by Hogan, James
transmission lines and distribution transformers, beyond which the track joined
a wider road that crossed a stretch of open ground to a bridge. The party had
just emerged onto the road when a group of horsemen wearing the uniforms of
Carthogian soldiers appeared ahead, approaching at full gallop from the bridge.
Thirg braced himself for the brutalized fanatics that Kroaxian teachings had led
him to expect; then he saw that Dornvald had eased his mount to a halt and was
sitting relaxed and at ease with a broad grin on his face while the column drew
up behind. "Major Vergallet, unless I'm much mistaken," Dornvald murmured to
Geynor, who was shading his imagers next to him.
"It is," Geynor confirmed. He glanced at Thirg and explained, "From the
Carthogian border fort across the bridge."
Thirg nodded and turned his head back to look. The Carthogians were smartly
attired, alert, and well disciplined, and their leader was at that moment
smiling in a way that was anything but brutally fanatical. He drew up before
Dornvald and saluted crisply. "It's good to see you back again, sir. I trust
your mission was successful." Thirg blinked his imager shades, jerked his head
round toward Geynor for a moment, and then stared back at Dornvald. Sir?
"Very much so, thank you, Major," Dornvald replied. He turned and indicated
Thirg with a gesture. "This is Thirg, an inquirer, who has wearied of Kroaxia's
stifling ways and comes to enjoy fresher air among our thinkers and artificers
in Carthogia. Thirg, meet Major Vergallet."
"We are honored to have the general's companion as our guest," Vergallet said.
General? Thirg blinked again and shook his head. "The honor is surely mine to be
admitted into such league," he replied lamely as the column began to move again
and the soldiers formed up on both sides.
Dornvald laughed at Thirg's bemusement. "You will find Kleippur's officers in
the most unexpected places and the strangest garbs," he said. "A small nation
such as ours has to live by its wits and its ability to know more about its
enemies than they know about each other."
"And more by the skills and knowledge of its armorers than by the size of its
army," Geynor added as he saw Thirg looking curiously at one of the strange
elongated steel tubular devices which the Carthogian soldiers were carrying
slung across their backs. "And that of course, Question-Answerer, is one of the
reasons why you are here."
The party rested and refreshed themselves at the border fort, and by the end of
even that brief stay Thirg had already dismissed most of what he had heard about
the Carthogians as ignorant superstition at best, and at worst as a campaign of
misinformation and lies waged deliberately by the more orthodox ruling elites of
other nations to protect themselves from the threat that Kleippur's social
experiment represented. "The servility and obedience that the Kroaxian priests
teach as a duty heretical even to question serve the nobles and princes in ways
that are clear enough," Dornvald remarked as he and Thirg talked over their
meal. "But why the whims and fancies of mere mortals should be of such concern
to an all-powerful Lifemaker is far more difficult to conceive. And does it not
seem strange that eternal salvation for the many, in a hereafter which they are
asked to accept on mere assurances, should be attainable in no other way than by
their enduring hardships gratefully and laboring their lives in wretchedness for
the further enrichment of a pious few who exhibit a suspiciously unholy interest
in the quality of their own herenow?" Neither Dornvald nor his companions
mentioned the Skybeings, and Thirg followed their example.
When the party left to continue its journey, the garrison commander assigned a
detachment of troops to escort it to the city of Menassim, apparently because
the Waskorians had been causing trouble again in an area that the road passed
through. The Waskorians, Dornvald explained to Thirg, were an alliance of
extremist sects who denounced as sinful and decadent the liberties that had come
with Kleippur's rule and were committed to bringing down the regime in order to
return the land to its old ways. The rulers of Kroaxia and Serethgin had been
quick to exploit the resentments of the Waskorians, and supplied them with
weapons and fomented uprisings. The freedom to earn their salvation in their own
way if they thought they needed to be saved from something wasn't sufficient for
the sects, it seemed; everyone else, willingly or otherwise, had to be saved
their way too.
The remainder of the journey passed without incident, however, possibly because
of the escorts. Slowly the rugged border country fell behind and was replaced by
hills of thin pipeline, power cable, and latticework scrub, giving way to open
slopes of bare ice higher up. After leaving the hills, the riders passed through
many miles of dense forest, and the first edge of dark was showing low in the
sky before signs of robeing habitation began increasing noticeably. At first
isolated homes and then villages appeared; at the same time the landscape took
on a tidier appearance with lubricant-fractionation columns standing in
well-kept rows, neatly cultivated nut, bolt, and bearing orchards, and rich
fields of electrolytic precipitation baths. Dornvald advised Thirg that they
were approaching the outskirts of Menassim.
