Grand Vizier of Krar

by W. John Tucker

  “Of course, if you think it important.”

  “I think it is vital and they must be placed safely into the hands of Praalis in Proequa Citadel,” Blan said. She was now thankful that she had thought to ask Arnapa to leave one of the canoes above the rapids. It would save a lot of time.

  “Pelembras, you were one of the group leaders coming across the mountains. Can you find your way back again?” Telko asked. In fact, Pelembras had been the final group leader, the one charged with recovering the directions that Arnapa had left along the way.

  “I’m sure of it,” Pelembras answered without hesitation. “I am not only your best shipwright and amateur potter, but also your best mountaineer.” True as it was, both he and Telko smiled at the brag. They had been good friends since Pelembras, as the youngest ever Shipwright General in Akrin, had been asked by the child Telko to teach him some of his art.

  “Then please take one of the others with you back to Sirsette Manor with this bundle of plates and two of these crystal clusters,” Telko said. “When you get there choose four others of our best people, experienced mountaineers and warriors. Then cross the mountains with them and deliver this precious cargo directly to Praalis. Here, take my seal to prove your authority.” Telko removed a golden seal ring from his finger and handed it to Pelembras.

  “Will you not need your seal ring?” Pelembras asked.

  “Not here,” Telko answered. “Everyone on our expedition knows me and, should I be captured, it is probably best for the seal to be elsewhere. Give it to Count Tor to hold for me until I return.”

  Pelembras saluted and turned to choose a companion for the journey.

  “Please also take the other three clusters and leave them with the guard at the entrance,” Blan asked with a winning smile. Pelembras couldn’t help smiling broadly in return as he turned to salute her. Then he set about his work.

  21

  Blan had delayed their departure so she could say goodbye to her orbear friends. She hugged the sisters and let them groom her for a while. Then she approached the matriarch and said, “I must go now, but I hope to return.” Surprising Blan, the matriarch gently placed her hands on Blan’s cheeks and kissed her just like a human might. Blan was touched and she knew that they understood each other, despite their language difference. With a sad wave to the orbears, she had then returned to the men waiting for her at the camp.

  The upward journey was easier. They knew what to expect and there were no confusing byways leading upward.

  *

  This was the final phase of Blan’s plan for investigating the sky ship. She was not sure what to expect, but she was convinced that a waterwheel would help her discover more about the nature of the materials she had found. She considered what Praalis had told her about her mill wheel at home interacting with the Communicor hidden in the rocks below it. She was hoping to see a similar effect here. She also remembered how her piece of skysheet had glowed in response to the movement of the pieces of skyhull used to repair the waterwheel at Sirsette Manor.

  As she had not found a way to cut or drill into skyhull material, Blan had brought a variety of metal strips, brackets, braces, bolts, nuts and strong twine with which to make mountings to fix boards of skyhull in place as paddles for the waterwheel. She had also brought lengths of iron to bolt the paddle mountings to the wheel, sections of curved iron tube to make the two sides of the wheel, sections of straight tube to make an axle long enough to stretch across the river, and heavier pieces of iron to support the axle on each bank. Everything had been hurriedly cut, prepared and tested at Proequa River shipyards and rushed to the ruined fort just in time to join the team when it set out across the mountains.

  Blan hoped that everything had been made according to her instructions and precise measurements. She could hardly return anything for correction, so she had decided that any mistakes would have to be worked around on site. As it turned out, there were few mistakes and none which made any significant difference.

  The biggest mistake was Blan’s own. She had underestimated the size of the boards of skyhull she had seen on her last visit. Fortunately, she saw the problem before Pelembras departed for Sirsette Manor. Master shipwright that he was, he suggested a modification by which the remaining shipwrights could build the wheel without loss of utility. The wheel just looked more awkward than Blan had envisaged it.

  It took the whole day to build the waterwheel. Although all the parts had been prepared in advance, except the paddles, the greatest delay was caused by the need to balance the wheel from both sides of the river. There had also been a short delay because Blan decided that her preferred location for the wheel, under the waterfall itself, would have to be abandoned because the force of the water there was too great for safety. In the end she decided that it should be built well back from the top of the waterfall, very close to where the makeshift overhead crane had been set up to transport their equipment across the river. That turned out to be a good decision because the brook was narrower there and the banks on both sides provided better support.

  Finally the waterwheel was ready, but the sun had set. Pelembras and his assistant had gone upstream with their precious cargo earlier in the day. Arnapa had left two men on guard not far below the rapids with their own canoe and Telko’s nine remaining canoes. One of them made his way to the waterfall to report that Arnapa had pressed on to Panners Island. She would wait there for Blan and Telko and expected them to arrive before midday next day. Blan would have to finish her work with the waterwheel that night, so the group could set of downstream before dawn.

  22

  The first thing that Blan noticed as she played around with her waterwheel was that the skysheet covering the paddles did not light up. Yet her original roll of skysheet did, much the same as had happened at the waterwheel at Sirsette Manor.

