Gwent felt suddenly tired of it all. The shiny newness had worn off things. He had had fantasies of ruling these people, or of becoming a Traveller and learning the secret of this pocket universe, but they had been fantasies in a fantasy -and suddenly there was no more fantasy left. He had killed, seen pain and death and sacrifice to this abomination of victory. More would die in the citadel. And the Travellers were other than he had believed. Here and now, this was reality; he had to accommodate himself to it, and there was a room he knew where someone tended the sick who could make that accommodation worthwhile.
The sun was setting when the concealed base sphincter’s biological mechanism finally broke down under the bombardment, and the hordes burst through, silent now, but still ignorant of mercy.
* * * *
Part Four: The Caste
1
It was Father Piers who came to fetch them. It was past noon of the new day, and the window light caught his face, revealing a mixture of envy and bitterness as he spoke the words:
‘We have found a Magister Portarum. You are to come, and bring Master Hrunting with you.’
Gwent saw stark fear in Jehane’s face. He wanted to comfort her, but words wouldn’t come, and he just nodded to the priest. Piers smiled bitterly, and Gwent now knew the cause of that bitterness: Travellers were the true priests of this world; they eschewed preaching, but it was they who sacrificed at the Gates.
The speaking of the Latin name seemed to give new life to the dying Hrunting. He climbed miraculously to his feet, and stood, precariously, waiting to be led. The bloody bandages on his face were already drying black.
‘Shall we go?’ said Piers, matter of factly.
* * * *
The city had been cleaned up; but here and there were still traces of blood, and every so often, one saw the tired, furtive face of a city-born child, spared after the waning of the bloodlust, but enslaved.
After a few hundred yards Hrunting stumbled and together they had to carry him - awkwardly. But they were already at the plaza. It had not been completely cleared: around the base of the citadel, bodies were stacked, still in their living suits, suits already bloated and loathsome from feasting on the corpses they enwrapped.
The sphincter had jammed open. None had known how to repair it, and that would be the way of it, Gwent realized. The conquerors would live in the now heartless city for a year or two, not repairing it, or even tending it, and it would die, street by street, and one by one the valley people would drift back to their farms and homesteads, until finally only the Gate was guarded, and desolation reigned.
They went down a spiral stairway, into the gloom, and then at Father Piers’ touch of an unidentified section of the wall a small sphincter opened, and the Gate glowed behind it. Piers avoided even glancing inside, but stalked back the way he had come.
The Gate itself was only a point in space, but points need pointing out - by a plaque, or an arrow painted in red on a brown wall, or as in this case, by a chair. A throne, more aptly. At first, Gwent thought it was an exception to this metalless world: a frame of gold and silver, once dipped in a tub of jewels, but closer inspection revealed it as even more remarkable. It was a single plant, and the colours were soft, butterfly colours, but glittering and glinting as if the energies of the Gate shone through. Perhaps they did.
‘Pretty, eh?’
Gwent looked, into the shadowed corner of the room, and made out the face of a man - the Magister Portarum.
‘Yes,’ he answered simply
‘A pretty trinket, no more.’ The Magister Portarum stepped out into the light, and Gwent saw a youth before him, in a dark one piece suit, just like a living suit, but of simple material.
‘So you are Gwent.’ The youth smiled; but it was not the smile of a young man, and neither was his voice. Both hinted at vast experience; this man had held power for generations, Gwent’s intuition told him, for all that appearances were to the contrary; it was an intuition he trusted.
The youth watched him, his eyes seeming to divine his thoughts. Perhaps they did. Finally the Magister Portarum broke the developing silence.
‘Put Hrunting in the chair.’
Gwent obeyed, carefully easing the now scarcely conscious man into the delicate tracery of life that the other dismissed as a mere bauble. Gwent felt cold fear, expecting the Traveller to disappear before his eyes, but he merely sprawled. The Magister Portarum laughed.
‘Axon Gates are subtle, unlike the Dendrite Gate you passed through. There are degrees of interpenetration, and control, for those who learn how to exercise it.’
He paused, then: ‘Of course, you are a Traveller, although you scarcely know what one is, or grows to be, which is why Hrunting remains: two Travellers are formally necessary for an induction. But first, you have some guesses?’
Gwent was beginning to find this knowing, utterly self confident seeming-youth annoying, very annoying. He had been too well anticipated, so he decided to try another tack.
‘The guards who were in here, with you. You stopped them from using the Gate?’
‘Am I responsible for the stacked corpses without? In a sense, yes - but not in the sense you mean. I encouraged them to go through, begged even, and for all the respect they bore me, not inconsiderable, they scarcely listened.
‘I am the author of this destruction - but only because I had no other choice. The city went mad; it turned away from its Gate, and the chance of eternal life, retreating into a dream, the old heresy, that this is a variant of the primary world, and can be lived in as such.’
‘It’s a way station?’
‘Less - a filter.’
