The Cyborg and the Sorcerers

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "I can take care of myself!"

  "Then why are you here with me, instead of back in Awlmei? You weren't taking very good care of yourself running off into the wilderness with no food, no supplies, and no money, and then plopping in front of a dragon."

  "I didn't mean that. I know I'm not very good at those sorts of things. I take care of myself, though; I keep myself clean and healthy. I look all right."

  "That's just your appearance, though."

  "Isn't that what matters for a woman?"

  "No."

  Ahnao did not reply to that, and Slant lapsed into a sullen silence while the girl turned her attention to the road, the trees, and the horses, rather than trying to figure out this incomprehensible man.

  Slant decided that his optimism had been premature; she really was hopeless. He began planning in a halfhearted way to get rid of her. He knew that if he stayed near her he would not be able to keep his hands off her forever, particularly since she gave every appearance of welcoming his advances. His self-respect would not allow him to make love to a woman he thought so little of, he told himself.

  He wondered whether it might have been easier if she were to make overt advances; he could refuse them and put a quick end to the matter, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, she did not seem to have any intention of making direct advances; her culture apparently insisted on the male taking the aggressive role.

  He should, he thought, be able to get rid of her somehow in Praunce; he would find some man willing to take care of her, perhaps a wizard who would take her as an apprentice. Then he wouldn't have to worry about her any more. His best estimate was that they would reach Praunce the following day. One more day of celibacy could scarcely be too much to ask of himself.

  He found himself wondering, though, whether perhaps the regulatory mechanisms had not merely shut down but reversed. Was the urge he felt really just an ordinary sex drive? He knew, intellectually, that it probably was, and after fourteen years and through the haze of conditioning he could not remember what he had felt before he became a cyborg—but it seemed he could think of nothing else, and if that was the normal state of mankind, how did anyone ever get any work done or think about anything important? He began theorizing that his body was over-compensating for fourteen years of restraint.

  Around midafternoon, however, something occurred to distract him—they reached the end of the forest.

  There was little warning; the trees did not gradually thin out, but stopped short. They could see from the last bend in the road a hundred meters back that there was much more light ahead, implying that the trees no longer shaded the highway, but it was not until they were almost to the line that they were able to see the actual state of affairs.

  The forest ended abruptly in a low stone wall and a simple gate across the road; beyond lay open fields extending over the horizon, broken only by sparse rows of young poplars that had apparently been planted as windbreaks. Every meter of cleared land was lush with crops; Slant could make out corn, wheat, and some sort of bean, as well as others he did not recognize. He reined in his horse a dozen meters from the gate and studied the view.

  At first he had noticed only the farms; now he saw two other important features. First, the gate was guarded; men were peering out at him from behind the last of the forest's trees, and at least two had arrows nocked and aimed. Second, the tower he had spotted earlier was now plainly visible on the horizon, not directly ahead but slightly to the left, which was why he had not noticed it immediately. It was not alone; although the one structure stood higher than the others, half a dozen were visible, forming an impressive skyline. He tried to estimate their height but did not arrive at a reasonable guess; he decided that the nearness of the horizon on this planet smaller than Old Earth was responsible for distorting his judgment. Even allowing for that, however, the tallest tower had to be at least seventy or eighty meters high.

  He was quite sure that those towers were part of Praunce, and he wondered why he could not see the city proper. The towers, he decided, must be built on a bill, and the city walls and other buildings lower down, so that they remained just below the horizon. The land was not level; there were several valleys and rises between the forest and the city.

  That was all matter for later consideration, however; first he had to deal with the guards.

  "Hello!" he called out

  A short, stocky man stepped out from behind a tree. "Hello, stranger," he said. "What brings you here?"

  "We're just passing through, on our way to Teyzha." That seemed a better explanation than the truth. If he didn't find wizards here who could remove the thermite and the override, it would be the truth.

  The guard looked Slant and Ahnao over carefully; Slant noticed that he looked Ahnao over very carefully indeed, and found himself resenting it slightly.

  Finally, the guard stepped back and called, "They look all right to me."

  Other men stepped out of concealment; one of the archers did not. There were five altogether.

  "Do you want to call out a wizard to check?" one asked.

  "Why bother? There are only the two of them."

  "They could be spies."

  "What if they are? That's not our concern. We're not paid to stop spies, just bandits and raiders."

  "I wish they would just station a wizard out here; then we wouldn't have to worry." The voice belonged to a new speaker, a youth scarcely out of his teens.

  "The wizards have better things to do," answered the short man.

  "Oh, let them go," said the only man other than the archer who had not yet spoken. "What harm can one man and his woman do?"

  "We should call a wizard out to check," insisted he who had been second to speak.

  The debate continued for a moment longer, but was finally settled by a vote of three to one in favor of letting them pass. The archer never spoke a word.

  The short spokesman stepped to the roadside and gestured to Slant that he could pass. "Go on, then."

  "Thank you," Slant replied. "That is Praunce I see in the distance, then?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "You are guarding the border?"

