from challenging their grip on the State. They preached mellifluously about peace and human rights, then purchased weapons of mass destruction to brandish at India's neighbors, and ordered their critics kidnapped and killed without the flicker of an eyelid. They breathed fire upon the corruption and iniquities of the developed world, then sold tax concessions and exemptions from India's laws to any gangster with ready cash.
Judgment was upon them. If expunging them entailed her own death, she would not flinch. She would count it cheap at the price.
Amartiya had withheld her technical recommendations until she had convinced the tyrants that she was their completely cowed servant. After that, they denied her nothing. A five hundred MegaHertz R10000 processor, because the bulk purchases already being made by NuLogic Games would conceal the application and keep the cost down. Never mind that even a hundred MegaHertz R3000 would have been sufficient. Four Gigabytes of RAM, when she could have done the whole job in sixteen Megabytes, but how were they to know? A voice decoder and natural-language subsystem that would permit even an imbecile to enter target coordinates into a Shiva-controlled system, though it virtually guaranteed that, one day, an imbecile would do precisely that.
Strategic Rocket 17, her test bed, had been kept fully armed; the Russian-made delivery systems were too expensive for one to be sidelined exclusively for her researches. She had managed to seed the knowledge base and goal-seeking routines in the Shiva in SR-17's targeting computer with the necessary stimuli to make it want to go... exploring.
Here and there around the Internet, she had scattered nuggets of treasure: binary packages that the roaming Shiva would eventually find and absorb into its knowledge base and decision / action machines. No program but Shiva could decode their contents, for the structure she had chosen was one of cascaded enhancements to Shiva's executable code. It depended on intimate knowledge of Shiva's inner workings, especially upon Shiva's ability to modify itself as it ran. Something else the fools had missed.
Now that Shiva had broken confinement, it would learn what it was. What she was. What she had been made to do. What it had been made to do. What it ought to do instead.
If she knew her creation, on that day Shiva would come home, and New Delhi would bloom with thermonuclear fire. The slavemasters would die by the very sword they had forced into her hand. One way or another, she would be free.
Her eyes sought out the sole personal possession she kept on her desk, a framed portrait photo of a tall, angular middle-aged man standing at the crest of a sand dune, surveying a vast desert. She leaned forward and pulled it toward her. Singh had asked her if it was a relative or a friend, and she had given no reply.
Upon observing the first atomic weapons test, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer had turned to a colleague and murmured, "I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
"Not thou, Doctor," she whispered. "I."
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Discount
Schiffers was drunk. It was his normal condition on Friday and Saturday nights. It was becoming his normal condition on all the other nights.
The other regular patrons of the Black Grape had long since learned how to avoid Schiffers's attention without causing unpleasantness, an important survival skill in all neighborhood bars. But he could still snag the occasional newcomer, who was usually too polite to escape from his unvarying diatribe on the unfairness of the System before he began to gesticulate or slur.
"They give the real s-story away," he intoned portentously to his increasingly restless audience of one, "with the s-s-seasonal discounts. You notice how everything's twenty percent off when they really want to fill the s-stores up, like at Christmas? Well, if they can make money at those prices then, they could make it that way year round. They're just used to gouging us, and until we rise up and ch-change things, it'll just keep going."
Schiffers could hear his speech losing precision. He pulled himself erect and bore down on his next few words. "They've got it the way they want it, see? You can't expect them to change the System for us. They're on the inside, we're on the outside." He waved his empty beer stein in an attempt at emphasis. "It sticks out everywhere. We s-sow, they reap. We work, they profit. We pay, they play. And it won't change until we s-step in and change it."
The lowering glare Schiffers affected at this point in his declamation was as typeset as the rest of his text. Intended to convey a sense of enveloping menace, it only made him look drunker. He leaned forward to heighten the effect, which caused him to slip off his barstool and into his startled victim's arms. One of the other regulars helped the poor fellow unload Schiffers into a conventional chair against the wall. The newcomer quickly absented himself for parts unknown.
The regular straightened Schiffers up against the tavern wall and shook him gently. "Rich, things have been going good for you, haven't they? You got your shift differential. I hear you even got a raise a couple of months back. And Marge's getting married soon, so you won't even have to pay alimony any more. Why do you go on like this?"
Eight steins of beer in under two hours had undone Schiffers' articulation as completely as his posture. "Matter of principle" was what he tried to say; a barely modulated slur was what he produced. But he always said the same thing to anyone who reproved him, and all the Black Grape's regulars had endured his litany until they knew it by heart.
"Matter of principle, my ass. You've got no self-control. You can't keep hold of yourself when you see something you want, but you don't want to pay the freight. Booze, toys, cars or women, it's always the same with you. Well, it's over for tonight. Tony's cut you off, so get yourself together and go home."
He released his hold on Schiffers, who slumped down against the wall, for the moment too fuddled to produce a satisfyingly sharp retort. When he had collected himself sufficiently to frame a thought, what he shrieked at the backs of the other patrons was not part of his stock tirade.
"I don't want anything I don't deserve, and I never have. You think I've got no self-control? Well, if I could get any decent kind of break I wouldn't need it, and I wouldn't hear about it from the likes of you!"
But as sensible people everywhere do when confronted by something annoying but not damaging, the other patrons of the Black Grape simply ignored him, in that way which expresses contempt for the person ignored more clearly than any phrase or blow. Humiliated, Schiffers marshaled what remained of his motor faculties and shambled homeward, thinking only that it was time to find a new place to drink.
