by David Drake
His hand stopped against the shiny surface. He pushed harder. The water was solid, and it wasn’t water at all. More like stone. Smooth stone.
Abel sat up. He was surrounded by himself. He moved. Many other Abels moved with him.
Reflections. But there were dozens. It was as if he were inside a gem.
Where am I?
Abel stood up. He walked forward. One step, two. He ran into himself, nose to nose. Reached for his face. More smoothness.
Not blood, not reflecting water. This was a room made of looking glass. Mirrors. He’d only seen one once before. His mother’s friend Dagmar in Garangipore had a small glass she used to apply the kohl liner to her eyes. That she could do this without poking her eyes with the liner pencil had fascinated and scared Abel, and he’d liked to watch.
Yet this glass was different. Brighter. Completely reflective. Where did the light come from, anyway?
Suddenly Abel lashed out, swung at a wall as hard as he could with his fist.
Pain shot through his hand.
Ow!
Nothing, not the slightest effect on the wall. A smarting hand. Abel nursed it to his side while considering his next move.
It might help your plans for escape if you had some idea where you are, wouldn’t it, lad? And just who and what you are dealing with. The gruff voice had returned again. He hadn’t managed to smash it out of his skull after all.
Then, as a man might step through a waterfall at the Second Cataract (Abel had seen it happen once; there were caves behind the falls), a tall man with pale skin, dark hair, and a curly black beard stepped out of one of the mirrored walls and came to stand beside Abel. The man wore strange garb. Abel had never seen fabric so uniformly smooth. His own trousers and tunic were made from beaten flax fiber and always felt scratchy.
In addition to a shirt that covered his arms down to just below the elbow, the man wore not a well-bred man’s muslin trousers but the kind of baggy-legged pants that only beggars and wastelanders wore in the Land. These pants were stuffed into black boots of what looked like the finest herbidak leather Abel had ever seen. He wanted to touch those boots just to see if they were as supple as they looked.
“Hello, lad, I’m Raj Whitehall,” the man said. He gestured at the surrounding mirrored walls. “And this, all around us? This is Center.”
Greetings, Abel. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere in the mirrored room. We were concerned, but the danger has now passed. I am effecting repairs on the trauma your actions have cause to your brain. My efforts will allow you to avoid a convalescent period and, in fact, keep you from experiencing any ill effects at all, to a ninety-three percent probability.
“This is like the flying, isn’t it?” Abel said to Raj—mostly because he knew where to look when speaking to him. “It’s not really a…a simulation. This is a”—he searched for the new terminology, found it implanted—“mind-space.”
“You’re in the district prelate’s house, lying on his wife’s sleeping pallet,” Raj replied. “Your father and she are watching over you until you wake up. You managed to give yourself a fine concussion.”
Raj smiled. His big white teeth shone brightly in his black beard, making him look less like a wastelander and more like a Redland barbarian.
“Father found me?” Abel asked.
“That he did,” Raj replied. “The high priest was with him, too. It caused quite a stir. You got picked up and taken to Prelate Zilkovsky’s home on a private litter.”
“Father must be worried.”
“He was. And by the sound of his voice, a bit terrified that he would lose you as he did his woman. I would not expect him to be in a happy mood when you wake up.”
Observe:
Abel was in the priest’s house. He lay propped up on pillows upon a sleeping pallet. The walls of the room were painted white with a wash that Abel knew had to be very expensive. He smelled the familiar odor of surkrat cooking somewhere, a dish his mother had made. His father paced back and forth, his sandals slapping in rhythm against the ceramic tile floor.
Then Abel was back in the mirrored room.
“I want to wake up. I want to tell Father I’m all right.”
“In good time,” Raj answered. He hunched down to face Abel eye to eye. “Let Center do his work upon you first, lad.” Raj settled into a crisscross position on the floor. He did not fidget, and seemed like a man accustomed to occasionally sitting on floors—or wherever the situation called for.