It no longer came as any surprise to Thirg to see that the reactions of the
populace showed no signs of the fear and hatred manifested by downtrodden slaves
encountering their oppressors; on the contrary, the soldiers were greeted with
smiles and friendly waves, and children in the villages ran to the roadside to
watch them pass. The adults seemed healthy and well plated; they were neatly and
adequately dressed; and their houses were trim and in good repair. It was a
strange kind of "living in perpetual terror" that produced such results; he
thought to himself.
The city too, though bustling and crowded, was clean and seemed prosperous: The
shops and stalls of the merchants were amply stocked, and the wares were of good
quality; the streets were paved and cleared of rubbish; and the taverns and
eating houses were noisy and busy. Other things that Thirg, who had tended to
avoid cities as much as possible in Kroaxia, would have considered inseparable
from the urban scene were conspicuous by their absence. There were no beggars or
derelicts to be seen pleading or picking a living from the gutters, and neither
did priests or nobles in tall headgear ride haughtily in six-legged carriages
behind burly servants wielding bludgeons to clear the way. There were no burned
or partly dissolved corpses on public display as a warning to others against
blasphemy and heresy; no lesser offenders being exhibited and tormented by mobs
in the marketplace; no penitents in emery cloth and carbon black confessing
their sins to the world from street corners; no ascetic monks shackled to
pillars for the length of a bright—no signs at all, in fact, of the holy and the
devout dreaming up what had always struck Thirg as ever more absurd ways to
degrade and debase themselves in order
to prove themselves worthy creations of
an all-wise and all-benevolent Lifemaker whose judgment and disposition were
supposed to be capable of being influenced by such antics.
Nearer the center of the city the buildings became larger and taller, with
organically grown structures giving way to fabrications of welded blocks of cut
ice. Building with ice was not unknown in Kroaxia, but the scale and ingenuity
of the Carthogian architecture made everything that Thirg had seen previously
appear crude by comparison. Such advanced art was made possible, he learned, by
the discovery of new methods for actually synthesizing artificial lifting and
cutting devices from metals and other materials, which could mimic many of the
functions of natural, living machines. Such discoveries also accounted for the
extraordinary proficiency of the Carthogian army. The strange tubes that the
soldiers carried on their backs, for example, were actually weapons that used
explosive gases to hurl a projectile capable of shattering a slab of ice a
finger's-breadth thick at over a hundred paces.
Thirg was astounded. To exercise his intellect he had often speculated on the
possibility of creating artificial machines, but he had never expected to see
anything actually come of it. He remembered a friend who long ago had
entertained preposterous notions of creating a device to harness vaporized
methane for turning wheels. The friend had vanished abruptly after escaping
arrest on sorcery and heresy charges issued by the High Council of Pergassos,
and Thirg had almost forgotten their interminable arguments. On impulse he asked
the Carthogians if they knew of his friend's whereabouts. The friend was alive
and well, he was told, and in fact lived not far away on the outskirts of
Menassim. He was trying to improve a device he had constructed which used
vaporized methane to turn wheels.
The news of Dornvald's arrival had gone ahead, and a messenger met the party to
advise that Kleippur would receive them at his official residence, which turned
out to be an elegant but not over-ostentatious ice-block building inside a
walled courtyard, situated not far from the former royal palace, which now
served as government offices. On arrival the riders were conducted to guests'
quarters and invited to bathe and change into clean clothes, after which,
refreshed and considerably more presentable, Thirg was taken to the warm,
brightly furnished and cheerfully decorated Council Chamber on the ground floor,
overlooking the courtyard across a wide terrace. Inside, Kleippur, flanked by
two aides, was sitting at the far end of the large table that took up most of
the room; Dornvald, Geynor, and Fenyig were also present, now wearing the
uniforms of officers of the Carthogian army, and another figure was sitting with
its back to the door. By the wall on one side of the room, one of Lofbayel's
maps was fastened to an easel, and more were stacked on the table in front of
it.
Then Lofbayel himself turned in his seat, grinned delightedly at the amazement
on Thirg's face, and stood up to pump his hand vigorously. "Welcome to
Carthogia, Thirg! I'm pleased to see you here safely. Have no doubts—you will
find your true home here. I guarantee it."
"You h-here?" Thirg stammered. "What of Kersenia and the family? Are they—"
"All here at Menassim, and well. Indeed, we would have you as our guest again if
it pleases you."
"But how? I thought you were watched constantly."
"Another escapade of Dornvald's, of which you will no doubt hear in good time.
But come forward and meet Kleippur, and let us obstruct the more important
business no longer."
