Then he stands and takes my hand and leads me to the edge and holds out his hand to point to the bright blue dazzle that blinds me and all the children of man and wyrm.
"Sky," he says.
"Sick." I speak. I am like him, not like Mother.
She was eaten by the wyrm in the birthing place, but Father lives and I am like him.
"Born an hour ago, and already you can talk. What have I made here? What can you become?" Patience watched the time flow faster. The babies born, the Starship Captain teaching them everything. To build houses, to hunt for food, to tend their children and teach them. Language came easily, all learning came easily to these new people who never forgot anything once they had done it a single time. They invented their own words faster than Father could teach them, until they hardly came to him for learning anymore.
The gebling king, who never had a name for himself, he came to Father often. "Wyrm," Father said. "Your mother is the wyrm, and I am your father, but most important of all is the monster that ate your mother and drove us from the birthing place. He looks like a wyrm but he isn't a wyrm. He's your brother and he'll kill you all if he can, and if he ever comes out of the mountain you must kill him first."
So the gebling king was the first gebling who learned to kill, and he used the secret knowledge of murder just as human beings had used it from the start-to gather power to himself. I have the terrible secret. I can kill you if you disobey. But if you obey me, I can share the secret with you and you, too, can have power-
Until Father says one day, when he finds me covered with blood, "I wish Unwyrm had killed you that day in the birthing place, I wish he had killed me and eaten me rather than let me live to make you what you are. I'm sorry that I taught you, any of you."
So I kill him and eat his brain in front of the others, even though I find no mindstone in it; I don't tell them that he had no stone. And now my power is perfect, even greater than Unwyrm's power, because he has no one to obey him and I have all of these.
Patience screamed at the memory, at the taste and smell of Father's blood, at the look of horror and awe and admiration in the other geblings' eyes. I couldn't do this, I never could have done this, she cried out in revulsion. And yet this is what I was raised for, to kill in order to get power, to devour anything that threatens to block me from my will-
"It's maddening her," said Angel.
"Give her time to find herself," said Reck.
The voices meant nothing to Patience. For all she could see was the bloodshed through the years. The murders of the gebling kings, the murders of the Heptarchs.
Wars and assassinations, tortures and rapes, she remembered committing all the crimes of seven thousand years of power and she hated herself for all that she had done-
Nothing in my life except death and terror, she thought.
And then her own mother's face (or was it her mother?
She had three hundred mothers) smiling at her, touching her, saying, "Broken heart, don't cry. Don't cry at the' things that have been done in your name. For every life that was taken, there were ten thousand who lived in peace with your protection. Do you think your power would last for a moment if all you had was the power to kill? They would rise up and strike you down. You have the power to draw them together, to make them act as one. You have made the weak strong by the sound of your voice, and they love you forever."
Patience clung to the message of that voice. I have made the weak strong by the sound of my voice. They love me forever.
And at last, having found a thread to cling to so she would not fall into the abyss, she slept.
Chapter 13. TRUE FRIEND
SHE AWOKE LYING IN A BED, COVERED WITH THREE FEATHERBEDS.
A cold breeze from a broken window whipped past her face. The trees outside the window were golden with autumn. Are you really the trees of Earth? she asked them silently. Or are you strange alien creatures that have captured the trees and hidden them deep inside, so you can wear their mask?
She thought of all the children she had ever had in her hundreds of lives, pictured them smiling up at her, good children every one; but then something dark, a dark worm crawled into their mouths and now when they look out at her it is the wyrm with the tiny head and the fanlike fingers-not a wing at all-and the hundred fleshy organs of tearing and digesting and reproducing-Unwyrm, do you know the difference between eating and mating?
Or is there a difference to you? All hungers are the same hunger.
She opened her eyes. She saw him before she saw anything else, standing there half lit by the dim autumnal light through the window. Will. His face watching her in his utter silence, his unreadable stolidness, like an animal; or no, like a mountain, like the face of living rock.
Why are you watching me?
She did not speak; he did not answer. He only noticed that her eyes were open, nodded, and walked from the room. He closed the door gently behind him. It was the tenderness, the gentleness of the closing of the door that told her that he was not, after all, made of stone. It wasn't lifelessness that made him still, it was peace. He had made his peace with life, and so his face had no more to say, no silent pleas to make between speeches, and his mind had no speeches to make between silences.
He isn't hungry. He is already satisfied.
And as she thought of hunger, she felt again the Cranning call, as powerful as ever, gnawing at her womb.
I am hungry to have his babies, she thought. It came to her as the memory of a hundred nightmares during the time she slept. He will make me hungry for his seed in me, just as his mother made the Starship Captain yearn for her. He will make me think that it is ecstasy.
She shuddered. But now that she had dreamed Unwyrm a hundred times, his writhing as he devoured his mother and slaughtered his helpless deformed brothers, now that it was so familiar to her it did not make her lose control of herself and scream, as she had done in all the dreams.
She was too tired of it to cry out against it anymore. I'll just have to see to it that it doesn't happen, that's all.
