And then the fuxes dashed on ahead and I was left alone, striding across the tundra toward the Rio de Luz.
I came out of the fog.
And I looked up and up at what rose above me, touching the angry sky and stretching as far away as I could see to left and right. It seemed hundreds of kilometers in length, but that was impossible.
I heard myself moaning.
But I could not look away, even if it burned out my eyes.
Lit by the ever-changing curtain of Medea's sky, the crash and downdripping of a thousand colors that washed the ice in patterns that altered from instant to instant, the Rio de Luz had been transformed. The man had spent three years melting and slicing and sculpting kilometers of living ice — I couldn't tell how many — into a work of high art.
Horses of liquid blood raced through valleys of silver light. The stars were born and breathed and died in one lacy spire. Shards of amber brilliance shattered against a diamond-faceted icewall through a thousand apertures cut in the facing column. Fairy towers too thin to exist rose from a shadowed hollow and changed color from meter to meter all up their length. Legions of rainbows rushed from peak to peak, like waterfalls of precious gems. Shapes and forms and spaces merged and grew and vanished as the eye was drawn on and on. In a cleft he had formed an intaglio that was black and ominous as the specter of death. But when light hit it suddenly, shattering and spilling down into the bowl beneath, it became a great bird of golden promise. And the sky was there, too. All of it, reflected back and new because it had been pulled down and captured. Argo and the far suns and Phrixus and Helle and Jason and Theseus and memories of suns that had dominated the empty places and were no longer even memories. I had a dream of times past as I stared at one pool of changing colors that bubbled and sang. My heart was filled with feelings I had not known since childhood. And it never stopped. The pinpoints of bright blue flame skittered across the undulating walls of sculpted ice, rushed toward certain destruction in the deeps of a runoff cut, paused momentarily at the brink, then flung themselves into green oblivion. I heard myself moaning and turned away, looking back toward the ridge across the fog and tundra; and I saw nothing, nothing! It was too painful not to see what he had done. I felt my throat tighten with fear of missing a moment of that great pageant unfolding on the ice tapestry. I turned back and it was all new, I was seeing it first and always as I had just minutes before . . . was it minutes . . . how long had I been staring into that dream pool . . .how many years had passed . . . and would I be fortunate enough to spend the remainder of my life just standing there breathing in the rampaging beauty I beheld? I couldn't think, pulled air into my lungs only when I had forgotten to breathe for too long a time.
Then I felt myself being pulled along, and cried out against whatever force had me in its grip, that would deprive me of a second of that towering narcotic.
But I was pulled away, and was brought down to the base of the River of Light, and it was Ben of the Old Times who had me. He forced me to sit, with my back to the mountain, and after a very long time in which I sobbed and fought for air, I was able to understand that I had almost been lost, that the dreamplace had taken me. But I felt no gratitude. My soul ached to rush out and stare up at beauty forever.
The fux flowed with me, and through ekstasis I felt myself ceasing to pitch and yaw. The colors dimmed in the grottos behind my eyes. He held me silently with a powerful flow until I was William Pogue again. Not just an instrument through which the ice mountain sang its song, but Pogue, once again Pogue.
And I looked up, and I saw the fuxes hunkered down around the body of their "holy man," and they were making drawings in the ice with their claws. And I knew it was not I who had brought them to beauty.
He lay face down on the ice, one hand still touching the laser tube. The hologram projector had been attached with a slipcard computer. Still glowing was an image of the total sculpture. Almost all of it was in red lines, flickering and fading and coming back in with power being fed from base camp; but one small section near the top of an impossibly angled flying bridge and minaret section was in blue line.
I stared at it for a while. Then Ben said this was the reason I had been brought to that place. The holy man had died before he could complete the dreamplace. And in a rush of flow he showed me where, in the sculpture, they had first understood what beauty was, and what art was, and how they were one with the Grandparents in the sky. Then he created a clear, pure image. It was the man, flying to become one with Argo. It was the stick figure in the mud: it was the uninvited guest with the lines of radiance coming out of his head.