“You’re Raj.”
“Yes, lad.”
“You dress funny, but you look kind of like a man.”
Raj smiled. His teeth flashed within his dark beard. “That’s right, lad, I’m a simulation,” he said. “But a good one. I even manage to fool myself.”
“You’re not real.”
“I used to be.” Raj nodded as if remembering, though how could a simulation really remember anything? “A fighter. Then a soldier. Helped bring a world or two out of darkness.”
“And Center?”
“Center is no simulation. He’s here on Duisberg, contained in that capsule in the storehouse. And, in a way, so am I.”
“Then how come I see you when I’m supposed to be asleep in the prelate’s house?”
Raj nodded, thinking. Then he smiled and spoke. “You know how the Signal Corps has those towers along the road?”
“Those are for wigwag. You can send a message, or get one.”
“Well, think of it like this: there’s a little wigwag tower in your head now, lad. We talk to you that way.”
“And you can change things?”
“What do you mean?”
“In my head. Like make me forget about my mother. Wipe her out. You could do that, couldn’t you? And when you find out I’m not the one you’re looking for, you’re going to wipe her out. Like a rake on sand.”
He felt a sob coming on. How could you sob in simulation? You shouldn’t be able to. It wasn’t fair.
“Lad, we won’t take your mother away.”
Abel felt his teeth clenching, his whole body clenching. He didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to admit it even to himself.
“You won’t?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter anyway.”
“What?” said Raj. “I don’t understand, lad.”
“Because I’m forgetting what she looked like,” he said.
Raj’s hard face softened. “So that’s it.”
Interesting. The room filled with Center’s voice. Your precipitous action was a distant outlier in my own calculations. It’s not often that I am outthought, especially by a six-year-old.
But now that he had his point, Abel was not going to let go of it. He was being stubborn. He didn’t care. “You can wipe my mother away, can’t you?”
Raj nodded. “We could, lad.”
“Leave her alone,” Abel said. “Just leave her alone.”
Raj reached out, touched Abel’s shoulder, but Abel jerked away. “I’ll kill you both if you touch her,” he murmured.
“You have my word, lad,” Raj said. “Wouldn’t serve any purpose.”
“You’re a simulation. You’re just…you’re just a nothing. I don’t like you. I don’t trust you.”
Raj shook his head. Abel risked a glance at him. He seemed sad.
“It’s the way of all things,” he said. “Maybe we’ll earn your friendship, Abel. But we’re going to have to stick together anyway.”
“How come you are doing this to me?”
“We have to reach you when you are little, before the Law of Zentrum gets all the way beaten into your brain, that’s why.”
Suddenly, as loud as he could, Abel formed a thought. He wasn’t going to say it. He was going to shout it. I can get both of you out of my head! Any time, I can!
That is correct, Abel. But at the cost of your own life, said Center.
I’d rather be dead than a slave.
Raj rose to his knees from the crisscross sitt
ing position. For a moment, he looked Abel straight in the eyes. Abel returned the gaze with a glare.
Raj took Abel by the shoulders. Abel looked down at the backs of Raj’s big hands.
He could shake me to death with those. Well, let him try.
Abel pushed Raj’s hands away, crossed his own arms, and continued to glare.
Then Raj threw his shaggy head back and began to laugh. “Oh, we’ve found the one, all right!”
4
The classroom was stuffy and smelled of dont piss. It had once been a stable; there were no windows, and the floor sand was not packed, much less paved over. Bits of straw from its previous life could still be kicked up, and Abel suspected this was where the urine odor still resided. Abel knew he ought to feel lucky. Most of the people of the Land, even those from First Families, never learned to read, and resorted to an abacus when numbers began to move much past twenty. With his father’s permission, the officers with children had pooled their resources to hire a teacher and had rented the space from the military garrison.
Reading had come easily to Abel. Math had not.
