Cziller’s camp was strung across a tree-clad hilltop, a nucleus of a dozen large tents, pitched beneath camouflage netting and infrared baffling, surrounded by a kind of shanty town of smaller tents, shacks, and burrows that faded away into the forest. Rick and Jonah Rivington were far from being the only supplicants. There were emissaries and representatives from all of the settlements on various errands, individuals and groups of mercenaries wanting official sanction for their clandestine operations or hoping for an advantage by being close to the centre of things. Despite their specific invitation, Rick and Jonah Rivington had to wait three more days before they got to see Cziller. Rivington, sanguine about the delay, spent much of the time botanising among the buttress roots of the soaring trees, while Rick spent most of his time drinking coffee or bad beer and listening to the latest stories of the war in a kind of tavern which burrowed into the hillside, definitely unofficial but doing a roaring trade all the same.
It was in that smoky, crowded, noisy burrow that Rick really began to believe in his mission. It came to him that many of the insurgents looked forward to the unravelling of civilisation without really appreciating the consequences. An end to Port of Plenty’s continual surveillance and control to be sure, and an end to the bland levelling diet of regurgitated trivia: but an end also to medical care and the selective herbicides which kept invasive and poisonous native plants out of the fields, and an end to the rich common cultural heritage, an end to Bach chorales and the unfocused light of Impressionism, an end to all that was worth remembering of the Earth. Everything could fall apart: everything. Nothing left but a handful of half-remembered tales, shards, a return to the bullock-drawn plough and old age by thirty.
That was the extreme which must be prevented, yet it was impossible to sort out what should be saved and what abandoned. That was why he and Jonah had never agreed on a list of priorities. There could be no such list. All must be saved indiscriminately. Or the attempt must be made, anyhow. Any knowledge, the spinor equations of five-field theory or the progressive harmonics of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” has by itself no intrinsic value: its worth or otherwise is realised only in civilisation’s context.
All this was what Rick tried to explain to Theodora Cziller when he and Jonah Rivington were at last granted an audience.
After he had finished, Cziller said, “This is all very well, but how much will it cost? How many hours of work will it take?” She sat stiffly upright in a carved wooden chair, her right hand resting on the cluttered little table beside her. A small woman in her late fifties, with a thin aesthetic face, grey hair pulled severely back like a punishment. Her eyes were her only remarkable feature: deep-set and a bright, dense blue, as if enamelled, they did not seem to receive light so much as transmit a force of will. Rick flinched beneath her penetrating regard; then she reached for another cigarillo (the air of the little tent reeked of their acrid smoke) and said, “I suppose you will say as little as I want, or as much as you need.”
“Something like that,” Rick admitted. He and Jonah Rivington stood before Cziller like penitents, of necessity. Apart from her chair and the little table, the only other furniture in the tent was a folding cot and a small metal chest. A lamp hung from the ridgepole but it was not switched on; when Cziller lit her cigarillo the flare of the match seemed as bright as the sun, whose afternoon light filtered only dimly through the canvas walls.
Rivington said, “We can ask for volunteers from the camp. Quite a few are from the University anyhow, they’ll need little enough training.”
“And what will you do,” Cziller asked, “if in the middle of your operation at the University, insurgents start to bum down the buildings before you’ve finished?”
Rivington began, “I suppose we’d need an escort—”
“No. You would let the buildings burn.” Through the haze of tobacco smoke, Cziller’s gaze was sharply intent. “That is the only way I could let something like this go ahead. I will admit to you freely that I am in command of an army which is not really an army at all. It has no discipline, and its members are not really trained. There is no central organisation, apart from myself and a few others here. The lines of communication are vague, the hierarchy very nearly nonexistent.” She paused to puff on her cigarillo; clearly, she had given this exposition many times before.
She continued dryly, “The basic unit is a part of men and women, usually but not always from one settlement, of indefinite number and leadership, and possessed of equally indefinite aims beyond that of defeating the city. My only real achievement is to have organised these units into a number of divisions. I suppose that you could say that this is the most democratic army to have ever existed. Its common aim is to overturn the tyranny of Port of Plenty, but there is no centrally imposed plan. Everything is achieved more or less by consensus. And there is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. Strong because unpredictable; and weak for the same reason. Being unpredictable, our moves are less likely to be predicted and forestalled by Constat, but I am also bedevilled by that selfsame unpredictability. The strength and disposition of each division changes from week to week, and it is a constant struggle to keep each at its appointed task.” Again she drew on her cigarillo. “Well now, what does this mean for you? It means, my friends, that as in any democracy, might is right. Whether might in terms of ballot majority, or in the number of guns each side possesses. So if someone comes along with the intent of burning the University to the ground, you will let them, if you are outnumbered. There will be no appeal to higher authority.”
“Are you saying that we could have gone ahead with asking you?” Rick asked.
Cziller smiled. “You could have made a try of it. But you wouldn’t have known whether or not I would have tried to stop it once I’d heard of it.”
Jonah Rivington rubbed his unshaven chin. “But I’m right in thinking that you aren’t against it?”
