Grand Vizier of Krar

by W. John Tucker

  She resolved to make sure, at least, that all the record plates stayed in their present order. She explained this to Memwin.

  “Memwin, until we find some kind of index or some way of quickly sorting and numbering these plates, I want to keep them all in the order we found them.”

  In the meantime, she was worried about her lack of progress finding some immediately usable tool to help her friends in the war. It was clear from the Geode activity that a lot was happening around the mouth of Southport River. Also, the enemy’s front line had clearly reached Tan Mountains, just north of Port Fandabbin, and was advancing rapidly from the east toward Glorz River.

  Blan now hoped to take Actio B to Port Fandabbin, but she could not do that and operate Control at the same time, or could she? If she sent Pel with Actio B then she and Memwin would run out of food and water again. Sending Pel and Memwin out for food and water had been dangerous enough before, but the arrival of the Earth Wizards and the intense activity of a Geode no more than a league away had convinced Blan that Black Knight had guessed that she and Memwin were near Belspire.

  There had been some good news in a report from Pencar. On the night of the recent new moon Penntrafa had broken through the blockade of Austra Great Harbour and was now leading a fleet of thirty-five pirate ships, her own five and thirty others that had managed to sneak into the harbour over the last seven weeks or had waited for her outside the blockade. She was heading to attack shipping around Port Cankrar with the intention of perhaps also destroying some of the port facilities there. Crowmar, Olette, Pencar and Penna were all with her. They were being pursued north by many quimals.

  Nightsight and Azimath had each set up beacon communications with pirates hovering outside their respective enemy blockades. They reported that Penntrafa’s move had drawn quimals away from both Nantport and Slave Island, thus giving new hope for a concerted breakout.

  105

  “At last!” Blan cried out in jubilation. She quickly looked up to check that nobody in the upper chamber had heard. They had not.

  Memwin came running over expectantly.

  It was the breakthrough that Blan had been hoping for, indeed depending on. It had eluded her until now. The morning was half over and they were both depressed by the sight of soldiers filing into the upper chamber. Apparently, the army had decided to use the dome as a shelter after all. That did not auger well for Pel’s prospects of coming back or for the prospects of Blan and Memwin escaping. However, Blan had at that moment managed to communicate with Control via Actio B and vice versa. This was the first time she could get Actio B to work like the other Actios. Even better, she believed that she could now use Actio B to access Control from far away.

  More triumphs seemed to follow, one after another. Blan found out how to get Control to contact all the other active Actios at once. Furthermore, she could set this up via Actio B. She made contact with all the other users and told them what she had discovered and how any one of them could now do the same. They all agreed that this facility would be particularly useful when they were in a position to relieve the blockade of Port Fandabbin. If Carl obtained an Actio, he could coordinate naval manoeuvres with the other Actio operators blow by blow in the heat of battle around the port, along the coast or right out in the Archipelago. Praalis then suggested that his device, Actio 8, should be taken by Nargin who would need it more.

  Blan spent the next three hours teaching them all how to lock and unlock their Actios to prevent the enemy from using them should they be captured. She was thankful for having discovered how to show them all at once instead of one by one.

  Exhausted by the matter of locking and unlocking Actios, Blan decided to lie down and think how she might warn Pel about the soldiers gathering under the dome. But her reverie was broken by Memwin.

  “Blan, how do you know that it was twenty thousand years since the Visitors were here? Who counted the years since then?”

  “That’s a good question, Memwin. The record plates that Praalis found many years ago had been held by the Illumen, humans with whom the Visitors had confided some of their knowledge. The Illumen had recorded some of their own history on some of the plates. They had counted the years and linked their reckoning to some events Praalis already knew about, such as the foundation of some cities that still exist today. That is the last we hear of the Illumen, but it is enough to establish the time-line.”

  Memwin thought about this briefly and then asked another question.

  “Blan, how do the Actios and Control talk to each other? I don’t mean how they talk, but how what one says goes all the way across the world and is found by another.”

  This was a question that had troubled Blan. With so many other things to think about, she had set it aside to ponder at some future time.

  “Why don’t I ask Control?” Blan said. It was easy enough to say, but Control was not like a very knowledgeable person to whom one could address a question in ordinary human language and expect an answer, or even a “don’t know”. Control had to recognise a communication as a valid enquiry or instruction in accordance with the way it had been programmed. That is why Blan was spending so much time learning how to communicate with it. In effect, Blan was finding ways of teaching Control how to understand her. It had been the same with the Actios, except Control seemed to be capable of a much broader range of functions. Blan had deduced that Control and the Actios had been programmed to initiate contact with intelligent creatures. The Visitors could not have hoped that all intelligent beings they found in their travels around the galaxy would be of their own kind, so they programmed their machines to help them deal with other beings. Although the Visitors had little interest in most humans, Control had been programmed to engage with any who demonstrated the intellectual power to reciprocate. Control and Blan were each slowly learning how to talk to each other, but Blan was still a long way from being able to get an answer to many of the questions she longed to ask. Control could read her brain signals, but was not yet able to interpret them all. On the other hand, Control had been triggered to communicate with Blan in the first place because it detected a raw intelligence worthy of a Vanantius (not that Blan knew this); it was programmed to develop the relationship and to communicate with anyone else whom Blan introduced.

