Hell's Gate m-1

by David Weber

  "Over Mythal, you mean?"

  "Exactly." Gadrial looked away, gazing out across the endless, steady swell as the passenger ship sliced through it with a graceful, soothing motion. "It was a Ransaran magistron who first perfected the spells for examining what he called the genetic map of living creatures."

  "And what's a 'genetic map'?" Shaylar inquired with an air of slightly martyred patience.

  "Sorry." Gadrial looked back at her and smiled. "The word 'genetic' is derived from the Old Ransaran word for race or descent. And the reason Hansara?Rayjhari Hansara, the magistron who developed the original concept and spells?called it that was that it's basically a symbolically congruent representation of the physical characteristics of the creature. It's a fundamental principle of magic that the map is the territory, and once Hansara came up with a way to represent a living organism's characteristics in a fashion which could be visualized and manipulated, it really did become possible to 'design' creatures to order."

  Shaylar shivered as if a sudden icy wind had found its way up and down her spine. And, in fact, one had, in a metaphorical way of speaking.

  "And does that include people?" she asked after moment.

  "No," Gadrial said firmly. Shaylar looked both relieved and skeptical, in almost equal measure, and Gadrial shrugged. "There's no arcane reason it couldn't include people," she conceded. "Human beings' codes can be visualized just as well as those of any other creature. But from the very beginning, any efforts to tinker with humanity were outlawed."

  "Even in Mythal?" Shaylar said, with rather more skepticism, and Gadrial surprised her with a harsh bark of laughter.

  "Especially in Mythal! The last thing any shakira would want to do is come up with a way to turn garthan into shakira. Given their religion, they'd see it as blasphemous, at the very least. And from a practical perspective?which I personally happen to think is even more important to them than their ludicrous religious concepts?if they were to turn all of the garthan into Gifted shakira, what happens to the existing shakira's slave class? It's been my observation that their 'religious principles' serve their more worldly ambitions much more than the other way around."

  "But what about turning garthan into even more obedient slaves?"

  "Now that probably would be something that would appeal to the caste-lords," Gadrial admitted with a grimace of distaste. "These days, at least. But at the time the rules and laws which prohibit tampering with humans were being put into place, no Mythalan garthan had any hope of ever managing to escape or defy his overlords. There was no need to turn them into 'more obedient slaves,' because it was impossible for them to be disobedient under the existing system."

  "And why did everyone else feel it should be outlawed?"

  "Because, at the time, it was all a process of trial and error," Gadrial said. "In fact, that's still the case whenever anyone begins mapping a new species, in a lot of ways. Hansara had found a way to producer congruent map, but it's an incredibly complex chart, Shaylar, and initially, he had no way of establishing the congruency between a particular section of the map and specific characteristics of the creature it represented. So he and his fellow magistrons not only had to come up with techniques to modify the chart, they also had to figure out which parts of it they needed to modify to achieve a specific objective. Most of their initial efforts?for decades, literally?produced creatures which couldn't possibly survive on their own. Or, at best, which were far, far cries from what they'd wanted to produce. No one was willing to allow them to experiment on humans when they might as readily produce a three-headed monster as an improvement on the original model. And, of course, Hansara and his colleagues were almost all Ransarans."

  "Which was significant why?" Shaylar asked, and Gadrial paused with an arrested expression.

  "You know," she replied after moment, "you speak Andaran so well that I keep forgetting how little you actually know about Arcana. Like all of the reasons, aside from the purely personal, of course, a Ransaran like me would have for disliking a Mythalan."

  "Should I take it that one or more of those reasons would have a bearing on all of this?"