“As long as you remember your place, you can go ahead. Find as many in the camp who’ll help you, but—” her gaze flashed “—heaven help you if you try recruiting among the fighting people. And heaven help you too if you try and use my name to get ahead, not that it will do you much good. I’m not against your project—it widens possibilities after this is all over—but it is not the most important item on the agenda. We all know what that is.”
Rick asked her what she meant, about widening possibilities.
“You’re an educated man, I take it. You have been thinking about what will happen when the city falls. You see the possibility of barbarism, hence your project. But it is not the only possibility, and I think the more we have to play with the better. Some have been saying, you know, that there should be a new constitution written, the spirit of seventeen seventy-six and all that. I say the hell with it, I’m no George Washington. I’m not even Thomas Jefferson. Keep things fluid and uncertain, that way people fix on the task at hand.” She stubbed out her cigarillo on the scarred arm of her chair with an impatient gesture. The interview was over.
That had been a week past. Rick and Rivington had returned to the camp outside Arcadia, managed to recruit a half a dozen volunteers. Most of those who had fled the city did not want to take the part of any side in the war, Lena among them. But she had given Rick her blessing anyway. Now, on the cold beach, Rick mulled over Cziller’s parting words for perhaps the hundredth time, but he was too tired to riddle any more sense from them. Shifting a little in the hollow which his buttocks had worn in the sand he opened his aching eyes and saw that the cold illimitable darkness seemed to be lifting. Surely, it wasn’t already dawn. What had happened to Rivington?
Yet there was a growing impression of solid shadows slumped everywhere on a vaguely lighter ground, where before everything had been almost entirely black. Rick could make out the shapes of the men and women sprawled among the ragged tufts of grass; could even make out the breakers far down the beach, dirty white lines that continually unravelled in the same direction.
And then h
is confusion passed. He saw. Above the ocean’s horizon, the gleaming disc of Cerberus was setting through a ragged gap in the clouds. And in the moment of understanding he saw Rivington’s figure, a tall stoop-shouldered shadow in the shadowy moonlight, coming toward him.
24. The Ambush
The last night of Cerberus also shone for a moment on the stolen overlander, falling through its windscreen and gleaming in Miguel’s unsleeping eyes like the crystalline essence of his insomnia. Mari, or what had been Mari, was a shadow against the moonlight. She was hunched over the console at the front of the overlander’s cramped cabin, probably communing with the real blue brother in the city, through the compsim. Miguel shivered. Then, as he so often did these nights he got up from the seat where he had been trying to get some sleep and climbed through the hatch into cold black air.
It was bad enough being cooped up with the woman by day; at night it was intolerable. Most of the time she sat still and silent, scarcely seeming to breathe, eyes dully focused on infinity. That was bad. Worse was when she was suddenly raised into activity, to eat or to go outside and relieve herself, or to fieldstrip and reassemble the cryostat which held the stolen aborigine eggs in suspended animation, or start up the overlander and drive it to another hiding place—Miguel had lost count of the number of times that had happened, although their random path never took them very far from Port of Plenty’s perimeter—or to patiently scan the surrounding area through one or another of the overlander’s devices. But patient was the wrong word, for it implied volition. Not a spark of her personality was left. She was no more than the vessel of the blue brother’s implacable will.
Miguel jumped to the ground and walked to the edge of the drop. This was one of the better hiding places, the top of a hill which crested above the forest like a breaking wave. The overlander was parked among tall trees which grew right to the edge of the cliff. The combination of fitful moonlight and its camouflage circuits made it invisible after only a few steps.
Miguel sat on cold stone and shook out his thermoblanket, drew it around himself like a cape. There was frost in the air. Slowly but perceptibly, the burnished face of the large moon sank into the clouds at the horizon. Shadow swallowed the silvery vista of the forest spread beyond the cliff. Not for the first time, Miguel thought about throwing himself off the edge…but it would not necessarily be the end. He had nightmares about the corpse of the blue brother’s other slave, the one killed in the Source Cave, plodding after the overlander’s erratic path, flesh in tatters about its bones. If he killed himself he might awake to find himself trapped in the cold flesh of his own dead body. Anything was possible.
He must have dozed, for he awoke with his hand around the compsim and the soundless voice of the blue brother reverberating in his head.
—It is past midnight, Miguel. You must return to the vehicle.
“I’m sick of the vehicle, and of that woman of yours. If we have to hide out here, let me do it away from her.” But his complaint was more habit than anything else. He was already on his feet when the blue brother replied.
—There is no longer any need to hide from the insurgents. The time is coming, Miguel. It is almost upon us. You must make ready to deliver your cargo.
“What do you mean? What do you want of me now, in the name of God?” In the darkness, Miguel could hardly make out the trees, let alone the camouflaged overlander. He stumbled over a root and skinned his palm on cold unforgiving ground. The blue brother did not answer. Or perhaps it did. As Miguel got up, the overlander’s motor started with a shrill clatter, and a moment later its headlights snapped on, dazzling him.