With class a half day on Mondays and Fridays, and, of course instruction in the Law and Stasis taking up all of Thursday, Abel had begun to spend a great deal of time inside his thoughts, talking to the voices he still was not quite sure were real, but that he knew had proved to be quite helpful at times.
But the voices, Raj and Center, would not give him the damn answers. At least they hadn’t yet. He was determined to keep asking for help, because wheedling was easier than attempting another meaningless word problem of the sort the instructor, Lieutenant Milovich, seemed to take such pleasure in assigning.
I hope you know us better than that now, lad, Raj said. We’re here to give you more options, not turn you into a suckling babe again.
Yeah, right, thought Abel. Prove you want to help by doing this math problem for me. What’s the angle of the triangle Lieutenant Milovich wants us to calculate? I’ve got two angles and a side. It’s not a right angle, so how do I do it?
If we told you, how would that help you learn trigonometry?
You could just put it in my head.
That is correct, Center put in. I could instantly provide you with the answer to this question. But I could not condition you sufficiently so that you will know how to work out the problem for yourself, or how to approach future problems.
Give me the answer.
No.
I don’t care about ballistics or land surveying. I care about being a Scout.
And do you not think knowing how to estimate land areas might come in useful out there in the wastes of the Redlands?
No. Abel considered. Well, maybe. Give me the answer anyway.
No.
I know about the Redlands, but if you tell me the answer, it will get me out of this stuffy garrison taking lessons from a junior officer with too much time on his puffy little rich-boy hands.
The lieutenant’s hand swelling is from hypothyroidism. He’ll be dead before he’s thirty from autoimmune system collapse, Center said. A Fibonacci projection using Seldon values for social normatives does indicate an upper-class upbringing, however. Reconstruction of formative moments should be possible—
Center took longer than usual before he spoke again. Abel had learned that this usually indicated he was performing some sort of extremely complex calculation.
Yes, I have it now. Observe:
Milovich as a boy Abel’s age, standing next to a window in the upper stories of a residence in Lindron. He was sipping a steaming liquid (smell was present in the vision), and Abel detected the odor of cured yerba mate. Milovich—or the boy, as Abel had to think of him now—was wearing a linen wrap twisted about one shoulder and clasped at the hip by a belt of well-tanned carnadon leather.
Just what I figured, Abel thought. Sipping mate and clothed in carnadon.
Observe:
The boy suddenly broke into a smile and turned from the window. He spoke to a young girl who sat in a corner working at a loom.
Servant or concubine?
Try sister.
“Father’s home,” said the boy.
His sister nodded placidly, but remained at her work. The boy rattled down the stairs and emerged in a finely furnished receiving room below. He waited nervously as the door swung open.
“Father!”
A man in the door in the blue robes of the high priesthood’s service. A dark scowl on his face. “What’s this?” he said. “What the hell have you done?”
The boy glanced down at his father’s hands. They held a creation of balsa and glue that had taken the boy a full day of labor to create.
His father lifted this creation in front of the boy’s face.
“It’s…it’s a glider,” said the boy. “One of the boys at school showed me some scroll drawings. I just looked at them and figured out how to make one, and I wanted you to—”
“You wanted me to what?”
“I worked really hard on it,” the boy said, desperation slipping into his voice. “Because…I know you think I can’t do anything right. I wanted to show you I can, I mean sometimes—”
“You left it on the stoop.”
“So you’d see it,” replied the boy. “When you got home, I mean.”
“And the neighbors? Did you consider that they might see it?”
“I didn’t think about that.”
“Of course you didn’t, you stupid fuck,” said the father. “Of course you didn’t.”
Shaking with anger, he crushed the balsa flyer in front of the boy’s eyes. “You could’ve gotten me fired. You could’ve gotten you and your sister dragged away. Do you see what you’ve done?”
“But I—”
The boy didn’t have the opportunity to finish his sentence. His father lashed out with a backhand and sent him spinning across the room. And when he fell, his father stepped up and kicked him hard in the abdomen.