  Memwin and Blan were a dozen paces apart on top of Control. Memwin was laying record plates on the surface and studying them for any indication that they had been numbered. Blan was still trying to get Control to understand her questions about how information was transmitted across the world. This was more laborious than it might have been because she was now communicating with Control only via Actio B, so she would be better practiced at it when she had to escape. She would need to be able to operate Control as efficiently as possible from far away.

  Blan and Memwin called out to each other at exactly the same time.

  Memwin said excitedly, “Blan, I think Control is talking to me.”

  Blan said, “I think I have an answer but I’m not sure what it means. You first, Memwin.”

  “I think I heard my own voice in my head but the words were not mine,” said Memwin. “I think it was Control reading the record plate to me.”

  “Good, keep going and see if you can discover whether the records have any sequence,” Blan suggested.

  “What did you find out, Blan?” Memwin asked.

  “Control and the Actios use a method called Dualfield Resonation Displacement to communicate with each other. That does not tell me much because it is what the Actios are called, that is, Dualfield Resonation Displacement Components. It was the technology of the Vanantii. The Chanangii reproduced it very late in their time on Earth.

  “It is interesting, though, that it’s not the method used by the Communicors and Geodes. They use mechanical resonance which is very much slower than the Dualfield method. Information sent by mechanical resonance travels through the crystal fibres grown out under the seas and land masses from the Communicors. That is like shock wav
es from an earth tremor, albeit one directed only along the crystal fibres, and it can take five or ten minutes to get from, say, Proequa City to Port Fandabbin.

  “The Dualfield method appears to occur instantly and can only be explained in terms of the movement of space itself, there being no easy analogy to the things we understand in our everyday lives.”

  She was reminded of what Praalis had told her about the Separation, and how through mind control he had managed to host within his body two resonating copies of the space he occupied. “I’ll have to look into this some more at some other time,” Blan ended as a whole lot of other questions occurred to her. She pressed on working with Control and Actio B to see if she could get more answers.

  Blan had three more triumphs with Control that day. The first was that she got it to recognise that she wanted more information about her pregnancy. However, the breeding patterns of humans had never been of much interest to the Visitors, so there was no information other than the pregnancy was in an early stage. Blan had to contemplate the possibility that the father of her child could be any of Black Knight, Telko, or Carnus. Only the second option held joy for her. A child’s complexion was no longer determined by parenthood, so she was not going to be able to guess who the father was from that, but a child’s character was believed to depend greatly on the character of its near ancestors. Whilst Memwin had turned out to have far more of the character of Fenfenwin than of Black Knight, Blan did not want her child turning out like Borckren or Craskren who shared an evil nature with their father. As for Carnus, Blan almost felt ill from the thought of her having a boy child who turned out to be just like him. It had seemed a blessing that her monthly reproductive cycles weighed on her very lightly; but now it was a problem because she could not remember when they had stopped, or she had been so busy she did not notice. She had not thought about it at all until Control gave her the shock diagnosis. How remiss of her, she chided herself. All those bouts of sickness over recent weeks… morning sickness!

  The second triumph was to discover that the faint red glow coming from the floor was light from molten rock, transmitted up through many miles of crystal ‘roots’ grown by the sky ship over the last twenty two thousand years. The ship had stored energy for all that time and was not lacking now. Had Blan been able to repair the damage that had caused the Vanantii to come to Earth, and had she been allowed full access to Control, she could have ordered the ship to disconnect from its crystal roots and take off on a voyage to the stars. She could certainly have buzzed Black Knight’s fleets and armies and sent them all scurrying back home. Unfortunately, having failed to cut into the small piece of skyhull she had taken at Pitpet Brook, she was unlikely to be able to repair this huge ship made of the same material.

  The third triumph was to get Control to close the main entrance to the library, thus locking in the panicking soldiers and Earth Wizards.

  106

  The door to the main entrance of the sky ship must have been left open since the ship landed on Earth. When humans found the abandoned ship many thousands of years later, they had no idea that there was a door to the entrance; it lay buried within the skyhull material surrounding the opening. They built a new entrance and, feeling nervous about the apparent transparency of the dome from the inside and its image-making on the outside, they built the outer shell, which had eventually become covered in soil and buildings (even a tower which, some said, gave its name to the city but which actually, like the city, mountains and river, derived its name from Arn Bel who founded the city). They coated the inside of the inner shell to obscure the transparency of the walls and the eerie red glow from the floor. Now that the soldiers had removed the man-made entrance there was nothing to prevent the sky ship’s own door from closing. It did just that, and it did so with smoothness and silence, as though it had last been opened yesterday. The soldiers and Earth Wizards froze in alarm.

