New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  What precisely the Folk Field was, Gwent had difficulty in deciding; direct questions yielded the answer that it was a field of people, camped out, but Wulf fought shy of revealing for what purpose. When Gwent asked if there were no cities, Wulf blanched like a maiden and begged him to be silent on that, here on the fells.

  He did gather that they were people of Wulf’s time at the Folk Field.

  ‘There are priests there,’ Wulf admitted. ‘Some think we’re in Hell, and some for lack of pains think we’re in Purgatory, and there’s one, Piers, that denied his faith. There’s no bishop to settle the matter between them.’ He paused. “We may be in Hell, but it’s sinful to despair, so I act as if I weren’t.’

  It was in the late afternoon - according to Wulf - when they saw the running man.

  * * * *

  5

  The Field of Folk spilled out on both sides of the river. Hrunting had seen such gatherings before, and never had the consequences been happy. His first thought was to ease his scramasax in its small scabbard, and to move his money supply to a safer concealment. He wondered whether there were any other Travellers here - and whether, this time, he might escape notice as one himself.

  He was bringing his mind to the purpose of the gathering - of perhaps two or three thousand souls - when he saw a figure detach itself from the collage of tents and huts and screens, coming out across the rich valley land to meet him. He didn’t vary his pace, but rested his hand on the hilt of his scramasax.

  After they had moved for several minutes, he could make out that the figure was in a rough and ready priestly garb. His hand rested on the hilt of the scramasax still: the primary catchment area of this sector was the English Eleventh Century, and he knew it, and its priests, only too well.

  ‘Welcome, brother,’ the priest said. ‘I am Father Piers.’

  Hrunting nodded introducing himself with his new name.

  ‘Are you come to join the Great Venture?’

  Hrunting smiled: it was to be a great theft. ‘I know nothing of it.’

  It was the priest’s turn to smile. ‘It is my profession to dispel ignorance, brother. Our city has refused us access to the Gate. Even the sick and dying ...’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we take what is rightfully ours.’

  ‘And the city?’

  ‘One with Sodom and Gomorrah.’

  * * * *

  6

  Shouting, Wulf scurried off in search of non-existent cover, taking the knife with him. Gwent looked about, as if for help of some kind, but there was no help against the running man. Gwent stood his ground and waited a short eternity while the green clad figure of the running man drew near. This was a fighting man he could see: the green was not clothing, but some kind of armour; it encased him like a knight’s plate armour in the dying days of chivalry, but it in no way impeded him. When he was so close that Gwent could see grey eyes peering out of the green, the runner gracefully extracted with his right hand a glittering gold ceramic sword, and a silver gleaming ceramic misericorde with his left.

  Gwent felt a sudden panic. Was it to be death at this man’s hands for enmities not his, and with so much to learn? No! He stripped off his jacket, and, holding it by the collar, waited. Without change of pace, the running man came at him. Gwent noticed how the armour moved with him, like a second skin. When they were five yards apart, he flung the jacket. As if mechanically, the running man slashed at it, but it tangled on his misericorde, and made him mistime the sword stroke. Gwent’s muscles remembered the long hours spent at combat judo in seedy backrooms, and he caught the arm on the down swing, gripping it with both hands. He swung it up and sideways, kicking himself backwards as he did so. The green runner jerked into the air, out of Gwent’s grip, to crumple on the turf three yards away.

  Gwent had gone back too hard, winded himself. He could vaguely make out the green runner stirring, but his body refused to do anything about it. He’d almost won; he couldn’t give up now. He rolled on to his face, gasping for breath, and pushed himself up on his arms. But it was unnecessary. Wulf stood over his opponent, brandishing his own knife. The green runner made an ineffectual one-armed grab - the other arm was broken - at the servant, for both his weapons had spun beyond his reach, but Wulf was quick. He jumped out of reach, only to dive back, the knife darting for the unprotected eyes, once, twice, and then deep. Gwent eased himself back to the earth, not watching. Even dying, the green runner maintained that almost inhuman silence.

  Gwent finally struggled to his feet. Wulf paused a moment in his stripping of the dead man.

  ‘My lord, no one else at Folk Field has a harness of living armour. You’ll truly be a great man, a leader.’ He turned back to the delicate job of stripping the now limp, green harness from its bloody-faced former owner, only adding casually: ‘Serving you will be an honourable estate.’

  * * * *

  Part Two: To The City

  1

  ‘Here, there are no coincidences ...’

  Hrunting’s words, uttered in passing to him just before the strategy meeting he was currently enduring, haunted Gwent; they were like a key he had been casually handed, but without the location of the appropriate door, or a hint as to what lay beyond it.