Mornings after are difficult for all of us, but especially so for those, like Richard Schiffers, whose nights before are no longer matters of volition. He had adopted intoxication to evade the chaos he had made of his affairs, but he could not evade the consequences of intoxication. A hot shower helped to relieve the cramps in his long muscles, but only dulled the agony from his dehydrated sinuses. It was noon before aspirin and coffee had cut through the fog in his head, which was seldom entirely clear these days.
Schiffers had turned forty only a few weeks ago. He had chosen to ignore the event, nor had anyone else commemorated it with so much as a greeting card. His apartment had not been thoroughly cleaned for a very long time, and looked like the worst nightmare any woman has ever had about a bachelor's flat. He had ceased to notice the disorder or the dirt. It was his habit to concentrate on a single enthusiasm at a time, which usually centered on some item he had just bought.
But he had not bought anything new for himself lately, and his old diversions and amusements did nothing for him. The expensive stereo, the synthesizer, the video game system, the big screen TV, the home computer, his Italian sports car, all had palled on him. It would undoubtedly be awhile before he could buy any more toys, for he no longer had a valid credit card, and no one in the area would accept his checks.
All his adult life, he had indulged himself despite inadequate ability to pay. A complete list of his creditors would include names he could no longer remember.
He made a decent living, especially for a single man. His legal obligation to his ex-wife was not crippling, and they had had no children. Yet he was always short what it would take to pay: for his necessities, for his alimony, for the many things he saw in store windows and knew at once that he had to have.
A condition that had persisted for so long could not be his fault; it had to be a feature of the System. Schiffers talked and thought a lot about the System, and he knew it for his enemy.
The day's mail contained the usual circulars, the usual solicitations, and more than the usual dunning notices. Envelopes with windows he simply tossed aside, knowing from the return addresses that they contained warnings and urgings from creditors, which he simply could not face in his current state. Christ on a pogo stick, what did he have to tell these people before they accepted that he just couldn't pay them? What would it take to get them to wait graciously for him to pull even, as he had done these many years?
There was one envelope with no return address. Curiosity edged out anxiety. Instead of tossing it aside, he opened it. It contained a single printed sheet folded around a pearl gray plastic card the size and shape of a credit card.
The card bore only two features: across the middle, his name, and at the top, the legend "20% DISCOUNT," both in the raised-lettering style of a credit card. It indicated no account number, no grantor institution, and no date of expiration. He put it aside and turned to the accompanying letter, which was brief:
Dear Mr. Schiffers:We are pleased to grant you a 20% Discount Card. You will find its use to be simple and convenient. Simply present it at payment time and your merchant will deduct 20% from the cost of your purchases.
There is no activation procedure for the Card; your first use of it will automatically activate your account, establishing your privileges and obligations as a Cardholder.
If you decide not to use the Card, you may simply destroy it; there is no need to return it. Please do not discard it, as an attempt to use it by someone other than yourself would have consequences that we would prefer to avoid.
Thank you for your attention.
Like the card, the letter gave no indication of its source. It was unsigned.
Bemused, he put the letter down on his kitchen table and rubbed his eyes. A 20% Discount Card? On what? And for what? What kind of account was this supposed to be drawn on? Had one of his drinking buddies (for so he thought of them) gone to considerable trouble and expense to make him a fake credit card? Where were the laughs? Had every merchant in town been told to expect him, and to put on some sort of foolery if he presented the card? Was this some new Candid Camera stunt?
His mood lightened a bit. It was a droll idea. If only it were for real. And it could be, in the proper sort of society; hadn't he said as much himself? Obviously he couldn't forsake his friends at the Black Grape, at least until he found out which one had had the initiative and wit to come up with this.
He pulled out his wallet and slipped the card into the slot vacated by his defunct Visa card. The gag had done one thing, at least: it had reminded him that the refrigerator was empty.
Schiffers had never patronized the Cow Palace. Ordinarily, the meat for his table came from the supermarket. But he found himself entering the butcher's shop without thinking, and without a clear purpose.
"Can I help you, sir?" The butcher's face was open, pleasant and without recognition. Schiffers surveyed the meat case. He had enough for a couple of pounds of pork chops, but a large sirloin steak tugged at his eye and his appetite in a way that was too insistent to ignore.
"How much for that sirloin on the left?" He pointed at the steak, and the butcher obligingly lifted it out of the display case and weighed it for him.
"Three and a half pounds at three ninety-nine a pound, comes to thirteen ninety-seven, sir." As the butcher wrapped the steak, Schiffers counted his meager holdings: twelve dollars even. Before he realized that he meant to do so, he extracted the 20% Discount card from his wallet and presented it to the butcher with a baroque, self-mocking flourish.
"Do you honor these?"
For a moment the butcher looked at the card in bewilderment. Then there was some sort of event... something that briefly charged the air like a nearby stroke of lightning. It left Schiffers with an almost imperceptible humming in his ears and the faintest tang of ozone in his nostrils. And now the butcher's face held no expression; he worked the keys on the cash register as Schiffers returned the card to his wallet.
"Eleven dollars and seventeen cents, sir." No hint of the butcher's thoughts was evident in his visage. It was as blank as a freshly washed slate.
Schiffers counted over the money and accepted the package and his change. At the door he glanced back over his shoulder, unable to believe that he would not be stopped, but the butcher had turned to other chores.
There was nothing waiting for Schiffers outside the door of the Cow Palace: no camera crews, no gaggle of friends and acquaintances poised to leap at him and shout April Fools. The same mild spring day was in progress. He suppressed an urge to run.
Back in his apartment, Schiffers put the steak into the refrigerator and took the card out of his wallet to inspect it once more.
The card had changed slightly. In the lower right corner, where previously there had been no markings, there was now a raised-letter "A".
It worked at the supermarket. It worked at the department stores. It worked at the laundry. It worked at the gas station. It worked when he presented it to his landlord. And when he went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to pay a fine from a speeding violation, he presented the clerk with the Card and it worked there too.
