"Glorious memory," said Manacle happily. "I think of that whenever we have the ceremony. The base. That's where the shiptower is, dear Huld, and therefore the ceremony is held there. It's very impressive, quite my favorite occasion. Let me tell you about it.
"We begin by placing a number of the bodies in the shiptower, along with some of the young fellows who play the part. We put some blues there, as well, for verisimilitude. The unloading machines are all polished and garlanded with flowers.
"Then I, as Dean, have the honor to take the part of Capan. I emerge from the shiptower and recite the inspiring words of dedication. All the Faculty is there, of course, down to the least boychild. I recite the words, then I start the unloading machines and they bring out the bodies and the blues. We put the young men into the rejoining machine, together with some blues to make it look real, and they emerge at once, all glowing and eager. Then I give them the Capan gown. This is symbolic, you understand, of our continuation in the academic tradition from the time of Capan to the present. We still wear the Capan gown in his honor. It is moving, my dear Huld, very moving. Then the machines take the rest of the bodies and the blues, the real ones, away to the caverns while Capan (I still have that part, of course) brings a monster out of the ship and puts her in the pit. This is symbolic too. It symbolizes our mission to search the monsters and record everything about them. Everyone cheers.
"Then, I go back in the shiptower and do the 'Calling Home' or 'Signal Home' as it's sometimes called. I go alone into the shiptower and instruct the instrument to contact Home with our message, then I come out and tell everybody what message has been called Home and what Home said. Everyone gets very choked up at that, and the choir sings, and the techs serve special cake, and we all drink wine. A very happy time, Huld. A very happy time." He wiped his eyes on the corner of his robe, looking all at once grave and grandfatherly, eyes full of an old and childlike joy. I wanted to kick him, but he went on in happy ignorance of my intent. "We give each other gifts, too, in honor of the occasion. I still have some gifts my father gave me, years ago."
"You bring a monster out of the ship?" said Huld. "Does this mean that in that long ago time your forefathers brought the monsters to this place?"
"Oh, yes. Certainly. Our forefathers came. With the monsters. To keep Home inviolate, to watch and record."
"Gamesmen were here, then, when your forefathers came?"
"Oh, I suppose so, Huld. Yes. They must have been, how else would they be here now? Your people. And the pawns, of course."
"And the monsters in your pits are the descendents of those your forefathers brought?"
"Oh, no, sir," babbled Flogshoulder. eager with his tiny bits of information. "They do not reproduce at all well, sir. No, many of the monsters in the pits are made in the monster labs. I will be supervisor there, next term. Also, we pay the Gifters to bring some from outside. And some .. well, some .
"You may say it, my boy," said Manacle, still kindly with his nostalgic glow. "Some are born to our own consecrated monsters, to be reared in special pits and adapted properly for our use. Waste not, want not.,' He made a high pitched little obscenity of laughter.
"Interesting." said Huld. "Very interesting. Well. If you will just show me whatever books there are which describe the defenders, our business may be concluded for a time."
"Oh, my dear Huld. I thought you understood. There are no manuals for the defenders! Either there never were any, and that may well be the case, or Nitch took them when he went. In any case, it doesn't matter. They are self-repairing, my dear fellow. You needn't concern yourself about them. If we need them, we have only to press that lever down. Everything else has been done."
I could feel Huld's baffled fury from across the room, feel his heat. "Dean Manacle. What will happen when the lever is thrust down? Do you know?"
"Well, of course. We will be defended. Haven't I said so again and again. Really, Huld, sometimes you are very trying."
Didir and Dora pushed me deep into the corner, perhaps to avoid touching Huld as he stormed away, followed by the others who were full of twittered commiseration. "Gamesmen!" said Shear. "They have no manners.
"After all our courtesies to him. Well. He was simply furious to see that we didn't need his warnings as much as he had thought we would. Dreadful blow to his ego. Full of pride, that one is. Still. He'll get over it." Manacle, comfortably full of his own view of his world.
