by David Drake
She and Timon, with a vanguard of a dozen or so behind them, moved into the Inner Sanctum. The Blaskoye were here, the Council of Law-givers. They were gathered around a figure. Each had a stick in his hand, and they were beating something on the ground. A closer look told her it was the form of a man.
Abel?
From behind a sacrifice platform, a form launched itself at her. Mahaut turned, too late. It struck her, and she was knocked sideways. She landed with a thud on her side. Pain shot through her, but only for a moment. Nothing was broken.
She turned, bringing her gun to bear as she did.
There stood Reis Athanaskew. He stood holding a small knife. It was perfectly obvious from his grip that he had no idea how to use the weapon.
He moved toward Mahaut.
It would be a shame, but she’d have to gun him down.
Timon stepped between them. For a moment, the brothers exchanged glances. Then Timon swung the butt of his gun in a jabbing arc. It cracked into Reis’s temple.
The priest dropped like a stone.
Timon helped Mahaut to her feet. She nodded toward the Blaskoye, and Timon understood what she meant. Their retinue was outside the Inner Sanctum entrance, with no shot. This would be up to herself and Timon. Together they brought up their rifles. Each had four shots left.
One by one they picked off the Blaskoye. The Redlanders seemed transfixed, unable to pull themselves out of their ritual beating even as their companions died.
It only took one bullet to drop each, and there were nine. When her rifle was done, she took a pistol from her belt, aimed, and, at close range, blew the last Blaskoye away.
She rushed over to check on the form they’d been beating.
“Abel!” She pulled the body of a Blaskoye away.
It wasn’t Abel. It was a man, but he was gray haired. Dressed in priestly orange. The face was destroyed, but who else could it be but the Abbot of Lindron?
“Mahaut.” A cracking voice from across the room. “Mahaut.” Louder.
It was coming from a crystalline wall. She recognized it from Thursday school descriptions. The Eye of Zentrum.
There, his back against the stone, was Abel. At first, she thought she saw agony on his face.
“Abel!”
His back was to the wall, the Eye. His arms were outstretched. His legs were together. He was shirtless, and there was a bloody bandage dangling from his lower torso.
Then she realized it wasn’t agony she was seeing. Abel was smiling.
Greetings, Mahaut Jacobson, said a high, genderless voice. It seemed to come from everywhere, from the air around her. It is very interesting to speak to you in person after all these years.
“Zentrum? Is that who you are? I don’t—”
I am Center, Mahaut. One of the voices Abel told you of.
“You’re—”
Real? Yes. I am real.
“Where are you?”
More difficult to answer. These colored stones you see…they are, in a manner of speaking, bigger on the inside than on the out. You may think of me as residing within them, although that’s not quite accurate.
“But this is the Tabernacle of Zentrum.”
It was.
Was.
“Let Abel go. What are you doing to him?”
He is free to go, Mahaut Jacobson, said the voice.
Mahaut moved to the base of the dais stairs. Three low, broad steps up led to the wall and the Eye.
“Abel, get down from there,” she called. “Please come down. Stop smiling at me like that! This is scaring me. You’re scaring me.”
Abel let out a dry laugh. “Don’t worry,” he croaked. “We’re completing Raj’s transfer now. Almost done.”
They stood and look at one another wordlessly for a while. Then Abel smiled and nodded. “It’s finished,” he said. There was a slight hiss of air, and his arms flopped down from the wall. Abel rubbed both of them as if to return feeling to them. He took a step forward. The crystal behind him was smeared with blood.
His back must be shredded to make that large a stain, she thought.
Abel took another step—and collapsed.
He would have tumbled down the steps and crashed onto the floor of the chamber had Mahaut not rushed forward and caught him.
PART FIFTEEN
The Climb
After the Civil War
1
Lindron
House Jacobson
Abel’s fever blasted in like a sandstorm and did not abate. His superficial wounds healed, but the pain in his gut was fantastic—at times, almost unendurable. The gangrenous smell erupted each time his bandages were changed. He knew he was dying. So did those around him.
“I can do this,” Mahaut whispered to him. “You brought me back. I’ll bring you back.”
For a while his fever raged, then, ominously, he was struck with chills, and no wrappings would warm him. Finally, he lay exhausted for much of the day.
“Don’t you go,” Mahaut whispered. “Not after all this, not when we’ve won the fight.”
Mahaut and his father set up a vigil in which they divided the days and nights staying by his side. Abel had candid moments within his general delirium. He could see that his father was resigned. Joab had seen men die before.
“That little villa with the olive trees and arbor overlooking the valley,” he said. “I’m going to build it. You’ll visit me there. We’ll watch the sunset in the west.”
Behind Joab’s words was the sorrow of the father who felt himself destined to outlive his child. Abel wished he could take that away from Joab. His father did not deserve this. But wishing did not make it so.
Mahaut grew more and more drained, but did not give up. If she could save her snake of a former husband from rot, why not the man she truly loved? She refused to believe that it would not happen, that she could call it forth by sheer will. She went in search of Center to find if the marvelous medicines of the past could be applied once again, now that the Stasis was broken.