  "Oh, I think you could probably take it that way. You see, one of the primary causes for the hostility between Mythal and Ransar is that we have totally different religious beliefs. Mythalans believe in something they call reincarnation. They believe that each individual human soul?they call it a 'yurha'?experiences dozens, possibly thousands, of lives, and that the purpose of those lives is for each yurha to become more completely realized?a 'higher being'?in each incarnation. Ultimately, the individual yurha reaches a state of actual divinity, in which it becomes one with the entire universe. That's what they visualize God to be: the entire universe. He's not an individual entity, not a creator, but a sort of … confluence of all of the magical energy bound up in all of creation. That's why the shakira are 'obviously' the highest of the Mythalan castes. Because they're the ones with the Gifts which allow them to manipulate that magical energy, they're clearly much closer to attaining the godhead than anyone else, since they as a caste must consist solely of people with highly evolved yurhas.

  "It also justifies their treatment of the garthan on several levels. The function of the garthan is to do all of those dirty, demeaning, physically exhausting jobs the shakira couldn't possibly take the time to do, since it would draw them away from their mastery of magic and thus separate them from the godhead. It would actually be sinful for them to allow themselves to be diverted, since that might cause their yurhas to move downward through their 'great chain of being.'"

  "That sounds a little bit like a really distorted version of what some Lissians believe," Shaylar said cautiously. "But the Lissians are among the gentlest, most compassionate people on Sharona."

  "Well, Mythalans certainly aren't gentle or compassionate," Gadrial said tartly. Then she sighed.

  "I suppose my own experiences with them really do color my reaction," she admitted. "But part of the problem I have with their entire culture is that once you accept their religious beliefs, and the mindset they've developed to go with them, then their treatment of the garthan is perfectly logical and reasonable. They really and truly simply don't understand why the rest of us can't just see that and admit that Mythal's been right all along … which is one of the reasons both Ransar and Andara simply can't stand them.

  "As they see it, the whole object of the human race, the whole reason we exist?according to the Mythalans?is for all of us eventually to obtain oneness. And, since they believe in reincarnation, each of us has an effectively limitless number of lives in which our yurha can advance. So no matter what they do to an individual garthan?or to all garthan, as a caste?they aren't really harming that individual, are they? After all, this is only one brief stop in an endless journey, and eventually all garthan?aside, of course, from the inevitably willful or evil ones?will become shakira themselves. In fact, some of the greatest cruelties the shakira have traditionally practiced upon the garthan, like the law codes which take Gifted children away from garthan parents and give them to shakira to raise, are justified on the basis of helping their victims attain enlightenment sooner."

  Shaylar looked at Gadrial for several seconds, reminding herself that, by her own admission, Gadrial hated Mythalans. But she'd also come to know Gadrial Kelbryan. If the magister hated Mythalans, it was probably because she despised their beliefs, rather than a case of her despising?or distorting?their beliefs because she hated them.

  "So how do Ransaran beliefs differ from Mythalan beliefs?" she asked finally.

  "In just about every conceivable way," Gadrial snorted. "First, every Ransaran?with the exception of the Manisthuans?is monotheistic. That is, we all believe there's only a single God, since God is, by definition, infinite and since, equally by definition, there can't be two infinite beings. All of our theologians agreed long ago that if two beings are separate from one another, then neither can be truly infinite, since they have to stop somewhere if there are going to be
two of them in the first place. Unfortunately, we're Ransarans. While we may all agree that there's only one God, we don't all agree on who He?or She?is."

  The corners of her eyes crinkled with amusement at Shaylar's expression, and she chuckled.

  "In fairness to the Mythalans," she said, "and much as it pains me to even consider being fair to them, I can't conceive of anyone who could possibly be more profoundly … irritating to them than Ransarans. It's almost as if God deliberately designed us to drive them crazy. And vice-versa, of course.

  "There are three major Ransaran religions, Shaylar, and quite a few subsidiary sects floating around the fringes. I personally belong to the Fellowship of Rahil, and we Rahilians follow the teachings of Rahil, the Great Prophetess. By all accounts, she was a magistron of truly phenomenal ability back in the days before the theoretical basis for magic was at all understood. We believe her abilities in that regard were directly inspired by God as a sign of His favor, and her writings about God constitute the seminal text of our religious beliefs. In the Rahilian view, God is infinite, and as such infinitely unknowable, but a benign and loving Creator who progressively reveals to us as much about Him as finite mortals are capable of understanding.