There was a pleading tone in the fux's ekstasis. Do this for us. Do what he did not have the time to do. Make it complete.
I stared at the laser lying there, with its unfinished hologram image blue and red and flickering. It was a bulky, heavy tube, a meter and a half long. And it was still on. He had fallen in the act.
I watched them scratching their first drawings, even the least of them, and I wept within myself; for Pogue who had come as far as he could, only to discover it was not far enough. And I hated him for doing what I could not do. And I knew he would have completed it and then walked off into the emptiness of Farside, to die quickly in the darkness, having done his penance . . . and more.
They stopped scratching, as if Ben had ordered them to pay some belated attention to me. They looked at me with their slanted vulpine eyes now filling with mischief and wonder. I stared back at them. Why should I? Why the hell should I? For what? Not for me, that's certain!
We sat there close and apart, for a long time, as the universe sent its best light to pay homage to the dreamplace.
The body of the penitent lay at my feet.
From time to time I scuffed at the harness that would hold the laser in position for cutting. There was blood on the shoulder straps.
After a while I stood up and lifted the rig. It was much heavier than I'd expected.
Now they come from everywhere to see it. Now they call it Oddum's Tapestry, not the Rio de Luz. Now everyone speaks of the magic. A long time ago he may have caused the death of thousands in another place, but they say that wasn't intentional; what he brought to the Medeans was on purpose. So it's probably right that everyone knows the name Virgil Oddum, and what he created at the East Pole.
But they should know me, too. I was there! I did some of the work.
My name is William Ronald Pogue, and I mattered. I'm old, but I'm important, too. You should know names.
THE MOBS THAT FED the guillotines raged, screaming, through Galiopolis, storming the Sixty Towers, dragging out the Lords and their executioners, their secret police, their paladins; holding mass slayings in the verdant gardens and tiled squares. The chunk of the blade became a regular beat in the great city of gold. The holiday cheers of the mobs rose round and round the onyx Towers as each Brother Lord in his turn was separated from his head.
And yet, miraculously, one Lord escaped. His spies among the poor had warned him that the vassals were beginning to talk of blood. They had warned him days ago. The last complement of peasant children taken for the arena had set the starving poor loose. They became a drum beating for death. He heard the swelling sound, and he took steps to protect himself if the worst should happen. Now, as the mobs became a tide washing through the great city, he fled as his Brother Lords died. He alone, of the sixty Brother Lords, escaped.
He used secret passages and hidden tunnels, and he escaped to the edge of the golden city. There at the verge of the forest, a rat pack close on his trail, he found the cleverly concealed pit that had been dug under the protecting, ground-sweeping branches of a thylax tree; and he buried himself, with only his dirt-smeared face and the muzzle of a stinger showing through the foliage. And he waited.
This Lord was known to the peasants as Garth of the Red Hand. And he knew how to wait. In the chambers of pain beneath his Tower he had absorbed the lessons of waiting: to enjoy with a gentle patience the exact science of his resident hectors
as they pleasured themselves with razors and chemicals and fire. Masks and needles and paring knives and lasers. He could sit without moving for hours.
Now he waited in fear. For close on a thousand years the Brother Lords had ruled, and fear was unknown to them, but Garth was not ashamed to admit he was frightened. From the balcony of his throne room he had seen the mob dragging Oldan and his mistresses to the blade. He had seen them clubbed to their knees, their arms held straight back, and the thrashing in the moment before the sound of swish and chunk. He had seen that the blade had already grown dull, and that the peasants took pleasure in the fact: raising the blade for a second strike; the head only half-severed; the body twitching.
He was not ashamed of his fear. And he waited with the utmost patience. There was no alternative.
The pack came crashing through the forest, and from his pit he watched. He saw the head of his brother Wanzor, eyes still open, thumping at the belt of the pack's leader.