Abel knew the answer. Center was not God. Center had said as much before. There would need to be research. Means found on Duisberg to grow and filter the exact mold. To recreate the past required a new society, a base of knowledge that combined learning and practice. Months at the least. Probably years.
Abel had only days remaining. Timon stopped by and sat with him, “standing watch,” he called it, so that Mahaut and Joab might rest. He and Timon spoke little. They had never been friends who needed to talk very much.
“I will not lead the Guardian Corps for much longer,” Timon said. “I am gathering a special unit to take to the Redlands. In three weeks, I will set off to find the children of Orash. At that time, you must take over the Corps.” Abel could tell that Timon did not expect this to happen.
“No. You remain in charge,” Abel said. “Send others with colder judgment.”
“I take your point,” Timon answered. “I may obey.”
When he heard his mother again singing his favorite rhyme, Abel knew the time must be drawing near. Would he see her again? Was there an afterlife? Raj was not a believer of any sort; Center had been notably silent on the prospect.
Each day her song became a little stronger, a little clearer—more real to him than the fading world. Was this the way it happened? Those you knew turned to ghosts, and the ghosts became real?
Then one day there was a new living ghost. A large man, running to plumpness no matter how much exercise he got.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here,” Landry said, his Delta accent as pronounced as ever. “I had to go to Orash and back.”
“Oh?”
“We grew it,” Landry said. “The green slime. It was hard. Harder than I thought it would be. But I had my men in the garrison try and try while we were down here fighting—all kinds of methods. Damned if they did not finally produce something interesting.”
Abel was almost too weak to speak, and it took a while for Landry’s words to penetrat
e his fuzzy brain.
“The penicillin,” he said.
“That’s right,” Landry answered. “It killed the slurry of nastiness I grew in a sugar mix. Hate to make you my first human to try it, but we don’t have much choice. If we wait around too long, these damn doctors are going to kill you, and then Land-heiress Mahaut will kill them.”
He helped Abel sit up. In his hand was what looked like a damp wheat cake, about the size of one of Zentrum’s quantum communion wafers. Except for being bright blue-green, it might have been one.
The sight of it made Abel smile.
“You want me to put that into my mouth?”
“I want you to swallow it,” Landry said. “Or else I’ll drip an emulsion down your throat.”
Landry poured a cup of water from the pitcher beside Abel’s bed. “It tastes like it looks,” he said.
Abel took the small cake. With Landry’s help, he put the cake into his mouth.
He let the water soak through it, and the cake began to dissolve. When it was softened, he forced himself to swallow.
Landry had been right. The taste was of plant rot.
Every two watches, he took more of the substance.
Within three days, he improved.
In a week, he was sitting up.
In a week and a half he was getting restless.
When next Churchill rose, he was on his feet, gingerly learning how to use his legs once again.
* * *
Lindron
482 Post Tercium
He made Timon keep the Corps and send Metzler and revolver-equipped Scouts into the Redlands. Timon had grudgingly accepted the logic.
Most had assumed Abel was now Zentrum’s chosen, that he was de facto ruler of Lindron and the Land. They called him the General.
They were wrong. Abel had not the slightest interest in rule—especially since he knew the perfect candidate for the job.
It was as if she had been training all her life for it.
So he would be consort now. He didn’t mind. Landry’s labs needed setting up in the Tabernacle complex. A metal forge the likes of which Lindron and the Land had never seen before must be built.
The Blaskoye had been destroyed, but there were other tribes in the Redlands. Maybe this time there would be something to placate them with other than gunpowder, land, and slaves: knowledge.
And if that did not work, such knowledge could once again be turned into a sword to use against them.
Landry’s newest device from cold hell, the repeating rifle, might knock some sense into them, for instance.
Most of all, Abel found himself spending time with the boy, Abram Jacobson. Abram was not Abel’s kin, nor Mahaut’s blood. In fact, he was the son of a man Abel had hated with all his heart.
He’d also sold the boy’s grandfather into slavery and hung four out of five uncles.
Yet medical science still had many decades, maybe centuries, to go before there would be any possibility of rebuilding Mahaut’s womb.
Abram Jacobson was the only son he and Mahaut would ever have.
When the boy was six, Abel gave Abram his first wooden popgun and took him to the carnadon overlook down by the River. There he could pretend to shoot the beasts to his heart’s content. It was a good thing to practice, even in play.
* * *
Center and Raj.
They were there, in the Tabernacle. For all intents and purposes, they were the Tabernacle. The copies within his mind also remained, but lay in archived form. In a sense, Center and Raj still lived inside him, although they did not speak.
At first, he spent much time in the Tabernacle conversing with them.
Center had known that the capsule would be destroyed—or guessed to a high probability.
The mercy you showed to the Hurthman when you killed him on the cross nullified the Seldonian calculus we had worked so hard to put in place. Yet it was a mathematical nexus. Though a punctuated ending, it also initiated a sensitive response to initial conditions. Of course, if von Hoff had not let you get away with it, all would have been lost from that moment forward to a ninety-eighth percentile certainty. So, in a sense, the recalibrating initial condition was von Hoff’s decision and not yours.