  "The border? Hligosh, no! You must have crossed the border days ago; it's too long to guard, though there are patrols. We are the inner guard, and this gate marks the city limits. It's been a hundred years since this was the border."

  "Oh." Slant did not entirely understand the term "city limits" in this application but saw no reason to bother asking for further explanation. "Thank you." He urged his; mount forward; Ahnao and the riderless horse followed.

  A few moments later he looked back and saw that four of the five guards were lounging idly by the gate, talking among themselves. The archer had finally lowered his bow and returned the arrow to his quiver but was still standing alertly by the tree, watching Slant and Ahnao ride on.

  For most of the next hour they rode on silently between unbroken expanses of green and gold; occasionally Slant noticed small houses in the distance, scattered among the fields, but he saw no other human beings.

  In front of them the city of Praunce grew on the horizon; the towers continued to enlarge as they neared, and Slant realized that his original estimate, dismissed as ludicrous, must have been short of the reality. The towers were huge. He now guessed the tallest to be more than a hundred and fifty meters high.

  They had still not come in sight of the city wall but the half-dozen towers had been joined by a forest of other buildings, stretching across a good-sized chunk of the horizon. Also, to the south, Slant now noticed a very odd formation. It was too irregular to be man-made, but it seemed unnatural and out of place among the gently rolling hills; it was a great jutting crag that reared up from the earth, its south face a steep slope, its north face an incredible overhang. He was unable to guess its size, but it was obviously huge, as he could see its shadow on the most southerly of Praunce's buildings while the sun was still well up the sky. Its surface appeared smooth, save for an edge that
looked knife-sharp between its two faces.

  Looking further, he spotted other, smaller outcroppings; the big one was due south of Praunce, as nearly as he could tell, well to the east of his own position, and the others, three at least, were strung out on an arc extending to the southwest from the city. The last was due south of him. Each was roughly triangular, leaning at an apparently impossible angle, but the direction of the lean varied; the one directly to the south had its overhang to the west, and the two in between leaned northwest at differing angles. Studying them, Slant decided that they all lay along a quarter circle, leaning outward. He wondered what freak of seismology could have produced such a thing.

  About an hour from the forest and the gate they topped a good-sized rise and found themselves looking down on a small village and presented with an excellent view of a broad, shallow valley. Like the countryside they had been traveling, it was lined thickly with intensively cultivated farmland, dotted with occasional small houses. Unlike the more westerly land, however, it was also dotted with barren patches.

  Slant looked at them in puzzlement; some appeared to be bare rock, which seemed odd when surrounded by obviously fertile topsoil, but the majority were even more perplexing in that they shone and glittered in the sun. They were not water, as they did not move at all in the gentle breeze that was blowing from the north; furthermore, the colors were not right for water. Some were shining silver, others glossy black, and at least one was tinted with red.

  There was no pattern to them, nor consistency of size; they were scattered about completely at random and ranged from specks of a meter or so to large dead areas dozens of meters across. They appeared to be more common to the south than to the north.

  Beyond the far side of the valley, the city of Praunce was finally visible. It began in straggling suburbs that trailed off vaguely into scattered houses; proceeding eastward the streets straightened and widened and the houses grew more numerous, interspersed with other structures. There was an abrupt end to this stage in the form of a high wall of black stone; beyond that, Slant could see only the towers and high buildings that he had been watching for half the day.

  He was surprised by two things; first, it was the only community he had seen on this planet that had suburbs outside the walls, and second, the sheer expanse was overpowering. He had been trained in estimating populations, as that was a simple and obvious requirement in a scout, and he placed Praunce in the half-million-to-a-million range—much larger than he had expected to find on a barbaric planet.

  It was still a long way off, as the valley was indeed broad; he did not think he had any chance of reaching the city before dark. That being the case, he turned his attention to the village on the slope before him. It would not do to sleep by the roadside here. There were no concealing trees, no dead leaves. The local inhabitants might take it amiss. Therefore, he decided, he would try to find an inn in this village. That should please Ahnao.

  The village consisted of a wide stretch in the highway and a smaller road leading off to the northeast somewhere, each lined with a dozen houses and shops. Like the suburbs of Praunce, it had no walls. At the intersection where the two streets met stood a three-story structure with several large many-paned glass windows; Slant guessed this to be either the seat of the local government, an inn, or both.

  It proved, upon investigation, to be an inn. It even had an adequate stable at one side where the horses could be sheltered, fed, and watered for a small fee. Although it was still well before dusk, Slant decided to stay the night. He and Ahnao could easily reach the city by noon of the following day if they left the inn around dawn, and that, he was sure, would be early enough.

  To his surprise, the innkeeper insisted that there were no rooms available on the first two floors. Slant had seen no other travelers on the road, and it was still early in the day to be seeking lodging. The stable was not crowded. He made a comment to that effect, and was told that the regular westbound caravan was due any minute. This caravan was a monthly event, and filled the entire second floor to overflowing; it lodged at this inn, close as it was to Praunce, because the entire morning of its departure date was invariably wasted in organizing, so that the caravan never got outside the walls before midday.