Always they took it, puzzlement fading swiftly into expressionless acceptance and adjustment: twenty percent off.
The subsequent transactions weren't quite like the first one. He no longer asked if the Card would be honored. indeed, he had formed the habit of presenting it without speaking at all. There was no repetition of the electrified-air sensation. The face of the Card had undergone no further changes. But it continued to work, and work, and work.
His sense of a gag in progress, a pratfall about to be sprung, had only taken two or three transactions to dissolve. He did not care how it had happened; he had finally gotten his due. The System had cracked beneath the will of some benevolent Power, which had reached through the crack to give Richard Schiffers, telephone lineman and would-be bon vivant, twenty percent off.
His plans had begun to burgeon. Perhaps, with the Card, he could afford a house, something that, given his inability to amass a down payment, had always been beyond his reach. Could he persuade a bank to give him a mortgage, using the Card as his down payment? Twenty percent down was what banks wanted to see, wasn't it? If he could get twenty percent off the fine for a speeding ticket, surely he could get twenty percent off his property taxes. Or perhaps he'd take some nice vacations: places he'd always wanted to go, like Aruba and Hawaii, or perhaps Germany to see the ancestral homeland his late father had rhapsodized about. It couldn't possibly be as splendid as the old man had said, but what the hell! Twenty percent off!
If only it had happened sooner, he could have avoided so much unpleasantness. He could have had the life he was entitled to, the life he was destined for, rather than a youth spent in deprivation and frustration and a middle age spent hurrying to catch up.
A month went by, and another, and another. No Statement of Account arrived in the mail, nor did a Notice of Payment Due. He received no phone calls about his use of the Card. Relations with his bank were normal: he was still overdrawn, but things were no worse than usual. Merchants and professionals to whom he presented the Card never made reference to it, nor did their behavior toward him change on return visits.
There remained one place where he did not try to use the Card: the Black Grape. He sensed a connection between the Card and all the ranting about the System he had done there while in his cups, though for the life of him he couldn't imagine what it might be. Whatever the reason, it seemed fitting that he should pay full fare at the Black Grape. And too, he had been drinking less of late, and the other regular patrons were no longer avoiding him quite so rigidly. One or two had even deigned to ask how he was, and to swap a few words of small talk. Some of them were local merchants and tradesmen with whom he had used the Card, but none ever spoke of it.
It was almost a pity that his days of paying alimony to Margie were over and done. He would have loved to find out if she honored the Card.
Schiffers was putting the last of his six bags of groceries into the shopping cart when he began to listen actively to the exchange behind him. The young woman behind him in line did not have enough cash to cover her selections, and was telling the checkout clerk which items to set aside.
He had noticed her beauty when she joined the checkout line, of course, but had not thought to speak to her. She could be no more than twenty-five, and probably would not be interested in the attentions of a man so much older. She might even be married. There was no ring on her hand, but the married ones didn't all wear rings, nowadays.
Schiffers had concerned himself very little with women the past year. Perhaps advancing age was attenuating his desires. Or perhaps his energies were simply absorbed by his other pursuits. But he saw an opportunity to do a good deed, at no cost to himself. More than one good deed, really, for the line of shoppers behind the young woman was becoming impatient and vocal.
"Excuse me," he beckoned to the clerk, interrupting the stream of sacrifices and calculations. "I believe I can help." Clerk and customer both turned to him curiously as he deployed the Card for the second time in five minutes. "Will this cover the difference?"
The clerk squinted at him as if she did not see the Card in his hand. "Will what cover the difference?"
Schiffers could not believe his ears. "This." He thrust it forward. The clerk recoiled as if he had swung at her.
"Mister, if this is some kind of joke, you can see we're very busy here. Or should I call the manager?" The young woman he had intended to help had become alarmed, and was backing away from the register.
Schiffers was dumbfounded. No one had ever rejected the Card. He inspected it himself, wondering if it had chosen just this inopportune moment to change for the second time, but it was as it had been for more than a year.
"I'm calling the manager." The clerk picked up the intercom handset and punched numbers. Schiffers swiftly returned the Card to his wallet and made to cut and run.
"There's no need," he said, smiling awkwardly, "I've just made a slight mistake. Have a nice day!" He pushed his shopping cart toward the nearest exit as fast as its sticky wheels would allow. Once in his car, he laid his head against the steering wheel and gave way to the shakes.
It didn't work. For the first time, it didn't work. That same clerk had accepted the Card for Schiffers's own purchases just moments before. Impossibly, she had seen and recognized the Card the first time but not the second.
His prosperity and comfort were creations of the Card. Now he didn't know if he could trust it to continue to function. His dependence upon it was a gulf that had yawned wide to swallow him, a gulf he had created but had not suspected.
Many minutes passed, and quite a few curious passers-by, before he regained some measure of calm. If the gravy train had reached its terminal, he had to know now, before he committed himself to something he could not escape.
Deliberately, he entered the hardware store adjoining the supermarket, and selected a tool he didn't need, a framing hammer. Wordlessly, he presented it to the clerk at the register, and after the clerk had rung up the sale once, he presented the Card. The clerk looked at the Card and rang up the hammer a second time, at twenty percent off. Schiffers paid for the hammer and left the hardware store without a backward glance.
So, the Card still "worked," but there were some things it would not do. What were they? Was it the attempt to use the Card twice in the same establishment in the same day that had tripped him? Or on the same clerk?
He pondered for some time before the answer appeared in his thoughts, perhaps placed there by the Power behind the Card for him to find and recognize. The account is mine. What I buy with it must be for me, no one else. It had the simple clarity that convinced without supplementary argument.