He'll die before he has me, or I'll die. His children will not be born from my body.
But even if I live, will I ever want a man as I want Unwyrm? What if he dies while still calling me? Will that need be with me then forever, always unsatisfied?
Thoughts like that made her angry with herself. She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. At once she was almost overcome with dizziness. The door to her room opened, and Angel came in. Angel, looking strong and healthy, no longer weak from the wound in his throat.
"Your wound has healed and the trees have turned colors," she said. "How long have I slept?"
"Forty days and forty nights, like Moses in the mount, like the rain of the deluge, like Elijah fasting in the wilderness. If you can call it sleeping. You've done a lot of shouting and kept us all awake. Even River has complained that you frighten his monkey. How are you?"
She reached up and touched the side of her head that Ruin had shaved. The hair had grown several centimeters.
"Weak," she said. "Unwyrm is calling me."
"We were afraid the scepter was too much for you."
"It wasn't the scepter, really. It was all the terrible things I had done."
"You didn't do any of them."
"But I did. Angel. No, don't argue with me. I didn't kill my own father and eat his brain, the way the first gebling king did, or kill my own wife, as my father did.
But I have killed. Obeying you or father, or to save my own life, I have killed easily, with pleasure, with pride.
That made it hard for me to-separate myself from all their crimes. I could only find and follow a very slender hope running from life to life throughout my past, Angel.
A hope that it all works together for good. That out of the blood I've poured into the ground, life can grow again."
"Many people who've just awakened from a sound sleep think they're philosophers," Angel said.
"Don't make fun of me," sa
id Patience. "This is important. This is my-my contribution to the scepter, if I have one to make. All the children will look to me, gebling children and human children, they all will look to me and I have to keep them safe. From Unwyrm's children. And yet sometimes I think-Unwyrm's children would not be murderers. They would all be bound together with one heart and mind, the way the wyrms were before the coming of humans to this world. Before human genes made us strangers to each other. Unwyrm's children would never be alone. And I could be their mother."
"Don't say that. Patience," said Angel.
"It's just that I finally understood the thought he sends to me, Angel. I know what Unwyrm did to his own mother. He's the devourer, not me. I'll kill him if I can." But she knew she didn't sound convincing. It didn't matter, though. It wasn't Angel she had to convince, it was herself.
"He is a wyrm, then? A descendant of the ones the first colonists killed?"
"He is the Unwyrm, Angel. The very one. The only one. Alive for all seven thousand years of the world's history."
"To live so long-"
"We're strangers here. The native life can adapt itself, make changes in a single generation that we take a million years to make. Unwyrm is more intelligent than all of them. In him are combined the most powerful of the native gifts, and he called the most brilliant of human minds, and they must have taught him all they knew. What's to stop him from repairing himself genetically, when he finds any part of him becoming weak, decaying?
What's to stop him from living until he's ready to mate?"
"Why would he wait so long?"
"I don't know. I only know how humans looked to the first geblings. The machines that let our ancestors fly, that made pictures in the air, that chewed up forests and spat out wheatfields. What did the wyrms see, when a new star appeared in the sky and metal birds skittered above the surface of the world? They weren't gnats, replacing safe and stationary wheat. They were at the peak of the ecological system, these wyrms, but we were more powerful than they. And if they were to replace us-"
"They had to know all that we knew."
"The wheat sits there, passively waiting for its enemy to destroy it. But the wyrms knew that human beings weren't passive. We were the most deadly competitor for life that this world had ever seen. To overpower us, the wyrms' grandchildren not only had to be identical to human beings-they had to excel at the things that human beings do best. They had to know more, to be more beautiful, more brilliant, more powerful, more dangerous.
How could a single wyrmchild, Unwyrm, hiding in his ice cave in Skyfoot, how could he learn enough to prepare his children?"
"An ice cave? That means he's high in the mountain, where the glaciers are."
"Don't you understand, Angel? He couldn't defeat us if we built machines. The wyrms knew it from the start.
When they captured the Starship Captain, before they even brought him down, they first made him destroy all the metal that was easy to mine. But there was still metal-I remember my ancestors who pursued it, who mined it, who tried to build machines with it. They might have succeeded. But always the geblings came, a flood of geblings out of Cranning."
"I'm reasonably familiar with the history of the world."
"Angel! I'm telling you what no one ever knew. I'm telling you the why of it. I've seen the pattern in it, remembering it all at once like this. Unwyrm sent the geblings to stop mankind from making the machines that would have made us irresistible. He waited all this time to keep us weak while he gathered wisdom to himself.
He gave himself seven thousand years. And then fulfilled his own prophecy by causing my brothers to be killed and me to be-"
He touched her head gently, to soothe her. His hand felt cool and loving on her forehead, on her cheek.
"River tells us that Cranning is only a week away, and the autumn winds are strong for getting there. But we have to go now. The winter winds will beat us back. It's good you came to yourself today-we'll bring you to Cranning in your right mind."
