No one knew enough. There, more or less, was his summary. All that could be concluded was that Constat had recruited servants for itself, servants who could neither question nor rebel against their master.
But as for why…
De Ramaira’s lethargy spread, mixing smoothly with his all too physical exhaustion. It had been a long day, no question of it, one more in a long succession of days without end. The warmth of the room and the comforting fumes of the rum and milk conspired against him. The recorder running on beside him, de Ramaira fell asleep.
23. Against Entropy
The city lay under blackout, its suburbs crackling with skirmishes as insurgent patrols probed the defences. The faint but distinct punctuation of gunshots came and went erratically; sometimes there would be nothing for as much as half an hour. But the sound of the fighting always returned, blown by the freezing offshore wind to those waiting at Jones Beach.
It filled Rick with an airily tumultuous mixture of apprehension and pure nervousness, the same feeling that had gripped him the first time he had left Mount Airy for the University. He huddled inside a fleece-lined overcoat, sitting on cold ground with his back against one wall of the amphitheatre where, what seemed a lifetime ago, he had waited with Cath for the colony-boat which had never arrived. Before him, black shapes on a black ground, the troops of the Third Division of the Liberation Army sat or sprawled in the sandy meadow bordering the beach, resting after the day’s long march. Above, the cloud-covered sky was starless and dark, save for a single patch of pale light over the sea where Cerberus hid her face.
Rick was so wired that he could not sleep, for all that his eyeballs flatly ached with exhaustion, for all that he needed to snatch some rest before it was time to start out for the city. A murmurous multitudinous noise, counterpoint to the sound of the breakers far down the beach, told him that the insurgents could not sleep either.
The Third Division of the so-called Liberation Army, to which Rick and Jonah Rivington had become attached, had that day made a forced match of some thirty kilometres from its bivouac outside the stripped fields of Arcadia, westward along an ungraded road through the bleak forests to the amphitheatre at Jones Beach. The city forces had rolled their frontline back to the hydroponic station three days before, but the organisation of the Liberation Army was so fragmented and its lines of communication so bedevilled by jamming, accidental damage, and sabotage, despite all that Rick had done, that the decision to capitalise on this had taken that long to work around the front: hence the urgency of the advance.
Rick had ridden in the back of a small cushiontruck together with Jonah Rivington and the officers of the division. They had arrived in the middle of the chill, overcast morning, the white amphitheatre rising before the wintry sea like the tipped shell of some enormous marine animal. The emplacements of the advance section were already in position at the beginning of the road to the city.
Between arrival and the serving of the miraculously hot evening meal—the first food any of them had eaten since breakfast at six that morning—Rick had mostly spent his time in the temporary command post, a tent whose canvas sides boomed like drumheads in the cold wind. He reviewed the plans of the University with Rivington, and the lists they had made, but mostly he just sat and waited. The mounted troops arrived soon after the officers, but the light was beginning to fade by the time the infantry began to stagger into the clearing, men and women sweating despite the cold, eyes like sunken bruises in exhausted white faces. The straggling column continued to discharge from the rough road well after sunset, until at last there were perhaps a thousand people gathered in the clearing around the amphitheatre. The lighting of fires was forbidden, but the division’s handful of cushiontrucks ferried in cauldrons of stew and urns of coffee from Arcadia. A few unlucky people were designated to dig latrines; the rest settled in the sandy meadow as best they could, and then there had been nothing to do but wait.
Now, Rick heard footsteps shuffling toward him. Someone loomed above, no more than a shadow on the darkness.
“Well, you haven’t moved at all.” Jonah Rivington’s gravelly bass was tuned down to a confiding rasp. “They’ve done planning at last, you’ll be pleased to know.”
Rick’s nervousness swelled inside him like a balloon. “So we can move out?”
“Hold on, now. They told me that patrols will be going out in maybe half an hour. We can tag on to one of those if anyone’s willing. But a patrol can’t hang around waiting for us. We’ll have to make our own way back through the lines.”