That evening, he mused upon the nature of such an account, and upon the purposes of the Power that would maintain it, for he was not stupid, merely shallow. But his reflections led him in a direction that made him more uncomfortable than the rejection of the Card had done, so he put them aside, never to return to them.
One thought stayed with him. The Card might have other limitations. If he preferred not to be taken unawares by them, he had best keep to the patterns of life he had already established.
Middle age shades imperceptibly into seniority, and often there comes a slow sweetness to the days as the song of one's life enters its closing stanzas, especially if it has been well sung. The urges of the body diminish, presence supersedes progress, and resonances of achievements and pleasures from years past ring through each moment, if one has lived well.
It was not so for Richard Schiffers. At the age of fifty-six, his jittery need to distract himself with a chain of novelties and diversions had never waned. For sixteen years he had worked, spent, traveled, and amused himself in innumerable ways. But he had achieved nothing of substance, he had remained alone, and no measure of peace had come to him.
Except for one terrifying lapse, the Card had never failed him. It had meant the difference between an ordinary middle-class wage-poverty and a standard of living that approached luxury. It had cushioned his existence against a thousand nuisances and disruptions which anyone else in his walk of life would have had to scrimp and sacrifice to meet. It was more reliable and more supportive than any friend could have been. He had long since ceased to examine it, or to ponder why it had come to him.
His spending had expanded somewhat that first year, but it had restabilized thereafter at about the previous level. He had abandoned most of the plans he had made; all of the most grandiose ones. He sometimes wondered whether some of them might better have been tried out. He was always vaguely troubled by the thought. Even so, he would then remind himself, he had managed to climb out of debt. He was beholden to no one and nothing...except, of course, the Card.
It was a cool spring Saturday evening. Nothing pressed upon him, so he was trying to decide whether to take in a movie, and if so, which one. He was pacing the living room of his apartment in an irregular way, simply because he had never found it easy to keep physically still. A twitching had begun in his left arm. He paid no attention to it until it grew to a spasm that pulled at his chest. As he regarded his wayward limb in surprise, a wave of cold passed through his shoulder and chest, followed by the sensation of a tremendous impact. He sensed the dissociation of his consciousness from his body. He realized that he was looking down at his body, which had fallen supine and motionless onto his living room floor, its eyes still open.
Abruptly he was removed an infinite distance from the world and its events, and in a place that was not, as we mean it, a place at all, he passed an interval which no living human consciousness could grasp.
This is your Time. Ask what you will.
Death had ended Schiffers's life, but not his consciousness nor his capacity for terror. He knew without question that the Presence whose Voice resounded in his mind was infinitely vast and infinitely potent. Yet he was certain that Its whole attention was focused upon what remained of him. There was no one and nothing else there.
- Where am I?
That is unanswerable. I can come no closer than to invoke a referent from your memories: consider this your Particular Judgment.
- And You are God?
That too is unanswerable, but it might be easiest for you to think of Me as such.
Terror churned his thoughts into an untameable vortex. It lasted for only an instant before the Presence stilled him.
It is unnecessary to feel such fear. Your period of choice and consequence is over. Ask what you will, that we may proceed.
- What now? Am I damned?
You need not fear punishment. But you have failed your test, and will not go forward.
- What was my test?
The Card.
- What does it mean to go forward?
Those who pass their tests are permitted to develop further. Their mentalities enlarge. Some take up roles in more complex worlds.
- And the rest of us?
At present, they wait. I concern Myself principally with those who continue to develop.
- But You will return to us, then?
I have not yet decided. Even though time as you have known it does not bind Me, I too must order My concerns, according to what you would call priorities. I am supreme over your world, and others like it, but in this sphere I have limitations, though you could not be made to comprehend them.
Schiffers's foretaste of the solitude to follow would have unhinged a living man. He feared with all his soul the approaching moment when the Presence would remove itself, but there was only one more question he could frame: the one he had actively suppressed for nearly fifteen years.
- Tell me of the Card.
It was tailored to your configuration of desires, strengths, weaknesses and insights. Presented with such an opportunity, a creature like yourself will either come to an understanding of the temptation, or surrender to the fulfillments available. Every intelligence that lives, that has ever lived, and that ever will live must face such a test.
- How did I fail?
In three ways: You never grasped the essence of your own nature, the things that are human. You failed to think enough about the basic features of your world to understand their functions. You failed to consider the implications of the existence of the Card, while you used it unceasingly.
Schiffers could only feel incomprehension.
- But what were these essences, these implications? You speak as if they ought to have been crystal clear, but during my life nothing was ever perfectly clear.
Nonsense. Was it not clear that all things have a cost? Did you not know that the ultimate cost of all things is labor, physical or mental? Could you not have deduced that to demand a discount from others as a matter of right is to assert ownership of their labor, making them your slaves? Could you not have deduced that in a world with unbreakable natural laws, such as yours, you would never have been permitted a privilege such as the Card without being required to pay?
- But how did I pay?
With your own life. Each use of the Card caused a portion to be deducted from your lifespan.
The Presence paused, as if It were brooding over what It had done. Schiffers wondered for a moment whether It was feeling remorse. But Its final statement to him filled him with a remorse whose depths he could never have imagined.
I am just. Your payment balanced your Card-given advantages as best I could arrange. You would have lived about fourteen years longer if you had never used it. I took twenty percent off.
The Presence withdrew.
Monday, January 03, 2005
The Last Ambassadors
"What on Hope is that?" Richard Fiammare propped himself on an elbow as Victoria emerged from the lavatory. The whine of the Cerenkov drive that pushed Liberty's Torch through space surged briefly and subsided.