Then they were gone, ripping away the entwined branches of the downswept trees, plunging deeper into the forest to find him. He had to believe all the others were dead now. They would . . . count heads. They would know he had not been sent to the blade. They would not rest till they had him.
There had to be an escape route. Nowhere in the world was safe. Nowhere in this world.
By now they had smashed open his treasure rooms and scattered his diamonds, killed his concubines, slaughtered his matched teams of horses and panthers. The thousand-year rule of the Brother Lords had ended.
There would be retribution when the peasants realized they could not rule themselves. When they called for their Lords to return.
Then he remembered what he had known a moment before; there were no more Lords. The fifty-nine Brothers were meat now, nothing but meat. And the sixtieth shivered in a hole in the forest.
Night came; and with it the merciless light of the full moon. Garth thought the time had come to escape. There was a way. He had spent his time waiting . . . and thinking. As he began to scoop away the dirt that hid him, torches moved into the forest. He could see their firefly light moving out from the burning core of Galiopolis. He waited till the hungry mobs had divided into hunting groups and had searched past his ignoble hideout. If he had sought hope in the delusion that they might have forgotten him, he knew, now, that they would never rest till they had located and slaughtered the last of the Brother Lords.
And so he burrowed deeper; he waited; crouched in the damp hole, his stinger aimed at the forest's shadows — waiting for the first unfortunate piggish face to discover him.
He waited and waited, but they seemed to have returned by other routes, seemed to have bypassed him in the darkness. For now, for a while, he was safe.
Then, as dawn sent its first glow through the trees, he crawled out of the pit beneath the ground-scraping branches, and cautiously made his way into the city.
To the Experimental Buildings.
The Professor had survived because he had come up from peasant stock. But even though he had been granted an elevated position in the world of the Lords, he knew his place. He knew who was of the royal creche, and who was not. And so he cowered in fear as Garth of the Red Hand leveled the stinger at his face.
Rats danced in the Professor's eyes, but he knew he was helpless. It was a tiny weapon, but it was in the hand of this Lord he had known all his life. Knew him as a thing that could kill without drawing a hesitant breath. He stared at this man, one of the former rulers of the world, whom he had never thought to see alive again; and he wished with a most unscientific intensity that there might be some way he could complete the moist job the peasants had begun.
Garth perched, hip cocked on the edge of a low experiment shelf, pointing the stinger directly into the Professor's face. "I have been subsidizing you far too long, Professor; but your foolish experiments may at last proffer some reward." The Professor looked confused. What could the Red Hand want that he could give?
"You will send me back one hundred years; and if you do not, I will burn out first your left eye; and then your right. And then your left leg; and then your right. . . and then . . ." He spoke in a soft, steady voice. The old man knew he was serious; he would do as he said.
"But, my Lord," he said, indicating the banks of time-stress warpers, "we have not yet perfected the machine. We can send you only to one historical era and only to one geographical coordinate: to the Mesozoic . . . more specifically, to the Upper Jurassic Period; approximately one hundred and thirty million years ago."
Lord Garth studied the scientist with narrowed eyes. "Convince me this is not a trick, old man; or die here and now."
The Professor replied with obvious fear in his voice. "We don't yet know why this should be so, my Lord; it is the consuming subject of our studies. It is the reason we have not been able to repay your unceasing faith in our continuing experiments. But we have sent men back and we have brought them forward again, with no difficulty. A genuine breakthrough; some might call it a miracle of science."
"And I call it useless for my purpose." He was silent a moment. Then his face, all but his eyes, went dead. "And your widows might call it the cause of their loneliness."
The Professor found breathing difficult. The tiny blind eye of the stinger stared unwaveringly at him.
"My Lord, please! It is only that we have not yet been able to develop a method for precise chronophase calibration."