Mari drove the overlander at breakneck speed through the forest. Half the time it was off the ground, jolting over half-sunken boulders, flying over sprawling buttress roots. Miguel clung to the passenger seat, watching with fascinated terror as time after time a tree trunk rushed into the beams of the headlamps and swerved aside only at the last moment. There was no end to them. He didn’t even realise that the overlander had struck a mine until the insurgents who had set the ambush opened fire.
The mine’s explosion was only another jolt; then the windscreen crazed and metal hail hammered the sides of the overlander. Mari hauled hard on the wheel. The overlander almost tipped over as it slewed around. There was another rattle of small-arms fire. The crazed windscreen fell away in a snow of crystals. Cold air slapped Miguel’s face, cold air and the acrid smell of burning. He glimpsed people running between the cathedral columns of the trees, caught in the headlights’ glare, and then the overlander was roaring down a steep slope and the people were left behind.
Miguel had enough time to think that the cops were trying to stop them, and then to realise that it was probably insurgents, ambushing what they must think was a cop patrol. And then something detonated in the rear of the overlander and heat washed his back. The overdriven scream of the motor cut out and the overlander slewed sideways and then tipped over, rolling once and with a world-shattering crash fetching the right way up against a huge tree.
Miguel blacked out when the overlander rolled, came around to find himself sagging sideways, held by the harness of his seat. He had somehow banged his head: it felt dizzily swollen, a remote void through which the light of the world swam weakly. When the blue brother’s voice came it was fainter than it had been for a long while.
—The eggs, Miguel. You must help save them.
Stooping amidst wreaths of smoke, Mari was already wrestling with the padded cryostat. Miguel felt a cool numbness as the piece of the blue brother inside his head took control. His hands punched the release buckle of the seat’s safety harness; clumsily, his body staggered across the smoke-hazed cabin to help the woman.
Mari went through the hatch and reached down to receive the cryostat, while Miguel hauled it up the ladder. Heat beat at his back, yet as in a nightmare he could not run. Only when the cryostat had been eased through the hatch did the blue brother’s control collapse, as abruptly as a pricked balloon. Miguel caught at the edge of the hatch, then remembered his pack and went down into the smoke to fetch it, the blue brother protesting feebly but unable, it seemed, to reengage its control. Perhaps the blow to Miguel’s head had loosened its hold over him.
—No time, Miguel!
“Fuck you. This is all I have in the world.”
—The world will be yours, fool!
By now, the smoke was so thick that he could hardly see his hands, and when Miguel groped his way to the ladder, the rungs were searingly hot. He hastily pulled himself through the hatch onto the ribbed roof, and found himself surrounded by fire.
—Jump, Miguel, jump!
He saw his chance, twisted the compsim from his belt and dropped it into the smoke which poured from the hatch. “Fuck you,” he said to the thing inside his head, then took a deep breath to steady himself and jumped through flapping sheets of flame.
He landed badly on soft ground, wrenching his ankle. He rolled over, managed to drag himself a few metres from the burning overlander.
The woman turned from the cryostat and walked stiffly over to where Miguel sat on thawing mud, gingerly probing his ankle. She bent over him and, once, twice, slapped his face. Her long ragged nails raked his cheeks. Her face was livid in the leaping flames that now completely enveloped the overlander. Her mouth opened and a voice came out of it.
“I saw what you did, Miguel. When I have time, I will punish you for it. Now you will help me to carry the frozen eggs. That is all that matters now. But later, yes. Later you will pay.”
—How you will pay, the weakened voice inside him echoed.
“Fuck you. Fuck both of you. I’m not your slave, see?”
The woman unholstered her pistol, and the voice that was not her voice said, “Willingly or unwillingly you will help me, Miguel. You will carry the cryostat to the city for me, and you must hurry. The insurgents will not be far behind and we have a rendezvous to make.”
As she went back to fetch the cryostat, Miguel
quickly reached inside his pack and fetched out a sliver of snake root. Ignoring the feeble, impotent warnings of the blue brother in his head, he rolled it under his tongue. Instantly, the familiar long-missed numbness began to spread over his skin. The pain of his bruised head and sprained ankle receded to feeble flickers at the horizon of his consciousness.
When the enslaved woman brought the cryostat over, Miguel was standing on his good foot and waggling his damaged ankle to ward off the worst of the sprain. She watched impassively as he settled the sling on his shoulder, then waved him on, trudging at his back. When the overlander blew a few minutes later, only Miguel looked back.
With the drug in the snakeroot mounting in his brain, the pillar of fire bloomed like some fantastic nightflower in the living cathedral of the forest. He would have stayed to watch, but the hollow mechanical thing, a network of blue lines seething under the skin of its face, ordered him on. Staggering under his load through the night, toward the city and consummation of the blue brother’s plans.
25. The Vault
De Ramaira woke with a shudder from a dream of falling through endless darkness, as if he had become the lost colonyboat, gravithic generators flatlined, fusion motor cold, falling uncontrollably through the boundless universe. Cold night still pressed at the narrow window beside the study’s fireplace. It was just before midnight. He had fallen asleep in his chair, the little recorder still running. As he switched it off, the noise which had woken him, the doorbell’s distant jangle, came again.
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