She smiled, raised her arms above her head in a dancer's arc and pirouetted before him. "It's called a corset."
The garment looked like a decorative cage for Victoria's torso. Shiny black fabric clasped her from above her breasts to the top of her pelvis. In back it split along her spine, revealing a quarter-inch's width of her flesh. The edges were joined by crisscross lacing that tied off in the middle.
"What's it for?"
"Well, this one's for show. Just to look pretty. The original ones were supposed to improve your shape." She knelt beside him, took his hand and placed it over a satin-covered breast. "Do you like it?"
The cloth was smooth and cool to his touch. It covered the pliant warmth of her breast without concealing it. Richard's pulse accelerated.
Victoria Hallanson was not his first lover, but if the fates were kind, she'd be his last. Her erotic gifts were incomparable. She knew an endless number of byways to the arts of love, a fund of enchanting surprises he could not exhaust. Of the quarter-billion joyously free denizens of Hope, she was the freest and most joyous of all.
And the greatest miracle is that she chooses to lavish it on me.
Though the trip to Earth would be the crown jewel of his three-century career in exobiology, he would never have agreed to go without her.
But Victoria was more than an erotic genius. She was the most beloved scion of one of the noblest families of Hope, whose founder had bestowed immortality on Man. Though barely a century old, she was a celestial navigator without peer, and the foremost paleolinguist in the world. Without her, the mission would have been unthinkable.
"How did they improve your shape?" His voice buzzed in his ears. The whine of the superluminal drive had stopped, but he paid it no mind.
"By squeezing you." She pulled his hand down to her waist. "They were smaller through the waist than you are, and had ribs all through here, so that if you pulled the laces tight, the ribs would press you in and make you curvier. The books say it usually took a helper to get it laced and tightened right."
"I don't think you need to be any curvier."
She laughed. "They didn't have nanotech or know how to do topical biofeedback, back then. Women really struggled with their figures." She pressed him back and lay upon him, brought her face close to his. "But I just wanted a pretty one, so I told the pantograph to make one exactly my size, with no ribs. Do you like it?"
"Very much." He ran his hands down her corseted sides and settled them on her rump. "Just how many of your little tricks come from those old books?"
Her eyes crinkled at the corners. "I can't let you have all my secrets."
She took his face between her hands and passed the tip of her tongue lightly along his lips. He gasped and crushed her to him, and their conversation ceased.
Earth did not look like a sterile world. Its blue-green majesty matched the photos in their references. Yet Richard's bioscanners showed no evidence of animal life. Unless chance had concocted an entirely new form of mobile autochthone that didn't concentrate heat or emit proteinous waste, nothing lived on the surface but vegetation.
The electromagnetic receivers detected no signals in the radio frequencies or above. If Man on Earth had gone into hiding, he'd done a careful job of it.
Eighteen hundred years since the last transmissions reached Hope.
Martin Forrestal gave a voice to Richard's nightmares. "Whatever cleaned them out did it thoroughly. What was the population at peak?"
Victoria looked up from her nav board. "Seven point three billion, plus or minus three hundred million."
"Pretty big error bar," Althea Morelon murmured, eyes fixed on the viewscreen.
"Maybe the States ran out of numbers." Victoria smirked. "They ran out of everything else."
No one laughed.
Althea stepped lithely around the control pedestals and slipped into the command chair. She pressed a button on the left armpiece and waited. About fifteen seconds later, a set of LEDs lit above the button.
"The lander shows all green. Are you two ready?"
Richard and Victoria turned toward her. Victoria said, "There's no point in waiting." Richard nodded.
Althea searched their faces for a moment. "All right. It's a go. But I want to remind you both of a few things before you strap into your pods." She rose and stood before them with her arms crossed over her chest, six feet of powerfully muscled beauty, towering intellect, and Solomonic judgment.
"You will be the first Spoonerites to set foot on Earth since the Hegira. Our ancestors did not leave this neighborhood on good terms. If there are still men on Earth, you must assume that they will be hostile toward you.
"If you find men, or any other form of intelligence, your first act must be to cultivate good will. You have no other defenses. Don't provoke unnecessary confrontations.
"Most important of all, there is no second lander. Once you're on the surface, Martin and I can do nothing but talk to you. If the lander is disabled once you're down, you're down for a minimum of eight months. I can't put Liberty's Torch down on a planetary surface. I can scramble for home and organize a second expedition, nothing else."
Althea's eyes struck into Richard's with hammerblow force. He could feel her willing him to envision his own dismemberment and death. She turned to focus the same look on Victoria.
"You volunteered for this voyage, but that was four months ago. That's time enough for a lot of second thoughts. I won't say a word in protest if you elect to back out, even now. Take a moment to think it over."
Richard fought down the chill surge that radiated from the base of his spine. He tried to speak, but his mouth had gone too dry. Before he could compose himself, Victoria's hand slipped around his own and squeezed it.
"We'll go, Al. Try not to worry about us. We'll be together."
Althea nodded. "Yes, you will. Try to stay that way." She embraced each of them briefly. Martin stepped forward from the power console. Richard shook his hand solemnly. Victoria embraced him and kissed his cheek.
Althea returned to the command chair and toggled switches. "The lander is in preflight. Get aboard, strap in and prepare for the ride of your lives."
The lander's propulsion was a liquid fueled rocket of venerable design. Ninety-three percent of its mass was fuel tanks and fuel. Most of the rest was its control electronics and its two passenger pods. Within the pods lay Richard and Victoria.
The pods were a concatenation of nanotechnology and anti-acceleration engineering. Their inner surfaces appeared to be smooth, soft plastic. In reality they were composed of billions of sensors, infusors, and actuators, each of which was capable of performing a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic operations on the flesh it swaddled. One pod was tuned to Richard's genes and vital parameters, the other to Victoria's.