In a moment they were gone. Didir let me come to the surface of myself, drove me to the surface of myself like a volcano exploding within me. I saw shattering lights, felt electric burning and shock, heard her voice, loud, "They are wrong, Peter. Wrong. That is not the way it was. I was there. I was there, I know how it was." Bits of her memory fled across my mind.
A babble erupted inside me, Dora and Trandilar, Wafnor's hearty cheer dimmed in a wild crosstalk which felt like panic, like fury, like fear. Finally Dora's voice, dark and heavy as velvet, "Turn the keys back, Peter. Turn the keys back and take them away," only to hear Didir once more, "No! It must be done in a certain order, a certain order or it goes."
I trembled with vertigo, sick, thrust this way and that by those inside me, without balance or direction. I screamed silently, "Stop! Stop!" and the interior babble ceased. Then Didir's voice, thrumming like a tight bowstring, held from panic by her ancient will, "Did you see the order in which the keys were turned, Peter? Did you observe?" At which I laughed. She herself had kept me submerged during all that time. I had only heard what came to my ears. I felt that tight bowstring thrum, thrum, begin to ravel. "Then leave them alone. Can you lock the door into the corridor?" she shrieked at me.
I could do that, and did, before she broke in a shower of fiery sparks which shook every fiber of me, went down every nerve, dropped me to the floor to lie twitching like some maddened or dying thing while I knew what it was that Didir knew. If the lever in that quiet room behind me were pushed down, something huge and horrible would happen-something final and irretrievable. And Didir believed it would happen to all the place we were in, to the corridors, the mountains, caverns, to all the black-clad magicians and their servants, to their monsters, their machines, and perhaps-perhaps to the world as well.
11
Calling Home
I convulsed, there on the floor thrashing like a fresh caught fish. If anyone had come by, they would have found me there in my own shape, naked as an egg and helpless as any fledgling. The presence within which had been Didir became a scattered shower of sparkling half-thoughts, fleeting memories; pictures of herself going to this place or that; pictures of someone else I did not know, tall and dark, gold-decked; premonitions of disaster which unmanned me to leave me gasping without ever making connected sense. Then there was a time, long or short, I never knew, of darkness. When I came to myself again it was to feel the hard, cold floor beneath my wet cheek where I had lain in my own drool.
After a little time, I was more or less myself again. I recognized what had happened-panic. Through all the confusion, I found myself wondering how one of the Gamesmen of Barish could feel panic. But then. I told myself, they were more than mere constructs. They had reality, though they had to use my head to express it-a head which was still splitting with an excruciating pain, pain enough to have panicked me and shut down all the places which the Gamesmen had occupied. Didir was gone, but so were Dorn and Trandilar, Shattnir and Wafnor. My head felt empty, vacant and echoing. The pain diminished almost at once, and I lay against the door of that dreadful room, frightened and quite alone. I wondered almost hysterically whether they would come back to me again, so felt for Shattnir because she was the one who was hardest, least vulnerable. Nothing. Her figure lay in my fingers like a doll, wooden, slightly chill. Well, there was no time to experiment or wonder. I had no knowledge of the time which had passed. I had to find Mavin, quickly, and tell her what I knew.
Furred-Peter grew a pair of wide, fragile ears upon his head, like those of the shadow people, and fled throug
h the halls listening for any movement. There was no Didir to warn me, and I was vulnerable in those metal corridors. I fled, promptly losing myself in the maze, unable to fish for thoughts to help me locate myself, following this one and that one at a distance until at last I came to a familiar place from which the committee room could be found. I got there, got in-and found it empty. Mavin was not there. Whether she had been there. I could not tell.
I was alone there for a long time, time enough to get hungry, to find my way to a place food was stored for Tallmen, Tallmen who came and went, saying nothing to me in the guise of a Tallman as I also came and went. The food was tasteless stuff. but it sustained me. I slept a time. I strode back and forth through the committee room, looking at the portraits of Deans from ancient times to the present. Perhaps it was my imagination, but they seemed to grow more and more foolish-looking at either end of the time. Some in the middle looked hard and competent-rather like Himaggery. I thought about that for a while, without reaching any conclusions. Then I had a fit of apprehension about Mavin. Had she been caught? Perhaps killed? Was she lying somewhere wounded, waiting for me to rescue her? I cursed the panic which had driven Didir out of my head and tried to get her back. Nothing. The little figure lay in my hand like a stick. Not a quiver. No, perhaps a quiver, but remote. I tried Shattnir once more. Only a far, faint tingling. Well, whether it was something in the Gamesmen or something in myself, I could not tell. My head felt as though it had been struck by lightning. Perhaps there were fibers there which could be temporarily severed, synapses which could be shocked into quiescence. I waited. I walked about. I chewed my fingernails off, grew others and chewed them off as well.