“Jesus. Well, I guess I didn’t expect anything else.”
You will come back, won’t you?
Sure. There’s nothing else that might tempt me.
Just don’t get hurt on account of this crazy idea of yours.
Crazy? I’m saving civilisation and you think that’s crazy?
Well I adore Vaughan Williams, but I wouldn’t want to get killed saving any of his scores.
But you took a risk, bringing your family’s archives out. I just feel that if I didn’t go it would make this whole thing, the running away, just an empty gesture.
Maybe this sounds selfish. Shit, I don’t care if it does. Just don’t throw away our future for everyone else’s.
In the darkness, Rivington settled to the cold sand with a grunt of satisfaction. He said, “Things are more muddled than usual. But at least we’re moving. I was beginning to think Cziller couldn’t get her stuff together after all, winter would freeze out the campaign and then where would we be? People have been drifting off anyhow, anxious to stake out their piece of territory. They reckon to have lost about five percent on the march today.”
“And even more when the fighting really gets going, I guess.”
“Maybe not. If people think the city really is going down, well, that’s what they came for. Look here, Richard, one thing I have to say before we go…”
“Something serious, I guess. Always is when you call me Richard.”
Rivington’s leather jacket creaked; perhaps he had shrugged. “All I want to say is that I hope David de Ramaira appreciates what we’re doing for him.”
“Me too. But you should see all the stuff he has, Jonah, a whole library of books, datacubes, files…He’s worth any three University departments by himself.”
Rivington chuckled, and began to stand. “The books will have to wait. I’ve still got to find someone to take us out there. Least you get to rest a breath longer. I’ll be back, now.”
“Sure.” Rick said as Rivington moved off, stepping in darkness with casual, surefooted ease among tussocks of grass and recumbent men and women. In the distance came the crepitating sound of rifle fire. Another skirmish.
Rick settled back and closed his eyes, but still his mind spun on. No time to sleep, anyway. It was like the time he and Lena had waited for the signal light to flash at the other side of the wide dark clearing in the forest. A tingling in his palms. Something that would not dissolve or be swallowed at the back of his throat.
Love, that’s not selfish, that’s just sensible.
The hell with you.
I’m just trying to salvage something of my life. When we were thrashing this out with Jonah you were all for it.
Maybe I didn’t realise what you were getting into. If you want to justify running away you could work in the hospital.
Do you want that?
No. No, I suppose I don’t. Don’t listen to me, I am being selfish now. But you get your ass shot off and bring it here to be fixed up, I’ll make sure you don’t get anaesthetic.
They had been strange, those days in the muddy camp that had grown up beyond the western fields of Arcadia. Rick had touched bottom, and was safe. A limbo, free of the need for any saving decision. It was not a bad place to be.
Apart from the wounded, all the people in the camp were defectors from Port of Plenty. They were confined within the loosely defined perimeter, but otherwise there were few regulations. When they were not work
ing, Lena and Rick were together.
In the first few days, Rick had laboured in a makeshift foundry to make bullets, pouring lead into moulds nested in a bed of sand. The foundry was roofed by canvas but otherwise was open to the raw winter air, so that Rick was always both too hot and too cold, his feet freezing in slushy mud while the skin of his face withered in the glare of molten metal. Sometimes splashes of lead ate into the thick proofed-cotton gloves that reached up to his elbows. His nose continually ran as it drew in the spiteful mixture of dry heat and knifing cold. Yet he felt no bitterness at the drudgery. He was working from his beginnings once more.
And love was something won from humdrum toil, and so was more precious than his casual couplings with Cath, an ineffable sweetness that overcame the fatigue of their limbs—for Lena was working too, tending the wounded in the hospital huts in the middle of the camp. In their small tent, on a mattress laid on a canvas groundsheet, love was something newly won from the grey end of each day.