  Like the Mythlans, Rahilians believe that the purpose of a physical, mortal existence is for the individual soul to live and grow?to 'evolve' upward, to use the Mythalan term?by making choices and acquiring experience. But we also believe that God is separate from the universe around us, that He extends beyond and transcends it as an individual distinct from it, and that He seeks an individual relationship with each of us. That was what Rahil taught, at any rate.

  "Over the centuries, the Rahilians and the other two major Ransaran religions have spent quite a lot of their time massacring one another over various points of religious disagreement," Gadrial admitted. "We stopped doing that about, oh, nine hundred years ago, I guess. Not that we all turned into sunshine and light where our differences are concerned, of course. But at least all of us got to the point where we agreed that whoever was right, God would probably be fairly irritated with His?or Her?worshipers if they insisted on slaughtering everyone else in job lots simply for being mistaken.

  "At any rate, there are three things that all three of our major religions have in common. First, we believe there's an individual God, an all-powerful being who exists outside the material universe, rather than being bound up in it.

  "Second, none of us believe in reincarnation, although all of us do believe in the immortality of the human soul. And we believe that each soul has a single mortal existence in which to establish its relationship to God. There's some disagreement among us about what happens to the souls that don't manage to establish the right relationship with God. In fact, that's one of the points we used to kill each other over, back in the good old days.

  "Third, we believe each individual must have the greatest possible opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Not simply because all of us agree God wants us to love one another, but because it's in the process of becoming all a person can be, that person is brought closer to God and so to the ability to establish that 'right relationship' we all believe in … even if we're not quite in total agreement over what it ought to be."

  She stopped again, gazing at Shaylar, and the Voice nodded slowly. Gadrial was right, she reflected. Assuming that the magister had described the Mythalans and Ransaran viewpoints as accurately?or, at least, honestly?as Shaylar was confident she had, it was scarcely surprising that the Mythalans would hate, despise, and fear everything Ransar stood for. And she could think of nothing someone with Gadrial's religious and philosophical values would find more revolting and cruel than the Mythalan caste system. Which only made the deep and obvious love which had existed between Gadrial and Magister Halathyn even more remarkable.

  "At any rate," Gadrial continued, "given the Ransaran views on the preciousness of each individual life, the possibility of any of our major religions?most of which were still quite cheerfully chopping up the adherents of their Ransaran coreligionists at the time?signing off on the notion of trial-and-error experiments on humans was … remote, shall we say. So both the Mythalans and the Ransarans, each for their own very different reasons, outlawed that sort of experimentation on humans from the very beginning."

  "But not on other creatures," Shaylar said, and managed not to grimace when Gadrial shook her head.

  The more Shaylar heard about the Mythalans, the more she preferred the Ransarans. Yet it was obvious to her that even the humanistic Ransarans were very, very different from her own people. Most Sharonians would have found it exceedingly difficult to "sign off on" that sort of experimentation upon any creatures, not just humans. There were exceptions, of course, as she was well aware, but the existence of those like her mother, whose Talent allowed communication with sentient non-human species, made them rare. Very few Sharonians would have been prepared to suggest that a cow, or a chicken, was intellectually or morally equivalent to a human being. But, by the same token, very few Sharonians would have been prepared to deny that the great apes and the cetaceans had attained a very high level of intelligence which, if not equal to that of human beings, certainly approached it very closely. In some ways, that same Talent kept them from over-anthropomorphizing the lesser animals, with whom no meaningful contact was possible. Still, by and large, they tended to regard themselves as the stewards of the worlds in which they lived, and the notion of creating experimental monsters would have been highly repugnant to them.

  Not that she had any intention of discussing that with Gadrial just now. Especially since, so far, she'd managed to conceal the existence of that specific Talent, despite her mother's life work.

  If they ever ask me exactly who Mother's an ambassador to, keeping that particular secret a secret is going to get sticky, she thought. So let's not go there just now, Shaylar.

  "So, how does all of this relate to transport dragons and battle dragons?" she asked, instead.