I was about ready to give up and go on searching alone when she arrived, breathless and weary, desperately glad of the food I had hidden in the balcony of that dusty room.
"Lords, Peter, but that was a journey," she said, falling into long silence while she chewed the tasteless food, eyes closed, body swaying with fatigue. "The techs in that place fiddled about for hours, talking among themselves, mostly about old Quench. It seems that ancient firebrand has been preaching revolution and rebellion to the techs, along with his other strange activities. The techs are mere pawns, Peter, brought in here, put in boots, forced to maintain the place. Some of them are clever. They have learned a lot though they are not given the chance to learn enough." She swayed, chewed, sighed.
"At last they put Himaggery and Windlow upon a kind of cart and wheeled it into a corridor where the cart was attached to a train of similar carts, all loaded with bodies and blues and crates of one thing or another. I hid myself on one of the carts, and a group of pawns rode it as well. Most of them are older men. I believe there have been no young techs trained for some time." She stopped to sip some of the bottled water I had found. "Lords, what a journey. We went north and west, I think, though it is hard to say because of the ways the corridors curve and join. Whatever the direction, we went far and long to the place they keep the bodies, distant and high, lying under some great glacier, I think-some source of endless cold. They are stacked there, Peter, thousands of them, piled like wood for the war-ovens. Endless aisles of them. I saw Throsset of Dornes. He was on top of a pile, like a carving. I saw Minery Mindcaster. I knew her when I was a child and she a marvelous, twinned Talent. They drove the carts into a side room and left them, then they all got on the one little machine which had hauled the rest and went away. There was no place on it for me to hide, and they all knew one another." She put her hand on mine, still shaking with cold. "So, I followed them on foot, and became lost, and took endless time to return." I let the food and drink restore her before I told her what I had learned. When I had done, she questioned me.
"What is Huld up to? You knew him. What do you guess?"
"I guess he is up to gaining power," I said. I knew this to be true, though I was not sure what power Huld sought in this strange haunt of magicians who seemingly were not magicians at all but merely bad custodians of ancient skills and knowledge.
"Huld is not content to be merely Demon, merely Gamesman. He has no wish, I think, to be willingly followed. It is power he wants, power over the unwilling. He wants to be worshipped, yes, but out of fear and trembling, not out of beguilement. He had that, through Mandor, and it was something, but not enough for him. Still, that is why he hates me. Because I conquered Mandor and held Huld against his will, even for that little time."
"And he came to this place-how?"
"I think he learned, somehow, how I had been protected in Schooltown, how Mertyn and Nitch had protected me. He could have Read that from me, easy enough, when I was captive there. I think Huld sought Nitch, sought him and found him, perhaps killed him for what he knew. This is only supposition, but I know Huld, and the idea hangs together." Surprisingly, the idea did hang together, though I had not known until that instant that I had figured it out. "So Huld came here, seeking power, and found Manacle."
"And Nitch had taken certain books?"
"Perhaps. And perhaps Huld had not thought to Read Nitch concerning books, so perhaps the books are gone forever."
"Or perhaps they were lost half a thousand years ago."
"Perhaps."
"So there may be nothing we can find to tell us about these defenders, nothing we can find to tell us how to restore Himaggery and Windlow and a thousand, thousand more.
"About the defenders, I know only what I caught from Didir's mind before she fled me in panic-or before I drove her out in a panic of my own. She knew of the defenders. Originally there were five keys, kept by five persons, one of whom was someone near to Didir. The reason for this was to prevent the defenders being accidentally released. Now Manacle has unlocked all the bonds. Any one who gets into that room needs only press a lever down, and whatever it is the defenders do will occur. The idea of this drove Didir into panic, the others as well, and it burst my head with them. Now I cannot raise them."