Hrunting groaned in the chair. The Magister Portarum looked at him, and for a moment the shape of the wounded Traveller seemed to blur, then return to reality, and the sprawling was no longer born of weariness and pain, but a relaxing of the spirit.
Gwent’s annoyance faded too, and he realized the significance of the words the Magister Portarum had just used: filter, axon and dendrite. He had compared this ... sector with a nerve cell that received information by several incoming pathways - dentrites - integrated them chemically, then passed the integrated message on through a solitary channel, the axon. A nerve cell - also a brain cell. Gwent didn’t proceed far with the thought, but far enough to see the implications of such an analogy, indeterminate, diffuse, overwhelming.
‘I have seen a hundred sectors,’ the seeming-youth said, ‘like small universes all of them, and ciphers in them more than half believing them so. The human mind is very conservative; evolution in millions of years in the primary is not brushed away like cobwebs from a stairway. So people and cities reject their Gates; Tithonus rejected immortality without eternal youth of the body: real people reject eternal youth of the body if it doesn’t bring with it eternal youth of the mind. Form without renewal.’ He smiled, wanly. ‘But you were about to tell me of your guesses.’
‘Manganon is the creation of eternity,’ Gwent heard himself saying, and the Magister Portarum smiled again, and began to speak, softly, persistently, using Gate language, but heightened in some way, so that it seemed to impinge directly on Gwent’s consciousness, a great dialectic of gaudy, fragile butterfly wing images capped by a synthesis of Heisenbergian indeterminacy. And through this, Gwent saw them, felt what they felt when the anentropic phenomenon of time travel showed them the end of the singular outfolding and infolding of energy that was the universe and that ylem barrier to human progression, and felt the pointlessness of it all, in that it would end, and felt with them the surge of their spirits as he was shown how it could be, how the past could be drained of energy to maintain expansion until the last witness quasar hid behind the curtain of light, and beyond to the age of iron, and beyond, when mankind inhabited a universe of dying dwarfs and Schwarzchild singularities and beyond again, until the tail of the snake was eaten, and mankind must resolve its problems anew.
And he knew the why of Manganon, knew it for the cage it was to ciphers
and the maze it became to Travellers, who would go on to make this be.
* * * *
The Magister Portarum stopped talking: the spell broke, and Gwent found himself breathing hard, as if he had been engaged on the hardest work.
‘I offer no proof,’ the Magister Portarum said. ‘What I say, I offer more as a myth than a hypothesis ...’
‘A myth ...’ Gwent began, uttering sceptical words utterly without scepticism:’... has vague beginnings.’
‘And yet, Travellers believe it, and have believed it through a thousand transfigurations, the only meaningful way to compute time. If you designed this ... Manganon, for a purpose, and rumours circulated in it that were at cross purposes to your purpose, wouldn’t you end them? Don’t doubt that they have the power to do it. But mightn’t they even start them?’
‘Which would be no guarantee of their truth.’ The words surprised Gwent; how could he doubt?
‘Precisely,’ the Magister Portarum said, ‘and if the truth were too great, one would start with little truths, building towards the great truth.’
Gwent knew he was caught, trapped into a grand design and he could be either an unwilling tool or a believing disciple. Whichever, he already had the gift of immortality, and then the choice was made, and not even the shadow of a shadow of doubt remained: he believed.
‘You are inducted,’ the Magister Portarum said formally, and Gwent saw that Hrunting was no longer in the chair. Now its tracery glowed invitingly at him.
‘There’s all the time in eternity,’ the Magister Portarum said kindly. ‘Go back - live, rule here if you can, until you can bear it no longer. The Gate is always waiting.’
* * * *
Part Five: Magister Portarum
The Magister Portarum - he had no need or use for any-other name - watched Gwent leave, abstractedly. Gwent didn’t interest him particularly: he had inducted many Travellers, and Gwent was scarcely exceptional. He would take a few years in this sector still, and it would be many transfigurations then before he would add significantly to the great book of Travellers’ Tales, and his copy, carried in his head, for memory was the only commodity that could be taken by axon transfiguration from sector to sector, would grow slowly, building the sustaining myth.
And how many more years would he, the Magister Portarum, have to wait before a Traveller of sufficient seniority and experience transfigured all unknowing into this sector, for unwelcome promotion? A year, a century - time was not of the essence. But truth was.
How much of it had he told Gwent? He looked at the chair, and where the chair was, looked through it, at the Gate. Some Travellers saw only an emptiness, tugging reality into it; ciphers and young Travellers saw nothing at all; but he saw such beauty as scarce his mind could hold. Truth, beauty - beauty, truth; and by way of a very devious and tortuous argument, the benignity of them. There was a whole philosophy built on that premise, but not one the Magister Portarum cared for.