Rick and Lena had married the day after they had arrived at the camp, a fifteen-minute service presided over by an Episcopalian minister and witnessed by the camp doctor and one of the guards. Rick had proposed to Lena on the last night they had spent in Port of Plenty. He had cast the ring himself, from scrap nickel wire; she had given him one of her bracelets, Bach’s oeuvre in its entirety. It was a thoroughly traditional wedding.
And so it might have continued until the end of the war, if it had not been for Jonah Rivington.
A tall, stooped man with an affable and slightly raffish air, Rivington was something to do with the intelligence corps of Cziller’s rag-tag army. Precisely what, was anyone’s guess, although he did occasionally interview new arrivals at the camp. That was when Rick had first met Rivington, although what started out as a formal debriefing soon degenerated into a session of rambling reminiscences, about the University in general and David de Ramaira in particular.
Rivington had befriended the Wombworlder when studying Agriculture at the University a dozen years before, and the friendship had continued after Rivington had returned to Freeport to supervise the Agronomy section of the Freeport collective. Somehow, Rivington had found time to make several expeditions into the Trackless Mountains to map and collect the flora there, and he had kept up a desultory correspondence with de Ramaira about his findings. But this was not what had brought Rivington and Rick together; it was merely the glue of a friendship which developed after Rivington approached Rick about fixing up a communications network that the city forces couldn’t tap into. Rick thought about it for the rest of the morning while he worked in the foundry, then sought Rivington out in the mess tent.
“I’ve some answers for you,” he said.
“What are you trying to do, impress me? Okay, I’m impressed.” Rivington had a creased, lugubrious face. It creased more as he smiled. “So what are these ideas.”
“I don’t know if you’ll like them.”
“We’re willing to try anything. Seriously. This close to the city you get the impression the cops can hear you going to the john.”
Rick wrapped his hands around his mug of coffee. It was cold, in the mess tent. “For short-range work lasers are probably best. With a tight enough beam there’s no spill over, though of course you are limited by line of sight. And for long range, I can’t think of anything better than the Mayan system.”
“Ah yes, the Mayan system. So what’s that, some kind of code?”
“Not exactly. The Mayans used runners to carry messages in the form of specifically knotted strings. You, we I guess, can use mounted messengers with the coded message concealed somewhere on them or their horses. Encrypt your message in binary, knot the string and plait it into the mane. If the messenger is captured he won’t know the message, and hopefully the cops won’t be able to find it.”
“That’s kind of sideways thinking, isn’t it? I was hoping for some way of stopping the cops intercepting our transmissions, or some uncrackable code.”
“There are any number of ways of making a transmission difficult to intercept—nanosecond bursting, for instance. The problem is that the cops have better equipment. And I’m no cryptographer, but I would think that Constat could crack any cipher, except for code words with a specific predetermined meaning. You call it sideways thinking. I call it appropriate technology.”
“So no magic gadget, huh?” Rivington smiled. “Oh well. I’ll pass on your idea about some kind of Pony Express anyhow.”
“Don’t forget lasers, for short-range traffic. Easy enough to set up, though you’ll need to organise line-of-sights in the forest. I might have an idea about that, too.”
“And lasers, sure. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a medal for this stuff, though.”
A few days later, Rivington turned up at the foundry and told Rick that if he really wanted to help the cause, he should apply his real skills.
“I’m getting pretty good at this,” Rick said.
Rivington stepped aside as Rick, using metre-long tongs, lifted a small, heavy crucible and began to pour smoking liquid lead. “That’s as may be, but we need good communication around here as much as we need bullets. You want to help?”