“Don’t you ever, ever do anything like that again! Do you hear?”
“Yes…yes, sir.”
Another vicious kick. His father’s sandal strap broke with the effort, and, cursing, he kicked the boy with his bare foot—but this time in the face, for good measure.
“I was right about you,” the boy’s father said. “You’ll never make a priest. I have my doubts if you’ll even make a soldier.”
He turned away, leaving his son gasping and bleeding on the dirt floor.
“Stupid little shit.”
* * *
Abel shook his head. He should’ve known the glider was against the Law. He could’ve made it and hid it somewhere.
In this instance, making a glider was only a means to an end for Milovich. I believe you understand that, Abel.
Would your own father have reacted in the same way, lad?
Maybe. Abel considered. Okay, no. But he would’ve been mad all right if I’d left something like that out on the porch. And how’s this supposed to help me figure out the area of some pointy piece of farmland without walking it, anyway?
Maybe you could show a little respect for the young lieutenant and ask him to explain it to you again. That would be one way, don’t you think, boy?
Yeah. Okay. You two know how to take the fun out of hating a guy’s guts.
Raj laughed his not-so-pleasant laugh. There’ll be plenty of time for that, lad. And plenty who deserve it more than Milovich.
Abel completed the assigned work as well as he could, but he could not shake off the feeling that Center was assessing his mathematical abilities the entire time and finding them severely lacking.
As class recessed he forced himself to get over his irritation and approach Milovich to ask for extra help. The young lieutenant seemed shocked at first, and then pleased. They arranged for a review session before the next class, and Abel was finally set free from the stinking classroom.
He rushed out into the garrison exercise yard to see if the Scouts had returned. They hadn’t. A few of h
is classmates lingered about, two of them—Xander and Klaus—sparring with musket rifles from the broken-weapons bin.
Musket rifles were a special exception to nishterlaub edicts. They contained metal, and lots of it, including bayonets, and shot lead minié balls. They could not be manufactured, but they could be repaired, and this only by the priest-smiths at special facilities within the temple compound in each district. Zentrum allowed the production of a new batch of rifles once per decade, as well, but only in the the Tabernacle of Lindron.
Gunpowder was a different matter altogether. Its manufacture was a fiat granted to only a very few places: Orash in Progar. Bruneberg in Cascade, Mims in the Delta, and near the Tabernacle at Lindron. Those who oversaw the magic creation of powder were called the Silent Brothers. They were selected from a young age and had their tongues removed at age eight as part of their induction ceremony. They were also castrated at that time.
I’d like to know how gunpowder is made, but not that badly, Abel thought.
The broken rifles that Xander and Klaus were using were fixed with blunted wooden bayonets for practice. Grunts of exertion and the clack of the practice weapons filled the courtyard. Klaus, who was a stickler for military detail, was wearing his full cadet’s uniform even while sparring. His brown knickers and black tunic marked him as one of the Black and Tans, the army Regulars. His lower legs were wrapped in leather strips for protection.
Xander was shirtless. He was Black and Tan, too, but his cadet’s tunic was thrown over a nearby dont hitching post, and his leg wraps were coming undone and trailing after him as he moved around the courtyard practice area.
Despite appearances, Xander was a military brat. His father was stationed several miles to the east at the outlying settlement of Lilleheim. Xander’s father was part of the teaching subscription, and he, his mother, and his sister had remained in Hestinga for school. Klaus, on the other hand, was the son of a priest in the local administration. Yet Abel knew, because he’d heard him say it enough times, that Klaus hated the priesthood and longed for a life in the regiments almost as much as Abel longed to become a Scout.
Abel’s own formality of dressing fell somewhere between the two cadets. He didn’t bother to wrap his lower legs every day unless he knew duty called for him to be out of the military compound, but he never forgot his cap, which most cadets kept stowed under an epaulet and didn’t wear in the compound.