From that moment, victory became discernible, predictable, and almost inevitable.
To you, maybe.
We are talking about me, Center answered dryly. All that was required was for Raj and myself to die, or at least for you to believe we were dead. We needed you inside, in intimate contact with Zentrum.
But where were you?
I had previously created an archived copy of both Raj and myself. We are essentially the same program with different parameters. Yet you must understand that the Center and General Whitehall who were killed by Zentrum, the copies in the capsule, really did suffer and die.
Where were you, General?
Raj laughed. The one place you would never check because you didn’t need to go there anymore.
Abel considered for a moment, then nodded.
The Hideout.
That furnace within your mental structures where conception forms, but does not yet express itself.
And I always thought you couldn’t hear me there.
We could not. There were not yet words to hear.
And you hid there?
We superimposed an inactive, compressed archive onto your preverbal conceptual subroutines.
We hid there, Raj said.
Compressed or not, how could I have personas as complex as you are inside me and not know it?
What makes you so sure that you’re the person, man, and we’re the personas?
Abel shrugged.
I’ve never been sure. You know that.
The human mind is a quantum-based entity. Evolution has provided room to grow. We took a portion of that room.
That I wasn’t using?
That you don’t often access.
And if I had gone to that place, I would have found you?
We were counting on that. That was the wager.
What do you mean?
We were counting on the fact that you would return to your hideout when you were in direct contact with Zentrum in order to protect your thoughts.
And if I hadn’t?
We would have remained inactivated. Our archived copies possessed no awareness. You would have become a tool of Zentrum.
So all of those years of practice getting away from you both were worth something after all.
They were essential for the survival of this world.
Abel laughed, shook his head. I won’t even ask the probability. It would probably scare the dakshit out of me.
Center remained silent.
Aye, it was a gamble, Abel, Raj said quietly. That, there’s no denying.
So we won. But what will you do with the victory, General? Spend your time overseeing roadway construction and irrigation projects on a backwater planet? You conquered a world.
In order to build something stronger. That’s always been the point, man.
After a while, he came less and less to the Tabernacle to converse with them. There was little to say. He didn’t need advice on brushing his teeth with willow wand, growing a garden, or sharpening his sword.
Mahaut, however, was at the Tabernacle constantly. Abel learned of his old friends’ doings through her.
It was enough.
* * *
Treville District
483 Post Tercium
When Abram was old enough, he took the boy to visit Joab. His father had indeed retired to a small villa overlooking Hestinga, the Canal, and the Valley beyond. Abel and the boy travelled up the Road on good donts, and Abel showed Abram how to care for an animal when on the move. After passing through Hestinga and visiting the boy’s beloved Aunt Loreilei and Uncle Frel, they came to the Escarpment and began to climb. It was a worn path that switchbacked up the cliffside, leaving room for only single-file riding. Abram tried to act brave, but Abel could see h
e was trembling, casting quick glances over the side of the trail with its hundredpace drop below, and squeezing his fingers into his dont’s plume enough to make the animal skittish and irritated.
When they stopped to drink water, an insectoid gnat fell into Abrams water cup. He threw it out, and the liquid soaked into the thirsty land.
Abel’s Scout instinct trembled at the sight.
The child must be taught a harsh lesson, a part of him thought. Take his canteen from him and make him walk another league up this mountain with nothing to wet his throat.
Yet Abram did not know better. As far as the boy knew, he lived in a land of plenty, and that was all there was to it.
Suddenly the trail left the switchback and began to climb straight upward. It had been cut into the raw rock of the Escarpment itself. The path was very narrow. Abel dismounted and led both their donts along the last stretch of the trail, while the boy walked ahead. When Abram began to hum, Abel knew the boy had gotten over his fright and would be fine the remainder of the climb.
They finally topped the plateau where Joab had decided to build. It stretched along the Escarpment a good quarter league, and was mostly flat shelf. Abel’s father, who had seen them coming, was waiting with chilled wine under his arbor of olive trees. Behind him was a stone villa, little more than a cabin, really, made of rock hewn from a nearby quarry. It was a mix of black Valley stone and the rusty crimson of Redland rock. Frel Weldletter had provided the design and Joab and a crew of retired Regulars had built it.
Abel gave Abram the reins of the donts and told him to put them away carefully into Joab’s corral, making sure to feed, water, and wipe down the skin around their blow holes where acid had collected during the hard climb.
Abel took a seat beside his father and poured himself a cup of wine.
They gazed out at the Valley below.
“Your mother would have loved this place,” Joab finally said. “It’s more for her than me, you know.”
Abel nodded. “Do you think of her a lot, Father?”
“Every moment,” he said. “How is your DeArmanville girl?”
“Mahaut is well. She sends her love.”
Joab chuckled. “Imagine that. The Land-empress sends old Joab Dashian her love.”
“She wants you to visit the capital soon.”