  ‘... and so, if I may summarize our resolutions?’ The Elder paused to brush back his long, white-blond hair and let his glance play over the council of the Folk Field, squatting before him in the makeshift council tent. The question was pro forma: he reflected the general will of the meeting too accurately and too forcefully for there to be any dissent. ‘So, the assault which I shall lead, with Traveller Gwent accompanying me, shall in its earlier stages be a decoy only: the city is impregnable from the landward side alone. We have, therefore, accepted Traveller Hrunting’s plan for an attack from the sea, which he has graciously consented to aid my daughter in leading...’ The Elder’s words droned on, and Gwent felt himself drawn in against his will into this petty struggle, with aims he scarcely understood. He was a little amazed at being accorded the title, ‘Traveller’, which seemingly was the due of Hrunting and, from what he could gather, of all those who had passed more Gates than those of initial transfiguration.

  No coincidences. What did Hrunting mean by that? There was the matter of the citizen who had, apparently co-incidentally, donated the superb harness of living armour he now wore. (He had had it stained a decent red.) Wulf had explained how it worked - it was a plant that lived symbiotically with him, on him, his sweat and evacuations, and the idea had appalled at first. After three weeks it no longer did so: he knew that when he peeled it off, he would be cleaner than ever before in his life, his skin as clean as a surgeon’s fresh gloves. And his new hide was tough: it could take a sword thrust without penetration. But the running man, alone on the fell...

  The meeting was winding up: the leaders of the Folk Field, earthy people in drab garments, were getting to their feet as quickly as their rheumatic limbs were able, readying themselves to shuffle back beneath the hellish sky to their tents four hundred yards away, across the heather. Gwent had no wish to join them: he rose from his squat and stalked arrogantly to the North, where the dim shapes of the high fells jutted upwards at the sunless sky.

  After a while, he was aware of rustlings in the heather: he was being followed. But the nature of the rustlings reassured him, and he kept his hands from his two swords, and went on to the base of the flint-dark outcropping. She joined him there.

  Gwent looked at her, at her long, light brown hair draping the shoulders of her sheer, white dress, and tried to analyse the emotions she roused in him. Love? - an overblown word; he wasn’t about to go and slay dragons for her. Or was he? Was she the reason he’d allowed himself to be ensnared into this war? Her feelings for him were more obvious: even meeting him here was not quite in keeping with the mores of the valley farmers who made up the Folk Field.

  ‘You are troubled,’ she said, in a kind of Middle English. She always eschewed the use of Gate Languag
e with him, and he understood her well enough. But his attempts to use that language puzzled and amused her: it was hard to remember which commonplace words were old, and which had been coined in the centuries that separated their speech.

  ‘The fighting...’

  ‘You are not afraid.’

  He smiled: it was not wholly true, but she was so firm, he agreed. ‘It’s just that, sometimes, I wonder if I’ve picked the right side. From all accounts, the city has a very advanced biotechnology.’ He paused, then descended to tautology: ‘In fine, they seem to be more civilized.’

  ‘At our expense!’ she flared. ‘Do you think they made all that: they found it! For many years, they were content to trade with us in the valley, to let the old and sick and Travellers use the Gate - but now they’ve gone mad. Was the citizen whose suit you wear more civilized than we, who have welcomed you to our homes?’

  Her anger made her beautiful, and he toned down his objection until it faded away into meaninglessness. But all the time, his mind was working overtime: the citizens had found their city. So who had made it? Not for the first time in these past weeks, he was appalled at the extent of his ignorance. He had drained Wulf dry of knowledge and fable. Jehane’s father, the Elder, and his clique of major farmers, were a little better informed than the common run; but their preoccupations were economic, not philosophical. Hrunting the Traveller could tell him more; but he was strangely reluctant to do so.

  The sky was changing: a faint greenish cast could be seen: night was at hand. He looked into Jehane’s waiting, deep, dark eyes. And he was afraid, afraid for her, for she would accompany Hrunting’s party - as if she were the Elder’s son, for the valley people would not follow even this Hrunting of the Many Names and fabled reputation without such a gesture. But surely he would see her safe. He was truly afraid of something else, of forming attachments, putting roots into this artificial soil. It would be so easy!

  ‘We’d better be getting back,’ he said, avoiding her eyes.

  * * * *

  2

  Hrunting was not happy about the meeting. It was inevitable, he realized, but he liked the idea none the better for that. Tact was not one of his strong points. Of course, Gwent was a Traveller; even the ciphers could see that. That potential might be delayed in realization, especially if the Elder’s daughter had her way, but not forever. And new Travellers should be allowed to bring their own insights to the Great Problem, and not be given the accepted ideas too quickly.

  ‘Where?’ he temporized. ‘I suppose that’s the question you’ve come to ask.’

  ‘Among others.’

  ‘Where do you think?’ Hrunting looked hard at him: he was not a handsome man; there was a coldness in his grey eyes, and a hardness in his features: an archetypal villain! Also, rather like a younger version of himself.

  ‘It’s a thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Res extensa, res cogitans - the difference seems profound, but in fact is subtle and not helpful. If we live in a dream, technological or spiritual, the question still is - whose?’

  Gwent seemed scarcely to hear. ‘It’s a device!’