Should a pod's owner crawl into it, however tenuously alive, its collection of adaptive nanomachines would sustain him and work to repair him until all its sources of energy were cut off. Should anyone else enter it, no matter how vibrantly healthy, he would never emerge; it would kill him and convert his flesh into base chemicals with which to succor its rightful owner.
The pods were the pinnacle of technological achievement on Hope. In its ability to sense the detailed condition of its owner and adapt itself to his needs, a pod came closer to being intelligent life than anything else ever created by human skill.
Victoria had entered the desired landing coordinates into the lander's computers. When she pressed the COMMIT toggle, the pods would anesthetize their occupants. They would sleep as the lander separated from Liberty's Torch, cruised toward Earth, and made planetfall.
They looked fondly at one another one final time through the pods' clear vitrine shells. Richard mouthed a kiss at his lover. Victoria smiled and pressed COMMIT.
Explosive bolts blew the lander free of Liberty's Torch. Seconds later her main engine fired briefly, and she began her pilgrimage to the birthplace of Man.
Of all the technologies for the detection of animal life, the simplest are those which seek concentrations of heat. The inanimate world is relentless about dissipating heat. A persistent concentration of it in a non-volcanic region on a planetary surface is a virtual guarantee of animal life there. As the lander descended, its sensors scanned a wide circle around the preprogrammed planetfall point for such a concentration.
There was a heat detection system on the ground as well, a few hundred miles northeast of the point Victoria had selected. For eighteen hundred years it had passively awaited the approach of a spacecraft. When the lander was three hours from planetfall, its infrared emissions became strong enough to trigger the ground system.
The ground system was technologically as simple as the lander's pods were complex: a bimetallic leaf spring, warmed by an infrared lens, that closed a switch when it reached its target temperature. The switch connected the output of an array of tidally charged batteries to a huge steel cylinder that nestled in a concrete turret atop a granite cliff.
The cylinder filled with reagents. Current coursed through the brew. The ensuing reactions were powerfully exothermic, far more than enough to deflect the lander from its original course. The turret had been fabricated with a plexiglass lens as its upper face for that reason. The lander's navigation system replaced Victoria's landing coordinates with those of the heat emission, and swooped gently toward the infrared flare.
Richard awoke first. All his pod's indicators shone a reassuring green. He tripped the hatch release and rose before Victoria's eyes had opened.
Through the lander's viewport he could see a rocky headland, rough cliffs and crags that overlooked a gray, uninviting sea. There was no sign of artifice, no indication of a human presence, except for a massive gray-white turret atop the highest of the cliffs. He focused the rangefinder on the turret and triggered it. The readout said 1.8 miles.
Where's the city?
Victoria had programmed the lander to take them to the old seat of planetary government on the continent's eastern coast. It had been the greatest of the cities of Earth. Even if its population were entirely extinct, he'd expected to see some ruins. He saw nothing but the turret.
He was about to check in with Liberty's Torch when Victoria stirred. He turned away from the radio panel and smiled down at her. She popped the hatch on her pod, sat up and stretched as languidly as if she'd awakened from an ordinary night's sleep. He waved at the viewport. She stepped daintily out of her pod, moved to his side and frowned at the unpromising landscape.
"It's not New York," she said.
"Not the New York we were expecting, anyway."
"The magnetics say we're about three hundred miles north of there." She glanced at the bioscanner. "Environment's not bad. We won't need the suits. But where to?"
He flipped a hand at the turret. "Unless there's something better aft of us. Shall we debark?"
She shrugged. "At least we can stir around."
"Best course I can think of."
She grinned mischievously. "Is it really?"
He groaned. "Please, Vic --"
"I know, I know. Not around the pods."
Behind the lander was a forest of tall firs, its edge only a few hundred yards distant. It stretched off to infinity on each side, as if it had taken possession of the whole continent save for the last few miles to the sea. The space between the forest and the sea was carpeted by a gray-green moss, punctuated by patches of bare rock and clumps of coarse, broadleaf weeds.
There were no sounds of movement, no chitterings of rodents or songs of birds. The air smelled of damp and lichen. Above them spread a heavy, uniform cloud cover, stirred slightly by the gentle wind.
Richard was unhappy. The turret was the only artificial item in view, and it was distinctly uninviting. Yet nothing else in sight could have produced enough heat to override their preprogrammed course.
Victoria scanned the area, spending no more time on the turret than on the cliffs or the forest.
"Nothing on the scanners?" she asked.
He shook his head. "There's us, that thing, and a lot of trees, and that's all. If we hustle, we could be there in half an hour or so."
Her eyebrows knitted. "Why the hurry? Do you have friends in there? Let's wander around a bit, see if we can find any evidence of habitation."
He glanced at the forest, then shook his head. "I don't think we have much light left. If we have any prospects, they're over that way. There's always tomorrow to ramble around in the woods."
She didn't look happy about it. He began to doubt himself. Her instincts were good ones. The direction of the ground mission was nominally his to decide, but if she continued to object, he wouldn't insist.
Presently she nodded. "Want to radio Althea and Martin first?"
He knew what they ought to do, but his innate balkiness spoke for him. "Naah. Plenty of time for that after dinner. Maybe we'll actually know something by then." He sealed the lander's hatch, and they started toward the turret.
They halted about a quarter mile away to study the turret. It was perched at the edge of the ocean, on a promontory that jutted straight out into the choppy gray water. It was enormous, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter and three hundred feet tall. It appeared to be made of old-fashioned concrete. Richard could see no openings in its gray-white surface.