"You locked the door?"
"I locked the door. Manacle has a key. I have no helpful thoughts about that. Let us think of Himaggery and Windlow instead. So far we have failed horribly at everything we tried to do."
She replied with some asperity. "Who would have thought that rescuing them would have entailed putting them back together? It is difficult to go into a place such as this to set someone free if that person is able to walk and think and assist in the process. I have done that, in one Game or another. It is more difficult if the prisoner is unconscious or wounded, and I have played that Game too, in my time. But to have a prisoner who must be reassembled prior to rescue denies logic and sets all sense awry. I did, however, try to make our process somewhat simpler. I have half of them with me." And she reached into some interior pocket to bring forth the two blues, Himaggery the Wizard, Windlow the Seer, tiny and impeccable, cold and hard. They were only patterns, as Manacle had said. Patterns of personality. Mavin waved at me to keep them, saying. "I have been thinking all the way back how we might put them together again. It may be that the machine used to separate them is the same machine used to reassemble them. In which case, we need only bring the bodies to that laboratory place."
I remembered something Manacle had said. "We need not do that. The bodies are to be brought to a machine, Mavin. Not to the laboratory, but to the 'base' where the ceremony is held. There will be a machine there, too. They will pretend to use it to restore those who play the part of voyagers. The ship thing is there. Manacle called it a shiptower. At any rate, the bodies will be brought there, and there we should be waiting for them."
When she asked me where that might be, I shook my head. I could not use Didir to fish for answers. We knew that Manacle would go there, however, and he was easy enough to find-we knew where his quarters were. "Manacle," commented Mavin, as we went toward his rooms. "The techs hate Manacle. I think some kind of mutiny brews there, my son, an old mutiny."
I thought of Laggy Nap and his power over the boots. "Perhaps the contrivance which controls the boots has falle
n into disrepair. Perhaps, if techs are expected to repair things and techs are also controlled by the boots, they have found a way to disrepair it."
"As I said," she murmured, "mutiny. Something brews." Though I had not seen Huld since he had stormed away from us outside the room of the defenders, I felt his presence still like a weight upon my lungs. Without Didir to protect me, I had to be more sly and secretive then heretofore. Thus, it took a sneaking time to come to Manacle's place and hear his rumbling whine through the open door. Shear came out, then went in again, several times. Flogshoulder, too, went in and out, bearing garments of some ceremonial type. They emerged together to go to a dining place, from which we later stole food which was of better quality than that given to Tallmen.
"How long until this ceremony?" I muttered. "How long must we lurk in this way?"
"We are so far underground time is without meaning," she said. "Nonetheless, if Manacle said 'two days' when we came into this place, then it cannot be long now. We have blundered about in here for the better part of two days at least. Time grows short, and I am glad of it. I could not bear much more of this."
I felt it, too, the being without sunlight, without passage of day and night. I wondered if this was how ghosts felt in the grave, separated not only from life but from time as well. This led to other thoughts of gloom and destruction, from which Mavin had to rouse me when Manacle came from his quarters for the final time.
We had no doubt he came out prepared for ceremony. There were stripes of gold upon his sleeves and his high square cap was splattered with gold as well. Shear and Flogshoulder came behind, also decorated, and we went in procession down and down corridors toward a distant gate. It was truly down, as though toward a valley, and it was into a valley we came to see the first light of dawn rouging the heights before us, brightening the cliffs with morning while the forests lay still in night below. Here was a green meadow crisscrossed with metal tracks, heaped with mounds of wrack and jetsam (or so they appeared), with a blackened tower standing at its center, silvered at its tip. A tiny opening gaped high in the side of the tower, like a missing tooth, and a tall spidery ladder stood beneath it. Upon the valley floor small groups of techs removed covers from machines which had been covered against the depredations of time and weather. Near the tower was a machine similar in every respect to that one which had so changed Himaggery and Windlow.
The True Game Page 35