  “See! It’s the movement of the waterwheel paddles which causes the stationary skysheet to glow,” she excitedly hypothesised for Telko. He was playing the part of her laboratory assistant. “The skysheet covering the moving paddles is not affected,” she added.

  After an hour in the presence of the vigorously spinning waterwheel her roll of skysheet was giving off considerable heat. Using gloves and tongs they rolled it out flat and saw that the heat was collected on one side only, the other side as cold as ice. They rolled it up again, with the cold side outward and clay caps over each end to contain the heat of the hot side.

  “We’ll see how long it takes to lose its heat,” Blan said.

  She turned her attention to the three crystal brains, as she liked to call them. She had suspended them above the ground on the now empty wooden boxes previously used to carry metal parts for the waterwheel. The crystals were already visibly glowing from within, even with no sunlight.

  “The brains also collect energy from the wheel,” she reckoned.

  “How can that be?” Telko asked. “There is no link for what you call ground lightning to flow into them.”

  Thinking about her new hypothesis, Blan placed each of the crystal brains in another wooden box. Their inner glow continued to grow. She then placed spare boards of skyhull between them and the waterwheel. It made no difference.

  Blan slowly asserted, as if speaking her thoughts as they came, or weighing each word at a time to make sure it would fit, “Lightning can pass through air and along metal, as we know. However, this energy does not need a conduit. The movement of the skyhull in the waterwheel is enough to cause this energy to transfer to the crystals. Therefore, it is some change in the fabric of the space between them that causes the effect, not the bridging of that space with some other material. My hypothesis is that all the forms of lightning are manifestations of this one effect which changes space itself, at least as we perceive it.”

  Telko frowned and said, “I don’t yet understand what this all means. How can it help us in our mission?”

  Blan looked up at Telko and replied, “When the crystal brains have gained enough energy they should
perform the functions for which the Visitors made them, very powerful ones. We should take them with us and learn how to use them. When the energy they gain from the waterwheel fades in them, I believe they can be topped up again from sunlight or by planting them in the ground for a while, as you have seen for yourself.”

  Telko looked happier, yet still questioning, with this suggestion that the brains had practical uses, so Blan followed with her winning argument.

  “You know that the enemy uses a special system of communication that has enabled him to control his vast forces and to anticipate almost every move that the Free Alliance makes. He operates that system through Geodes, huge clusters of crystals made by the Visitors and which the enemy discovered, dug up and deployed in some of his ships and supply caravans. With these crystal clusters from the sky ship I believe we have discovered our own, superior system of communication.”

  Telko felt her enthusiasm coarse through his veins like wine. Still, he had some concerns.

  “It is known that Black Knight’s flagship and the Secret Police Chief’s ship and some others are burdened with strange cargoes, perhaps rocks or crystals as you suggest. They weigh the ships down and must be very large. How can we compete with those when we only have these small stones? Why are these superior?”

  “This is another hypothesis I have been considering,” Blan explained, “that our crystal clusters were made at the very end of the Visitors’ time on Earth, when the knowledge and skill of the Chanangii had almost reached the level of their former masters, the Vanantii.

  “The Crystal Chambers or Geodes, along with the Communicors were an earlier technology, at least according to my hypothesis, and they were in any case built primarily to extract energy from the earth. Black Knight has not yet discovered their true purpose and power. He has discovered only their secondary use as a means of communication. Our crystal brains, on the other hand, are the latest technology, built to drive the sky ship through weightless space and to attempt communication with other Chanangii or Vanantii somewhere out there.” She waved her arms up toward the sky. “They were built when the Chanangii had become weary of our Earth, fearful of their mortality and desperate to reunite with others of their own kind.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Telko, his eyes wide.

  “It’s a hypothesis,” said Blan smiling. “Can you point out where I am wrong?”

  Had it not been a joke, her last question would have been unfair. Blan did not know, and her hypothesis was based on quite a few leaps of imagination. However, by a combination of scientific analysis, intuition and lateral thinking, Blan’s hypothesis was as close to the truth as it was possible to be in a complex universe pulsating with uncertainty.

  Telko felt that Blan was on to something. He was actually becoming quite interested in science himself. For him it was a new and exciting way of looking at things; not just to take things for granted, but to enquire why they were there and how they worked. He knew he would need time to adjust to the new way of thinking. Then something else occurred to him.

  “How is space weightless? Surely, if the sky ship stopped flying, it would fall to Earth like anything else.”

  “Not if it is far enough away,” Blan replied. “The moon and other celestial bodies do not fall to Earth. If a sky ship is far enough away from all the bodies pulling on it with their gravity, then it should require little power to move around. It would be almost weightless.”

  She paused in thought for a while before continuing.

  “The ship would need a lot of power to jump off Earth. The Chanangii must have believed that all the crystal brains would work together with the skyhull somehow to fling the ship into space, say, as one magnet can repel another, or by causing space to part in front of it and draw in behind it. The ship seems never to have left Earth, so we don’t know whether the hopes of the Chanangii could ever have been fulfilled.”