There was an artificiality in his tone as he spoke; his heart wasn't in what he said, and she couldn't think why he was lying to her. But that was no surprise, she could hardly think at all. So she let it go, didn't try to discover what it was he was concealing. "Tell Reck and Ruin that I also know the map of Cranning."
"They know you do. You've told us much in your sleep. We've been writing down the stories you shouted out, and Heffiji has been storing them away here and there. I've tried to figure out what her system is."
"She doesn't have one."
"That was my conclusion. A true dwelf. But no one else could have done this. Unwyrm was calling all the people who knew things. He would have called her, too, if she had actually known anything. The only way the knowledge could stay in the world was with someone like Heffiji who knew nothing of any value, but could lay her hands on everything that mattered. It's all here. All the learning of the world. Reck and Ruin have called geblings out of Cranning to guard the place. They're going to glaze and shutter the windows, put on a new roof. Whatever it takes to protect this house."
"Do the geblings accept Reck and Ruin as their king?"
Angel shrugged. "Who knows what goes on in their minds? They say one thing, but something completely different might be going on under the surface. The fact remains that for the time being, these kings can't go more than a few dozen meters away from you, or they start being driven away from Cranning by Unwyrm.
They can't exactly claim their right to lead the geblings while they're still chained to the human Heptarch, can they?"
"We've wasted enough time," Patience said. "Take me to the boat."
"We'll go as far as Cranning, but no deeper into the mountain until you're stronger."
"I wasn't sick, just crazy," Patience said. "Crazy people can be amazingly strong."
"Is the call-any different now?"
"Only because I know who it is that's calling me."
"So he doesn't control you-"
"Or if he does, he controls me so thoroughly that I don't know I'm controlled."
"That puts my mind at ease."
"Angel, I've become a terrible person."
"Have you?"
"If the scepter had been given to me before I knew the things we learned here in this house, I could never have coped with it. If I had been brought to Cranning without understanding all the things I understand, I would have been helpless when I faced him. I look back on all that you and father did, all that I did and the geblings did and-it was right, it was necessary."
"Why does that make you terrible?"
"Even Mother's death, Angel. Even that."
"Ah."
"What kind of person am I, to agree that my own mother had to die? I have lived through that so many times, all my life, only this time through Father's eyes. He never forgave himself for it. Yet I forgive him."
Angel bent down and kissed her forehead. "My Heptarch, only you are fit to rule mankind."
"What kind of person am I?"
"A wise one."
She didn't argue, though she knew it wasn't true. Wise she was not. But strong-she was strong. She had mastered the mindstone. There was a true self before all the folds of her life. She knew that much, but the rest of her self was still elusive, out of reach, out of sight. So let Angel call her wise, she cared nothing for that. "But am I good, Angel?"
"As Heptarch, your choice is no longer between good and bad. Your choice is between right and wrong."
She had been his student long enough to understand the difference, and agree that he was right. At least in her role as Heptarch, she could no longer live by the same moral code that others lived by. Her decisions now were the decisions of a larger community than just herself. But what community? "Right for whom?" she asked.
"For humankind, Heptarch."
She knew at once that he was wrong. "No. The King's House is all the world. I am a gebling, too. All the life that speaks, and all the life that doesn't speak, all the life of the world ex
cept one."
"And that one wants you. But I'll die before I let him have you. He thinks I'm too weak to save you, but I can, and I will."
His fervor as he spoke was no pretense. Whatever lies he was telling, this was not part of it. He did love her.
She touched his cheek. "Serve me as a free man. Angel."
"Slave or free, I serve you the same. What difference does it make?"
"I ask you now, as a free man, to help me."
Angel gently dressed her and led her from the room.
To her surprise, the house was busy with geblings, hundreds of them. Her room had been off limits to them, but through the rest of the house they were busy glazing, patching, repairing, making it whole again. Patience sat in the common room by a scant fire, a fall of sunlight catching her chair to help keep her warm, and watched the ladders going up and down, moving along the walls, the geblings scattering here and there. River's monkey scampered underfoot-a dozen times he was kicked, nearly stepped on, or knocked off some high perch. Always he got up, screeched a string of unintelligible obscenities, and bounded back into the thick of the fray. Patience could not help but notice that Heffiji was much like the monkey, almost frantic with delight and worry, scurrying in and out of the house, up and down the stairs. "Don't touch that!" she'd cry. The geblings would laugh and mock her, but they would also obey.
In his jar on the mantle piece. River slept. Away from Cranwater, the world did not exist for him.
Patience found herself trying to feel the geblings' silent communication, the speechless call of the othermind.
She remembered so clearly how it felt, when she was each of the first few gebling kings. Yet now she felt nothing. It was like reaching out with her hand, only to discover that her hand had been cut off. She watched them wistfully, grieving that she could never know them except in the vicarious memories that came to her through the scepter. And the geblings went about their business, not knowing who she was, not guessing that she was the one living human who knew what it was like to be a gebling, who could understand the constant fellowship that gave them their anchor in the world. How did I find the courage to live before, when I never knew what it was to know another person?
Wyrms Page 18