  "Well, it was Ransaran magistrons who built the first dragons," Gadrial said, as if she were discussing how to go about baking a cake, Shaylar thought.

  "'Built' them out of what?" the Voice demanded.

  "There's some dispute about that," Gadrial admitted. "According to at least one tradition, there were still some of the great lizards living in Ransar at the time." She shrugged. "I've always had problems with that particular explanation, myself, since the fossil record seems to indicate that all of the great lizards had died out?rather abruptly, in geological terms?long before dragons were ever developed. Still, there are undeniable similarities.

  "At any rate," she continued, as if blithely oblivious to the way Shaylar's eyes were bugging out ever so slightly, "the original dragons were developed in Ransar strictly as beasts of burden. As a way to move cargo quickly from point to point, for the most part, although there are still some wingless dragons in Ransar, where they've been used for centuries instead of horses or unicorns as really heavy draft animals. For the most part, though, their military applications were limited strictly to improving transport. Until the Mythalans got into the act, that was."

  "And why did I see that one coming?" Shaylar demanded rhetorically.

  "Because you're so clever," Gadrial told her with a wry chuckle.

  "I've always rather suspected that Mythalan resentment that we primitive Ransarans had produced something they hadn't played a part in what happened," the magister continued. "After all, to be brutally honest, most of us were pretty primitive compared to Mythal, at that particular point. Hansara was a Tosarian, and Tosaria had evolved a much higher level of civilization than most of the rest of us. My ancestors, for example, were still painting themselves blue and yellow and pickling their enemies's heads as door ornaments at the time. As far as Mythal was concerned, though, all Ransarans were still doing that, and yet the Tosarians had produced not just dragons but Hansara's basic work. Given shakira arrogance, I'm sure they felt an enormous temptation to prove they c
ould do it better than we had. But they weren't interested in simply improving transportation capabilities; they were looking for direct military applications."

  Gadrial's amusement of only moments before had vanished.

  "Skyfang is a pure transport type. As Daris says, he probably goes clear back to the first egg. Which means he's bigger, stronger, and less maneuverable than a battle dragon, but that he has more endurance and basic lift capability. And, aside from his teeth and claws, he has no natural weapons."

  "You mean battle dragons do have other weapons?" Shaylar's eyes widened.

  Mother Marthea! she thought shakenly. Surely the things' fangs, claws, and horns are vicious enough! How could even Mythalans want to add still more weapons to their nightmare?

  "They certainly do." Gadrial's voice was as grim as if she'd actually Heard Shaylar's thought … and shared it. "The weapons Jasak's men used against your people are called 'infantry-dragons' because they replicate the 'natural' weapons the Mythalans built into their real dragons, Shaylar. Some battle dragons breathe fire?or, rather, spit fireballs. Others throw lightning bolts. And still others, despite periodic efforts to ban the breeds in question entirely, project poisonous gases and vapors."

  Shaylar gazed at her in horror, and the magister shrugged. She was obviously sympathetic to Shaylar's reaction, but there was something more than simple sympathy behind that shrug, and she returned Shaylar's gaze levelly.

  "I can understand that you find the thought frightening and unnatural, Shaylar," she said. "And I don't disagree with you that building something like that into a living creature is a typically Mythalan sort of thing to do. In fact, I've always thought battle dragons are probably the most horrific battlefield weapons?short of the mass destruction spells which were banned when the Union was formed, at least?that Arcana's ever deployed. But I can't believe your people are that much different from ours when it comes to fighting wars. You've thrown the fact that Jasak's troopers' infantry-dragons burned your people to death into the face of every Army officer you've confronted, and I admit that that's a horrible way to die. But war is full of horrible ways to die, isn't it? Are you going to tell me your people never poured flaming oil onto someone trying to storm a castle wall? That they never blew someone's abdomen open with those artillery pieces of yours?those "mortars"?and left him to bleed slowly to death on the field of battle, screaming in pain? Never used fire as a naval weapon that gave men the choice between burning to death or drowning when their wooden ships went up in flame around them?"