  Hrunting smiled. This was turning out easier than he had expected. ‘That’s the accepted view, but we lack confirmation.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The Fellowship of Travellers - it’s not an organized band, but we know each other, and others know us, however much we try to be inconspicuous. And we help each other.’ He paused. ‘We travel the Gates, not when we’re dying and afraid like the ciphers, but with a purpose - to learn the purpose of the Gates, and the sectors they join, and of their makers. We chart them through dozens of metalless worlds like this, and all the Gates we’ve found are looped together, with the furthest forward catchment area in the 21st century. Our aim is to break through this loop, so we may know the purpose of Manganon.’

  ‘Manganon?’

  Hrunting smiled again, briefly. ‘It’s an old word, and it means “device”.’

  ‘And I’m one of you?’

  ‘You will be.’ Hrunting spoke now with absolute assurance. ‘But first I’m going to tell you why you’re going to fight. Not through simple inertia, or for an Elder’s daughter: but because the city controls a Gate.’ He paused dramatically. ‘An uncharted Gate.’

  * * * *

  Afterwards, Hrunting felt a little guilty. The Gate wasn’t in Travellers’ Tales, so in that sense he had spoken the truth; but it could hardly be uncharted with a Magister Portarum in residence, and he knew there was one, he could feel the draw of one, subtle and impossible to pinpoint, but there with a surety one couldn’t doubt. But it had been the right thing to do. Gwent had to learn for himself, as he had done. It hadn’t been hard, of course, to cut the flow of questions. He’d used the old and trusted trick of Travellers, and casually answered the patently unasked question.

  ‘You realize,’ he’d said, almost offhandedly, ‘that by travelling the great Gates, we become, effectively, immortal?’

  * * * *

  3

  It was time. Hrunting had no watch - in all Manganon there were no watches - but like all Travellers he had a sense of time, necessarily. He rubbed his eyes and slipped from the vegfoam bunk, reaching out. to touch the closed sphincter that served the half-alive cabin as a port hole. At his touch, the sphincter slowly opened, with all the grace of a flower opening under a dawn sun, dispelling the green gloom as it opened on the blood red midday sky.

  The surface of the sea was covered, as ever, with the omnipresent sungreen: the tideless ocean was like one vast Sargasso. In the distance he could just make out the coast with the imposing vegmuscle structure of the City drawn up on it like an abandoned ship: which perhaps was not too far from the truth.

  He grew aware of the ache in his left arm and found himself half-wishing he’d accepted Gwent’s offer of his living suit. But the barge had been successfully, if painfully, taken, providing them with living suits in plenty, and now there was little chance of Gwent dying uselessly in the taking of the City.

  The City was an old problem, much dealt with in Traveller’s Tales, being found in many guises in many Gate sectors. The problem was, why did they allow such high levels of biotechnology, when they effectively banned any significant level of conventional technology by making Manganon completely metalless, except for trace elements?

  The usual answer was the blanket selection answer: that Manganon was a device for selecting the best and the fittest, for some unknown purpose, and guns and bombs were too indiscriminate as a means to that end. There were suspicions as to what that purpose was: the abuttal of the concepts of entropy and time travel leading to the hugest project capable of conception; but like all hypotheses in Manganon, it was wild, unconfirmed ... How could it be confirmed, when they were as silent as the maker of Paley’s watch?

  But now was no time for speculation. Hrunting quickly donned the suit of living armour, grown of the same living vegmuscle as ship and City, opened the large sphincter of the door with a touch, climbed through and walked the length of the orange leaf corridor to where grew the spiral staircase that led down to the upper deck.

  He burst into the brightness of the deck, half expecting to be met by some of the boarding party, but there was none, and he looked leisurely about him. The barge consisted of a vast, flat-topped hull of vegmuscle which sucked water and sungreen in at the prow, and with a spasm of its internal chamber, jetted the water out at the stern. A system of filters extracted the sungreen on the way, to be used as food for the whole structure, the hull, the upper decks at stern and prow, and the whole elaborate panoply of rooms, small holds and minor decks that surmounted the upper decks in ragged pyramids.

  The barge almost looked like a natural thing, a freak of nature rather than a biological artifact. He was beginning to appreciate the subtle artistry of the colours. At first, he had only noted how the deep chlorophyll green of the hull gave way to rising, lighter shades, variegated with tiny splashes of orange and red; now he felt the patte
rn. However crude the citizens might be politically, they had no peers in the art of growing ships and cities.

  On the walkway thirty yards below, there was more colour and movement: Jehane in a green and orange living suit. She was on her way to join him, and she would need careful handling. Rumour had it that Gwent had rebuffed her, and he certainly didn’t want to be her target on the rebound. A Traveller could not love and remain a Traveller, and he was deep set in his ways. It was, in fact, an embarrassment having a woman on such a venture, but thankfully, she seemed competent enough. Whether she was or not, the ship would be in her hands when he led the crucial assault.

  ‘All’s well?’