  23

  As Blan was thinking about the implications of what she had found, her new hypothesis and the possibility of flying to new worlds at some time in the future, the unusually dry weather of the last few days came to an abrupt end. In the time that it took everyone to collect their food rations and climb back into the tunnel they were all soaked by a torrent of huge raindrops.

  They did not go far. They would have to depart in a few hours to make their way downstream in time to meet Arnapa at Panners Island. There was no time to go back to the cavern below, so they stretched out along the wall, ate some rations and settled down to get whatever sleep they could in the warm, tropical air.

  Except Blan; she was too excited to sleep. She went back outside and collected the crystal cluster with the healthiest glow. She then sat by herself to study it. She stared at it in the hope of seeing some way of making it do something. She turned it over in her hands and inspected everything about it. It was heavy enough for her to doubt that there were any hollows inside. Its shape was ovoid, half-way between a discus and a sphere. Parts of it were smooth, others not so. Blan’s first impression, that the device consisted of a cluster of crystals, arose from the fact that its unlighted surface seemed translucent and showed sharply defined crystal-like blocks and columns within. This effect was accentuated when light flashed or pulsed within the device along the edges of internal structures. However, Blan had to admit that, after her experience of the crystal Communicor under her home and with all that Praalis had told her about the Geodes, she had let her mind jump to the conclusion that the device she was now studying was also made of crystals. Not necessarily so, she mused; at least not in the way that she had previously thought of crystals. She tried to see details using the lenses she had brought with her. The tunnel was dark, but the glow from the device was enough to see many details: swirls of filaments; terminations like tiny pinheads; even the traces of where the new filaments that had reached into the ground for energy overnight had snapped off. It then struck Blan that the device was actually healing itself; previously jagged filament stumps were already smooth, and she was sure that some had disappeared. However, she could still not identify anything that would indicate how she could get the device to do something of her choosing. In frustration, she closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. She sat on the stony ground with the device in her hands and let her mind search for some new inspiration.

  After a while, almost as though from a dream, she heard a faint sound. In fact, it sounded like distant music, but none she had ever heard before. She opened her eyes and saw that curves of light were moving in rhythmic patterns across the upper surface of the device.

  She thought she heard herself say, “What’s this?” Perhaps she only thought it.

  The musical sounds became louder and quite clear. There was some kind of rhythmic communication taking place. It was loud enough, she thought, for the whole group to hear it.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked Telko as she noticed him lying on his side watching her.

  “No, I hear nothing except the sounds of the jungle outside,” he replied. He raised his eyebrows questioningly. When Blan pointed to the device in her lap, he was both relieved and curious.

  It did not seem possible, and yet it suddenly dawned on Blan that the device was trying to communicate with her. The experience was too new for her to deduce, although she soon guessed that the device was doing what it was built to do. That is, it sought to identify things to communicate with and then to proceed to establish a useful relationship with them. In particular, it was built to communicate with other members of the college of crystal clusters in the sky ship; mundane things about running the sky ship and more aspirational things like locating colonies of Chanangii or Vanantii. However, it was also programmed to interact with any form of intelligent being that it might meet in the course of its space voyages.

  Soon Blan was amazed that the musical sounds started to change and eventually became a form of speech. The speech became clearer and she was bemused to hear words in the native language and accent of her mother’s people
who originated in the hills inland from Prom Village. It was a language that Blan knew almost as well as common maritime.

  “What do you want?” Blan asked in common maritime. Telko looked curiously at Blan. She pointed again to the crystal cluster and used her hand to mimic a talking mouth. Telko shrugged his shoulders, rolled his eyes and smiled.

  Remarkably, the words Blan was now hearing in her head suddenly changed to the common maritime language. They sounded just as Blan imagined she would sound herself.

  “Contact made. Dualfield Resonation Displacement Component: Actio 28 requests query,” the voice announced.

  When she had overcome her initial shock, Blan’s first thought was to ask where all the Geodes were located. She was just about to announce this when the curves of light on the surface of the device changed into what Blan recognised to be a map. Clearly she need not speak aloud; she need only bring her thoughts to mind and mentally direct them to the device.

  In the map Blan saw before her, the shape of Arctequa was somewhat different from that depicted in the maps she had seen in Citadel Library, but she recognised it nonetheless. The Arctequa Backbone was certainly all there. Subtle shading had created a kind of relief map. The coasts were highlighted by an unbroken blue light. Flashing green and red spots of light also appeared and Blan had no doubt that these represented the locations of Geodes.

  Blan asked what the colours meant, and learned that green was for sites currently being used and red for sites recently in use. Dormant sites were not featured. She saw that there were many active or recently active Geodes scattered around Arctequa, on both sides of the mountains. The nearest were at the southern tip of Arctequa, so she asked for a map of that area only.

  The map expanded until Blan could clearly see a representation of the area from Proequa River down to Slave Island. The coast had changed a lot since the map had been made, especially around Slave Island where the area of the reefs had once been land. Nevertheless, it was clear to her that there was a Geode positioned at or near where Austra Castle was now located. Others had recently been in use off the coasts of Proequa and Slave Island.