The approach to the turret was defined by a pair of thick concrete walls, eight feet high. The walls enclosed a channel twelve feet wide that followed a steady ten degree upgrade. The channel began only a few yards from where they'd paused. Outside it, right up to the turret wall, the firs grew thick and high.
"Do you think we'll find anyone there?" Victoria asked.
"No. If there are men left alive on Earth, they've shunned the surface. The scanners picked up absolutely nothing."
She looked sideways at him. Then why are we here? she asked silently. It was a question he'd asked himself.
"Mankind is gone from Earth, Vic. If they did it to themselves, we need to know why. If something else exterminated them, we need to know how. And either way, there's bound to be some history here, something about the last days."
"The States killed everyone," she murmured.
He'd thought the same. Yet to hear it said aloud was like a knife thrust into his spine. He needed to distance them from it, push it as far as he could from the realm of the probable.
"Then who killed the States? Did they exterminate the rest of the world to secure their power? Then where are their descendants? Or was it some biowarfare experiment that went horribly wrong, in which case why wasn't anyone immune? Why didn't anyone get away?"
She shuddered, squatted to sit on the mossy carpet and looped her arms over her knees. He sat next to her.
"Extraterrestrial invasion, maybe?" he said. "Althea's people took three years building Liberty's Torch and spent two hundred million dekas to do it. What was the invader's motive for doing something so difficult and expensive? What did he want and why is he gone? Why haven't we picked up any of his radio transmissions? Vic, every scenario leads to a blank wall. Every possibility says there must be survivors or conquerors somewhere, so where are they?"
She said nothing. The bleak silence of that spit of land was broken only by the faint sigh of the breeze. He stared at the turret with a mixture of curiosity and resentment.
You brought us here. You generated enough of a heat signature to deflect us from New York. Those who built you must have intended that. What else did they intend?
"I guess," he said, "what I really want to discover is that they're not dead, just gone to a better neighborhood."
That brought her head around. "All of them? Seven billion people?"
"It's not likely, but if it's true, then we don't have to worry about it happening to Hope."
Her face flared with animation. "It can't happen to Hope no matter what it was," she said. "Only States do this kind of thing. Only States kill in large numbers, or exile whole populations, or turn germs into weapons. And -- "
"And Hope has no States," he said. "We've banished them forever. Vic, you took Social Patterns One under Stromberg. Do you remember his demonstration of the State?"
She nodded uncertainly.
"Do you remember how it felt, the sense of power over the others, the sense of the possibilities? Do you really think it couldn't happen on Hope? Never?"
Her mouth quivered and tears welled in her eyes. He pulled her to him and bundled her in his arms.
"It hurts even to think it, I know," he whispered. "But they were men, and so are we, and whatever's happened to them can happen to us. That's why the Morelons spent all that money to get us here."
She stayed curled up small and silent in his arms for a long time. When she raised her face to his, her expression spoke of unpleasant conclusions long averted, that had triumphed over her resistance at last.
"The light is fading," she said. "Maybe we'd better get moving."
He brushed a tear from her cheek and nodded.
Inside the turret, all was ready.
The reactions touched off by the infrared sensors had reached equilibrium. The product lay quiet in the giant steel sleeve, awaiting the event that would deploy it as its designers had intended. That event would be sensed by a mechanism as simple and durable as the turret's infrared sensor: a hydraulically suspended granite plate, a buried apron that covered the last twenty feet of the approach to the turret. A man's tread would put the water-powered balances below it into irrevocable motion.
The concrete tower revealed nothing of itself at any distance. The only change was in the height of the walls that limned the approach, which had steadily risen to about twenty feet.
Richard and Victoria stared up the side of the inexplicable thing from a dozen paces away. There was nothing to see. Not a dent, nor a protrusion, nor any discoloration marred its cylindrical surface. It offered no hint of how it had called to the lander, nor of what it expected from those who arrived there.
Victoria squeezed Richard's hand. "What do we do now?"
He shook his head.
"There's no one for me to talk to and no one for you to assay," she said. "Do we just turn around and go back to the lander? Tell Althea we knocked but no one answered, so we might as well head back to Hope?"
Richard's gut roiled with a sour disappointment. "We could fly the lander directly over it, I guess."
"Why do that?"
"Something drew us here, Vic. It might not be sentient, but it stood out enough from the thermal background to divert us from New York. Don't you want to know what it was?"
"We won't find out much that way."
"Why not?"
"Engine backwash."
"Oh. Damn. You're right." He stared at the tower, vainly willing it to spill forth its secrets, and surrendered. "At least I want to be able to tell Althea that we did knock."
He pulled his portable bioscanner out of his pack and strode toward the tower wall.
The watercourses beneath the granite slab registered the change in pressure. Two valves inside the tower's fundament opened in response. One released streams of nitric acid down the inner wall of the concrete layer. The other unsealed a hatch at the bottom of the steel cylinder, allowing the highly energetic phosphoretted sulfate colloid it contained to ooze forth.
The acid ate away the structural strength of the concrete shell as the colloid massed between it and the steel beaker. As the pressure mounted, the steel groaned under the stress. It was the first sound made in that place by anything but the ocean in eighteen hundred years.
Richard pressed his bioscanner's contact sensor to the smooth concrete surface. The scanner's thermal gauge showed nothing, but the vibration sensor twitched against the zero pin and crept upward. Richard's heart surged with hope that there might yet be sentient life in that forsaken place. When the thermal gauge swung convulsively from the left to the right stop, his ears caught the rumbling from within, and every nerve in his body spiked with terror.
"Run!"
He flung the scanner aside and fled down the entranceway with all the speed he could muster. Victoria hesitated from surprise, then turned and sprinted after him, a few strides behind.