  Blan had discovered from Control that there were two more side doors in addition to the one Memwin found, so she got Control to open the other two doors, and then closed them just before the stampeding soldiers and Earth Wizards reached them. When those doors were opened again, nobody wanted to stay behind and risk being locked in forever, so all the soldiers and Earth Wizards fled outside.

  At Blan’s request, Control then closed the two doors and opened the one Pel knew about. Pel came in soon after. He had been waiting for several hours between the inner and outer shells, hoping that Blan and Memwin were still safe and able to think of some ruse to let him enter. He knew that soldiers had been gathering in the dome. He had bluffed his way into a group of them who had been heading there to help set up camp inside. They were all ordinary soldiers from Port Cankrar and did not know the difference between a Kraran and an Akrinan. He had walked in their midst for a while, pretending to be a Kraran Earth Wizard, until he was close enough to the dome to leave their company and slip through the same crack in the outer shell that he had used as an exit seven days before.

  Pel did not come down to the lower chamber. He beckoned Blan and Memwin up. He assumed that they could see him, having just let him in.

  “We must hurry,” he urged them as the floor door opened and Blan and Memwin emerged from below. They were both very glad to see him safe, but he sounded worried. His arms and hands were bleeding and there were signs of other sores which had scabbed over.

  “What happened to your hands and arms?” Blan asked with concern as she searched in her bag for bandages.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Pel replied, “nothing more than can be expected when you try to refit a boat with sharp tools all by yourself in cold water and with the enemy trudging on beams above you.” When their jaws dropped and their mouths started to form the opening words of questions, he held up his hand and said, “I’ll tell you as we go, but you must now fetch everything you want to take with you. Get as much of the remaining food and water as you can carry because we might not have the opportunity to get either for a long while. Our ship, as it were, departs soon after dark.”

  Among other things Pel had found (or stolen, or requisitioned, or reinstated to the Free Alliance) a small, rugged backpack which he now gave to Blan. She put Actio B into it. She also insisted on carrying most of the food and water; she was, after all, the biggest and possibly the strongest of them.

  Pel carried his tools as well as a small bow and some arrows. “The bow and arrows may be useful to propel a rope for escape,” he explained. “There will be little point shooting at the enemy where we are going.”

  Memwin kept her concealed dagger.

  *

  They emerged from the outer shell, their exit hidden by the ruined wall. The sky was already dark. Soldiers were busy trying to break their way back into the dome through the mirror-like doors that now excluded them: they must have been ordered to do so because they did not sound enthusiastic. With few soldiers on the western side of the dome, Pel was able to lead Blan and Memwin to the tunnel entrance without incident.

  As she ran, alternately crouching and bending low, Blan looked over to the camp and saw that the gates were wide open. Through them she could see that the camp area was no longer filled with rows and columns of tents and prefabricated buildings. She wondered if the arena had also been dismantled. The army was on the move.

  The entrance to the tunnel was not far from the library dome but it was hidden in a lower-level basement which was itself hidden beneath the rubble of a ruined building. This building had been Arnapa’s childhood home and it had once been as grand as her upbringing had been privileged. As soon as he had closed and locked the tunnel door and utter dark had fallen around them, Pel lit a torch. The tunnel was plain and unadorned, just an arched passage lined with concrete, wide enough for two to walk abreast. Pel led them twenty paces south where they came to a junction with a similar tunnel crossing from east to west. The way ahead and the way west were completely blocked with rubble.

  “Don’t worry, the east passage is the one we take,” Pel as
sured them.

  Two hundred paces onward, they came to another junction and took the southern way, a much higher and broader passage.

  Pel explained, “According to Arnapa, this is directly under the main southern road from the library to the docks. We are now about ten fathomes beneath the road but the depth becomes less as we approach the docks.”

  “Where do the northern and eastern passages go?” Memwin asked. She had used a tunnel to cross under Belspire River. She was not, however, aware that it was part of the same underground network, albeit a network broken by many blockages.

  “The northern passage goes as far as the dome and ends against an impenetrable wall of rock,” Pel replied.

  “That will be the crystal roots of the sky ship,” Blan informed them.

  “I went up there a few days ago,” Pel said. “I reckon that the tunnel ended beneath the dome, near the main entrance. The tunnel would, as you suggest, confront whatever feature lies beneath the dome. As for the east tunnel, Arnapa told me that it goes for about two leagues and exits just beyond the limit of the old city. It has several offshoots going north and south. We take this southern way to the docks.”

  The southward tunnel was spacious, airy and well constructed with a smooth, paved floor and a smooth, arched roof. It had been built to accommodate a small horse-drawn carriage or two horsemen riding side by side. Despite the meagre light cast by Pel’s torch, they reached the other end in less than an hour. What they saw then was not at all what Blan had expected.

  The Belspire docks had been built well out into the river. A breakwater had been built a third of the way into Southport River near its confluence with Belspire River. Another breakwater had been built half way into Southport River a league further upstream. Both breakwaters were angled downstream to pose less resistance to the strong river current.