He had told Gwent no knowing lies. Gwent would believe, and believing he would have a foundation to build on, later, to question and qualify. There was much for him to learn, carefully placed clues he had failed to appreciate -how he, the Magister Portarum, in the fastness of the city had bent first the Elder and then the ciphers to his will; how he had brought the rook of Hrunting into that game, and the knight of Gwent. And that most intriguing of all problems, the lack of coincidence in Manganon; one could call it the lack of synchronicity or seriality, but it boiled down to the fact that in Manganon, bell shaped curves used descriptively were always, painfully, perfectly bell shaped.
Except when a Magister Portarum worked his will, the universe of Manganon was strictly causal: the diagonal of acausality that blurred the edges in the primary world didn’t exist here, save in an attenuated form about the Axon Gates.
For a moment, he thought of his city people, his devoted city people who still had dammed the flow to the Axon, and of what had been - yes, the passive was the best way to express it - done to them. But only for a moment. Then he let his private vision expand, out beyond the city walls, beyond the valley, past the limited discontinuities of Dendrite Gates into the regions where Manganon blurred into the dubious reality of the primary world.
Who was he? Oh, he could remember his past, if it were his; his Travellership, everything. But belief and memory and truth are not necessarily linked. Where do we end, and they begin?
In Manganon - a device, a thing, he told himself, but a fearful, transcendent, awesome, beautiful thing!
* * * *
Part Six: Heresies
Travellers’ Tales: being some of the better known aphorisms and assertions of the School of Itinerant Wisdom in the sector known as Inusyeyash, or Gaetor.
* * * *
1
Margenstaern: Our speech on such things is pointless. My esteemed colleague has paraphrased Mr. Dirac in saying that in one’s ideas one should hold beauty more important than experiment. However, the originator of that assertion hardly envisaged a situation in which no experiment is possible.
Garnet: My colleague disposes of experiment merely because he can think of none.
Margenstaern: Can you?
Garnet: Off the cuff, no. But I do not therefore deny the possibility of such experiment. You raise our limitations into an insuperable barrier to knowledge; I would sooner just raise them.
* * * *
2
Benbabun: The trouble with the general explanation is its overweening arrogance. They are not engaged on any small task. No. They are prolonging the life of the universe. You and I know very well that a great many of the fraternity of the Magistri Portarum actually believe that they by prolonging are also creating the universe. Do not be shocked! If you too believe in the ‘Essential Mystery’, then fear not to bring it into the light of day. So that we can see it for the farrago of misconceptions and simple fantasies that it is. It has the same proof as the basic, less elaborate theory from which it sprang: they permit us to believe it, so it must be essentially true.
Even they are an assumption. Only Manganon we know. But considering Manganon, they are a valid assumption. You ask me what is my explanation. I have no explanation, but if you wish me in indulge in speculation, I am willing to do so.
The purpose of Manganon. To save some sample of humanity. In the general fantasy, to prolong itself, the universe has to eat the energy of its historical tail. Manganon is outside time, but the Gates provide a kind of time and the progression through them a kind of evolution and history. We become they when their work has eaten their other ancestors. I’m sure an argument could be made that from us, they could get the same genetic endowment as from the whole of humanity. How that applies to actual existing people - a difficult point, but not one to stay any theoretician who has reached it.
Now, the general fantasy: the extension of the universe. Rather a large undertaking. Let’s make it smaller: the preservation, say, of our spiral arm when the galactic core is exploding. A force shield is created about the arm. To provide that, the past is drained of energy. The jewels of Manganon night and day are this force shield, flourescing under the bombardment of the nonthermal radiation from the synchrotron the core has become. Manganon, instead of being parallel with linear time is at right angles to it, co-temporal with their time. One could go on. But why bother? The fantasy has been made smaller, not less improbable. You ask me what to believe. Whatever you like. I favour thought rather than belief.
* * * *
3
Sandage: Let us consider the matter from a totally different angle. Let us explore a concept touched on simply to pass over: the concept of Dendrite and Axon Gates, the comparison with the nerve cell and the nervous system. Now the Gates, qua Gates, are for all their technologically advanced nature, simple things. They get one from A to B, renovating one in the process. That in itself is a huge assumption, but I’ll make it. Therefore the gates are not in themselves a nervous system. The analogy breaks down. The messages - if they e
xist - are concealed from us.
Now I do suggest that Manganon is a nervous system, a brain, and perhaps ultimately a mind, that messages exist, and that their concealment is by an old technique - that of the purloined letter. We, people, are the messages. Not abstractly, symbolically, but literally. Free agents, but messages: an element of acausality introduced into mind. This is hard to grasp. I can see you think I hide behind words. I do not, but reality does. If message impulses are free agents, then the composite is at least acausal with respect to structure. But I see I cannot usefully continue at this time.
Gwindalf: I adhere to the despair philosophy. They, discovering time travel, saw their own doom, and despaired. Not completely enough to yield outright, but enough to lose that confidence needed to confront and confound that doom. So they chose to recruit the vigour of their past to confront that doom for them. These in their turn now saw and despaired, and adopted the same technique. And so on...
New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology] Page 19