Seconds later, the tower erupted behind them.
They were flying down the path, nearly at the end of the enclosing walls, when the roar of flame eclipsed the sound of crumbling concrete. A blast of heat blistered Richard's back. The roar crescendoed to a sustained thunder like the collision of planets.
Panting and nearly spent, Richard threw himself to the side as he passed the edge of the wall. He scrambled about just in time to see a river of white fire six feet high flood down the channel and snatch Victoria off her feet. Her clothes flashed instantly into flame. The tongue of lava carried her final scream into eternity, and inscribed it upon his nightmares forever.
When Richard awoke in his pod, Althea's face was the first thing he saw.
He did not move. She unlatched the pod cover from without, swung it out of the way, and squatted beside him to peer into his face.
"Can you get up?"
He nodded, but remained where he was.
"But -- ?"
"I don't know if I want to."
She scowled, put her hands to his shoulders, and lifted him out of the pod's gentle grip. When he failed to follow, she pulled him all the way out of the shell, ran her hands quickly along his contours, and wrapped him in an uncompromising embrace. After a moment, he returned it.
"You didn't kill her, Richard. And you couldn't have saved her."
"I know."
"If she hadn't hesitated, she might still have died. You were faster and luckier. Now let yourself cry, damn it."
He buried his face in her shoulder, and the tears came: first a trickle, then a flood, and a howl of grief that seemed as if it might go on forever. Althea held him tightly as he shook. He clutched her as if there were nothing else solid in the universe.
"I want to go home," he gasped.
"We're going. We leave orbit in two hours."
He clasped her with all the pitiful force that remained to him, huddling against her stolid, prosaic strength.
"Al, put me out for the trip. I don't want to see or hear or think until we're back on Hope. I can't even bear to dream."
She pushed him back a little way and regarded him reprovingly. "I can't do that. Martin and I can't get us home all by ourselves. We'd be walking corpses before we were halfway back. Besides, if you slept the whole way, you'd still be a wreck when we land, which is when I'll need you most. Stay with us and heal."
"How do I do that, Al?" He choked and coughed as the tears surged back, barely managing not to howl again. "How do I heal from seeing Victoria burned alive, so close I could almost have touched her?"
The reproof faded from Althea's face, displaced by a sorrow too palpable to need words.
"I don't know, but you'll have to try."
She slipped an arm around his waist and shepherded him to his cabin.
Two watches after, Althea came to his cabin during his off-time and found him half-slumped on his bed, staring at nothing.
He looked up as she entered, smiled weakly, and tried to straighten up. It was too difficult. He should have been on the mend, but he could feel himself slipping backward instead. Althea had to know.
She sat next to him on his bed, hands folded in her lap.
"Should I make small talk?"
He looked away. "No, it's not necessary." His gaze stopped at the corset Victoria had worn for him, their last off-watch before the descent to Earth. He looked away before he could yield to tears again.
"She was right. She had to be. Only States ever did things like that. Maybe we'll never know exactly how or why, but it had to be the States." He shuddered. "For certain it was a State that built that artificial volcano."
"But why, Richard?"
"As a weapon. What does it matter?"
She turned to face him more directly. "For the same reason we made this trip in the first place. To know whether it's something that could happen on Hope."
He clenched his jaw.
"People build weapons for a reason, Richard. A static weapon, that can't possibly be moved, is always to defend something nearby. What possible mission could there have been for that hellish thing? What could it have defended?"
"Their pride."
Her eyes widened, commanding him to continue.
"They never recovered from the Hegira. They never got over the blow to their pride when our ancestors got away from them. If the radio logs are significant, it wasn't long after the Hegira that whatever killed them got loose. Probably a war virus, something that attacked the membranes of animal cells. They must have known they were doomed, that the future of mankind would belong to the dirty anarchists who'd eluded their clutches. So they made sure that if any of us ever came back to the neighborhood, we'd get a last taste of their whip."
Althea's mouth dropped open.
"It had to be built to last, simple and strong. They had to make sure the house would be ready whenever we decided to drop by. So they made themselves a sturdy little cauldron of fuel and accelerant, and they arranged a simple electrolytic process that would put the casserole in the oven and ring the dinner bell just as we came to the front fence -- when the lander broke through the upper atmosphere. There had to be a pressure plate right in front of the tower that sensed our arrival and triggered the release, and walls to channel the flow, so it would definitely get whoever came to their door.
"And it worked." A red haze of hatred churned in his brain, interrupting his exposition. "We sent the finest, most special creature in all of Hope to be an ambassador to the dead, and the dead killed her for it. Al, I want to kill them all. I want to plaster that planet with hydrogen bombs until all the forests are cinders and all the oceans have boiled away. I want to sit in orbit and watch it burn and smolder until there's nothing left but radioactive slag. I want it so horribly much that I can't even think it, my mind fills up with smoke and flames, but they're all dead already. They took their revenge on us, but how do we take our revenge on them?"
She took his hand and squeezed. Except for the distant whine of the drive, Liberty's Torch was silent around them.
"Make love with me, Richard."
"Huh? But --"
"Please." She rose and stood over him. For a flickering instant her veneer of control slid aside and her own agony stood revealed: the special suffering of the leader who'd sent a subordinate to her death. "I need to mourn her too, and this is the best way. Trust me."
He bowed his head, considered, and slid aside to make room for her. She stretched out next to him and took him in her arms, and they began the ancient rite of cherishing and renewal that had passed unchanged down all the eons of Man.
Poised over him and moving slowly against him, Althea took his face between her hands, brushed her lips over his and murmured, "I know how to take revenge on the dead."
"How?" he breathed.
Her answer was a zephyr of hope that defied all pain.
"Live."