  Slant agreed that it would not do to antagonize such important customers, and accepted the key to a room in the southeast corner of the third floor.

  The gold piece he paid for the room and stabling with was sufficient to cover the house's regular dinner and breakfast; with the caravan expected, the innkeeper was eager to feed Slant and Ahnao and get them out of the way. Ahnao was hungry, and Slant did not see fit to argue, so once they had tended to the horses and dropped their supplies off in their chamber they found a table in the common room and allowed a servant to bring them ale, bread, cheese, fruit, and a thick, gluey stew.

  They sat facing each other, chewing idly; Slant spent most of his attention on the nearest window, watching the people of the village drift by, going about their business. Ahnao watched Slant. When she had eaten enough to take the edge off her hunger, she asked suddenly, "How old are you?"

  Slant started. "I don't know," he replied.

  "How can that be? You must know when you were born."

  "Yes, of course, but it's not that simple. I was born about three hundred and twenty years ago. I don't know exactly, because I was born on Old Earth, and years are different here. I was eighteen when I left Old Earth, nineteen when I left Mars."

  "I don't understand. That doesn't make sense. I thought you were from Teyzha."

  "That's what I've been saying because it's easier and safer than telling the truth. I'm from Old Earth." He was not sure why he had decided to tell Ahnao this; he had avoided her questions previously. But then, he wasn't sure why he had lied before. It had, he decided, probably been nothing more than habit; since he left Mars he had always lied to maintain his cover. If he had told the truth, the computer would probably have killed him—or at least insisted that he kill his listener.

  His willingness to speak now, he theorized, was a reaction to the long suppression. He was finally free to do and say what he pleased, like any ordinary man, and he would use that freedom.

  "Old Earth is one of the stars, the little lights in the night sky, isn't it?"

  He saw no point in explaining the difference between a star and a planet, nor mentioning that Sol was usually not visible. "More or less," he said.

  "The stories say that everybody came from Old Earth originally, long ago. Is that what you mean? Your ancestors came from there?"

  "No, I mean I was born on Old Earth. I came here in the ship you saw near Awlmei."

  "Are the years much shorter there?"

  "No; I think they're a little bit longer."

  "Then how can you be three hundred years old?"

  Confronted with the necessity of explaining something he didn't understand himself, Slant said, "You're right, I'm not. I'm thirty three."

  "So you left Old Earth fifteen years ago?"

  Slant hesitated. "No," he said at last, "I left Old Earth during the Bad Times, more than three hundred years ago, as I said."

  "I don't understand."

  "Neither do I." He gulped down the last of his ale.

  There was a moment of relative silence, broken by a commotion in the street; several riders on horseback were stopping in front of the inn. The innkeeper hurried out to greet them, and Slant surmised that the caravan had arrived.

  "You really came from the past?"

  Slant was distracted by the caravan; the riders had been joined by at least one large wagon. He was unsure if he saw others off to one side. Without thinking about it, he answered, "Yes."

  "Did the demon you said possessed you bring you?"

  "You could say so."

  "How did it come to possess you?"

  Answering that required some thought; Slant turned away from the window and looked at Ahnao. "Why do you want to know?" he asked.

  She made a vague
shrugging gesture. "I don't know."

  "How much do you know about the Bad Times?"

  "Oh, not very much; the same as anyone, I suppose."

  "Did you know that they were a war?"

  "Well … sort of. Ships from the stars came and destroyed all the cities, I know that."

  "Yes, that's right. The ships came from Old Earth. The other worlds had not wanted to be ruled by Old Earth any more, so the ships were sent to smash everything until the other worlds obeyed again." That was the simplest summary of the war he could manage; he hoped it would serve.

  "That's not what the stories say!"

  "That's the truth, though. I know, I was on Old Earth. The war began two years before I was born, when the colonies stopped sending the food we needed."

  "Oh," said Ahnao, in a very small voice.

  "Old Earth sent out ships to destroy all the worlds that opposed it, and this world was one of those. However, there were other worlds that they were unsure about. It took years and years to travel between the worlds and carry messages, and there were many places that continued to obey Old Earth and many others that no one was sure about. To find out which side these worlds were on, and whether they might be dangerous, Old Earth sent out a lot of small one-person ships, which visited the worlds and reported back.

  "However, the government of Old Earth was worried that, after years of traveling all alone, through space, the people flying these little ships might not obey them any more, that they might join the enemy. In order to make sure that didn't happen, they built a computer into each ship and also put part of it in each pilot, set so that it would kill the pilot if he disobeyed.

  "I was one of those pilots, and the computer is what you wizards call a demon."

  "Oh. If you had disobeyed it, it would have killed you?"

  "Yes, exactly. There is a thing in my head that would explode and burn if the computer told it to."

  "The demon is dead, now, so you're safe, aren't you?"

  "Yes, but I'd still like to have the thing in my head removed. Then I could bring the computer back to life, but it wouldn't be able to harm me. I would control the demon, instead of the other way around."