Kleippur, who was younger than Thirg had imagined, and wore a tunic of gleaming
plate gold with a short cloak of royal blue ceramic links, began by welcoming
Thirg to Carthogia a second time. It had been a somewhat irregular way of
extending an invitation, he said, but he hoped Thirg would understand the
occasional necessity for such measures. Though not of exceptionally tall or
heavy build, Kleippur carried himself with an unhurried dignity that Thirg found
impressive, and commanded an authority that stemmed more from an instinctive
respect displayed by his followers than from any overt exhibition of rank or
assertion of status. He spoke with a soldier's directness and singleness of
purpose, yet with an air of detachment and a disinclination to passion that
marked him as a thinker. He introduced his two colleagues as Lyokanor, a senior
officer from a part of the Carthogian army that Kleippur described as
"Intelligence," and Pellimiades, a director of military constructions and
inventions.
Thirg said he was glad to be in Carthogia; there was no need for apologies. He
had been treated well and courteously despite the difficult circumstances, and
on top of that had enjoyed stimulating and thought-provoking company. "It had
become a mystery to me even before the high pass above Xerxeon," he said in
conclusion. "For what kind of outlaw was this who rode my philosophical
challenges as skillfully as he did his steed?"
Dornvald laughed. "I'm surprised that you could have been so easily deceived.
For most of the time it was all I could do to cling with my philosophical
fingers to avoid falling off."
The preliminaries over with, Kleippur turned and gestured toward the maps. "I
don't have to explain how valuable this kind of information is to us," he said.
"Lofbayel has told me that you too believe the world to be a sphere, Thirg—a
strange notion, and one which I admit causes me more perplexity than comfort ...
but nevertheless I will concede the possibility and grant that you have
considered the evidence at greater length than I. So can this claim be tested?
If so, how? If it is within my power to furnish the prerequisites, it shall be
done, for I would sooner know the world as it is than place misguided trust in
false appearances."
The utterance was so unlike anything that Thirg was used to hearing from those
in authority that for a second or two he just stared in disbelief. Then he
recovered quickly and remarked, "It would appear that heretics have little to
walk in fear of in this land."
"Facts cannot be changed by convictions," Kleippur answered. "He who is willing
to change his convictions to suit new facts cannot be a heretic, while he who
persists in holding convictions that deny the facts is not a heretic but a
fool—as would I be for fearing him. Therefore the term has no meaning to me."
"So is this the new faith of the nation that you would build?" Thirg asked.
"A philosophy, not a faith," Kleippur replied. "Since it acknowledges the
existence of nothing unknowable to reason, it has no place for belief without
reason. I could not build such a nation, but I would help it build itself."
"This is the land that Kroaxia has pledged to free from its chains and fetters?"
Thirg said, sounding incredulous and allowing his eyes to come to rest finally
on Lofbayel.
"Now you see which has the greater need to be freed," Lofbayel said.
Thirg looked mildly uneasy. "So does Carthogia now pledge itself to fre
e
Kroaxia?" he asked.
"The chains that bind the Kroaxians are in their minds," Kleippur replied,
shaking his head. "Can a robeing be freed who asks it not, for is it not a
self-contradiction to speak of imposing freedom? The Kroaxians must come to see
truth as you have—each by his own way and in his own time. Only then can a mind
be free and not merely have cast off one set of chains for another."
"A noble thought," Thirg agreed dubiously. "But let us not forget that my eyes
were opened only after I was brought to this land forcibly."
"Not so," Dornvald said. "We merely brought your eyes to where they could behold
the truth. You opened them yourself, a long time ago."
Thirg thought for a moment longer, and at last nodded, satisfied. "Then the
building of your nation shall have the help of both of us," he told Kleippur.
Kleippur nodded and seemed unsurprised. In that brief moment Thirg felt a touch
of the compulsion that Kleippur was able to radiate as a leader. His simple and
unassuming acceptance of Thirg's declaration had done more to cement a bond of
mutual respect and trust than any kind of elaborate speechmaking ever could.
"And so to business," Kleippur said briskly. He looked at Dornvald. "Well, what
tidings do you bring from Kroaxia? The Serethginians are reequipping and
recruiting mercenaries as far afield as Corbellio in preparation for a new
campaign against us, I am advised, but jealousies war within their camp which I
have designs to turn to our advantage. What is new from beyond the Meracasine?"
A short silence fell. Dornvald's two lieutenants glanced at each other
ominously. Eventually Dornvald said, "Serious though that matter may be,
Kleippur, events have come to pass which render it insignificant. We do indeed
bring tidings—strange tidings—not from beyond the Meracasine, but from within
it."
Kleippur frowned from Lyokanor to Pellimiades, and then looked back at Dornvald.
"Explain yourself, Dornvald," he said. "What new events?"
Dornvald nodded at Fenyig, who reached down and produced a flat package of what
looked at first like more charts, and put it down on the table. When he removed
the wrappings, however, the contents were seen to be not handproduced drawings,
but thick, glossy sheets carrying pictorial representations that contained