Each day, Rick and Rivington and half a dozen volunteers went out into the forest surrounding Arcadia to lay a communications network between the insurgent outposts that the cops couldn’t tap into. They strung kilometres of fibreoptic cable liberated from Arcadia, and when that ran out floated tethered, silvered balloons above the forest canopy to bounce laser signals from place to place. The balloons worked surprisingly well, although they had a tendency to get tangled in the treetops, or deflate in the freezing nights, and since they were no larger than a man’s head (any bigger and there was a danger the cop patrols might spot them) and were anything but stationary, signalling was dependent upon skilled marksmanship. Rivington also scrounged a transceiver, in the hope that Rick could use it to triangulate the cops’ jamming transmitters. If they could be located and taken out, perhaps ordinary radios could be used instead of the jury-rigged network; but the jammers seemed to be constantly moving around, probably mounted on overlanders. Unreliable as it was, the new network was the only secure mode of communications the insurgents had.
Troubleshooting became a full-time job, and Rick returned to the camp, to Lena, exhausted and smelling of horse and of his own sweat. But, usually, with a sense of satisfaction. He was doing his part. He was making his way.
Rick and Lena and Jonah Rivington spent many evenings together, sharing wine from Arcadia’s vast stores and the sweet, rich marijuana which was one of the Freeport collective’s main exports, talking over the state of the world and the war. It was during one of these rambling discursive conversations that Rivington threw out the seed of what was to become his and Rick’s mission. It would be a shame, he said, sprawled as usual on the floor, seeming to pick out words from the layers of smoke that hazed the ceiling, a shame if everything in the University was destroyed. After all, not everyone was going to head out into the wilderness to stake out their own bit of territory. There would still be a need for teaching something more than reading and writing and marketplace arithmetic, maybe even a place for the accumulation of knowledge. “It would be a shame,” he said, “if all that stuff in the University was smashed to bits and burned.”
“Would people do that?” Rick asked.
Lena, her head resting on his knees, drew on the fat reefer and passed it to Rivington. While he drew on it in turn, she said through a cloud of exhaled smoke, “They burned the library at Alexandria. What are you going to do, Jonah, start up your very own University back at Freeport? Would they allow that?”
“All that equipment shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste. At the least I should get in there and take what I need, anyhow. But yeah, my own university, that’s an idea. You teach in it Rick, and I’ll run it.” He blew a luxurious plume of smoke and stretched bonelessly. “One thing we don’t need to improve is this. Come on Rick, you shoul
d try it.”
The conversation turned to Rick’s strict upbringing, and then Rivington started a stoned monologue about the high country of the Trackless Mountains, ranges that seemed to stretch away forever in the clear air, the sunsets and the pure untrodden snow-fields, fierce ossifrages which rode the winds with wingspans of more than a dozen metres, and beaten gnarled trees that were thousands of years old, before at last smiling (“I’ve been rapping on too long, it’s about time to let you young lovers alone, now.”) and taking his leave.
But Rivington’s chance remark lodged in Rick’s mind. It was not really equipment that should be saved, he thought. Equipment was often heavy and difficult to move and could always be duplicated given the appropriate level of technology (and without that technology any salvaged equipment would soon wear out and not be replaced). Not equipment, then, but knowledge. He was thinking of de Ramaira’s time vault, of course, and in particular of his own contribution to it, the way he had pared it down to the irreducible minimum of theory, the seed from which all else could be derived. All this and more he talked out with Rivington—and early one morning Rivington, brimming with bonhomie, accosted Rick in the mess tent and told him that he should get ready for a journey.
“Where do you have in mind?”
“I’ve been promoting our idea,” Rivington said. “Theodora Cziller wants to see us.”
Although Lena had been enthusiastic about the project when it was only an idea, she had expressed fierce opposition to its actual implementation. It had been the first major disagreement between Rick and herself, but in the end she had let him go, as she had to. Rick and Jonah Rivington travelled alone on horses Rivington had managed to purloin, a journey that took two days to organise, two more to complete. On the map Cziller’s command camp was only twenty kilometres north of Arcadia, but there was no direct route through the hilly forests, and the need to avoid the fighting forced further detours.
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