Garth read the old man's fear. An unpleasant truth, that was what he was hearing. "Can you bring me back, after a suitable amount of time has elapsed here?"
"Yes, my Lord. You remain in the stress field, no matter where you go in that period. You could be brought back at any time."
"Then you will do it," Garth said. He lowered the stinger and stood away from the shelf as if ready for the journey.
"But. . ."
"You will do it" Garth said softly. "And hear me, Professor. I have a trusted agent still at large; one who owes his life to me; one who will see your every action. If you do not bring me back when all this is ended . . . " He waved his hand toward the outside of the Experimental Buildings. "He will not merely kill you . . . oh no: he has instructions to kill your wives and all your children. Slowly. As they would have died in the rooms of pain in my Tower. Do you understand, Professor? Do you really understand?"
The old man nodded. It had all been bluff, but the Professor could not know Garth was lying. He felt the flames of hatred burn higher; this animal should be killed as quickly as possible, should not be permitted to escape. Even in an age one hundred and thirty million years gone, his evil was something that should not be permitted to exist.
But he was old, and easily frightened. He was hampered as Garth was not: he had love in him. He would do it.
The old man readied his machines. And when the bright, smooth metal transmission stage had been elevated, and when the banks of time-stress warpers softly hummed with power, and when the cone of orange light shone down on the stage, he told Lord Garth to stand on the circular plate.
The escape route lay open before the last of the sixty Brother Lords. He did not move.
"How strong is your hatred?" he said. He studied the old man. "Is it strong enough that you would condemn your women and all your children?" The old man was too terrified to speak. "It might be that strong, though I think not. But I ask myself, 'Why has the Professor not mentioned the dangers that I might face in that ancient time? Even if I should be there but moments, and years pass here, and the Professor grows older and returns me in the blink of an eye . . . what of the invisible microbes in that ancient world? What of the beasts that roamed there? Am I not being sent off too easily, with so little preparation?' I ask myself these things, Professor. And you do not answer. "
The Professor clasped his hands nervously. "The danger, my Lord, would be to any creatures living in that time, not to you. Contamination from the future, from sophisticated viruses we might carry, that is the threat." You are the threat, then a
s now, he thought. "And as you say . . . you will perceive the journey and your time there as merely an instant. Ten years here, even twenty . . . as you say . . . the blink of an eye."
Garth looked at him. "Twenty years? You won't live another twenty years."
"But my wives and children will."
"And what if you die before the time is right to return me?" He asked the question aloud, but it was as if he were worrying it in his mind.
"There is an automatic return mechanism, my Lord. It could be set before you go."
"And what would prevent you from canceling it once I was gone?"
"I wouldn't do that, my Lord. On my honor, I would not do that."
Garth stared at him silently for a long time. Then, as if he had thought it through logically, considering every vaguest possibility, he said, "My agent will know when the time is right for my return, for the moment when your beloved peasants need a Lord to come again and rule them as before. Not sixty Brother Lords, but one. Just one."
"Yes, my Lord. Your. . . agent . . . "
Garth considered the old man. He seemed cowed by the thought of shadowy watchers. "And what of the great saurians that dominated the world? I am no peasant, old man. I have studied. I know of these dinosaurs, these terrible meat-eaters."
"That has been considered, my Lord. The experiments we have conducted, the men who have gone back, have selected the very site to which you will be transported. A safe location we have visited many times. The Morrison Formation, in the area they called Utah over a thousand years ago. Classic Upper Jurassic terrain, my Lord: warm, equitable climate; the seas have long since retreated to the north; this is a broad, low floodplain. Very sparsely inhabited by saurians, though our most recent expedition reported a herd of sauropods, very likely apatosaurus, but possibly diplodocus, foraging in the area."
Garth tried to remember. "They were herbivores? They did not eat meat?"
The Professor nodded with enthusiasm. "Exactly. Harmless vegetarians. Safe, my Lord, absolutely safe for the few moments you will exist in that time."
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