Ringships

by Peter Claisse

  ‘Don’t touch any of it.’ Captain Turner said. ‘Don’t tell it anything more about where we are.’

  At the dockside they found an old hand operated crane. It looked very ordinary, so they started to turn it around to help load the grain but as soon as they did it turned back and started to turn around and round. They realised what they had done and quickly moved away from it, but it was too late. The whole sky lit up with a blinding flash. They felt the heat from it on their skin but, to their amazement, saw no damage.

  Checking around they saw that just the very tops of the ship’s masts had been scorched but everything else had been protected by the city walls. Soon smoke was blowing through the streets and they ran to try to find the fire, eventually realising that it was the forest outside that was burning.

  The beam flashed again and this time they saw another flash out to sea. The first pylon was firing at them, but it was not strong enough to do damage. Adam called his men together.

  ‘It cannot hurt us here.’ He said. ‘That is what the walls were built for.’

  ‘What happens when we sail?’ One of the men asked.

  ‘It will not know where we are.’ He replied, and then paused to think before adding. ‘But we shall have to take the ring out of the ship.’

  When they started work they soon realised how long this was going to take. The whole structure had been built around the ring and it was almost as wide as the hull. Getting it out would involve removing planking and beams right across the width of the deck between the masts, and then rigging a derrick to lift the ring onto its edge and then far enough up to slide the ship away from beneath it. Before they could start most of the cargo of grain would need to be unloaded. The ring formed almost all of the ballast, so they would have to replace it with stones from the collapsed buildings. These would take up more space so there would only be just enough remaining to fit the grain back in.

  They soon stopped worrying about disturbing the machines around them. Whoever or whatever it was that was controlling them had found them but failed to destroy them. There were occasional flashes from the mountain, but the city walls provided good protection.

  Both Adam and the Captain were confident that removing the ring would prevent them from being detected provided they sailed out of the harbour at night without lights. Some of the crew seemed less sure so Adam decided to make quite certain.

  At one end of the harbour there was a shed with a number of small fishing boats still in it. The planks had dried out so the seams in the hulls needed re-caulking but apart from that they were ready for use. On a cloudy night Adam sailed calmly out of the harbour returning a few hours later having both checked the safety and also caught a good load of fish.

  32

  In the Southern Castle, Lynella was growing more anxious as the winter closed in and the ship did not return. She felt the activity at the mountain, not in a direct way that she could understand, just as a feeling that the steady rhythm of the planet was being disturbed.

  Paul could feel nothing directly, but sensed Lynella’s growing tension. Her health was now good and, with a combination its fine halls and some new technology, the castle was a comfortable place to live. Nevertheless, as the weeks went by she grew more and more distracted. It was therefore of little surprise to him when he went looking for her, late one evening as the first of the winter blizzards blew down across the source from the Eastern mountains, he found one of the doors open.

  Delaying just a minute to tell Angus where he was going, he followed he through. The steady glow of the lighting globes revealed a room which was, as expected, in many ways similar to the rooms in the dragons’ mountain. He crossed quickly to a door in the far wall, opening it to find Lynella sitting at an ornate table clearly already exploring far into the network. There were other chairs at the table, so he joined her, soon seeing the logic of the patterns of rings and opening the gateway to join her. From her reaction she had clearly been expecting him, a light echo of her presence came back to him showing him which way to go and urging him to hurry.

  The pathway was long but easy to travel because he knew that she had gone ahead and disabled any traps. He caught up with her at the tower by the river. The damage to the top had been massive and all the pathways to the machinery were blocked but they were not looking for reasons to stay. Slowly now they ventured out into the main routes that led along the line of pylons across the sea. Paul wanted to pause to check in the opposite direction towards the source but Lynella would not delay, from here the chaos was easy to detect.

  They moved forward to the island and the pylons. Paul had spent hours trying to visualise how the circuits within the machines and the pathways between them managed to mimic the workings of the human mind well enough for him to sense and communicate with others through them. He had tried to explain to the others what the sensation was like. The only conclusion they came to was that it was dangerous. He was letting part of his consciousness out of his control. If the link was broken, he would suffer and might not get out. If he let his mind go too far in, he could get trapped like Tiana. Her immortality had little to offer within the machines.

  ‘I have been waiting for you.’ He knew it was her. How a voice could be recognisable when he never actually heard it he did not know; but somehow it was quite clear.

  She had met them far out from the mountain and the machines in it that supported her conscious existence. Their way to the city was blocked, but she did not seem hostile, so they did not know if this was deliberate.

  ‘We came to see what was happening.’ Lynella replied. ‘We sensed that something was going on and came to have a look.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s the only reason you came is it? You never thought to come back and see if you could help me after all the help I gave you.’

  The thought that she was a real person who might be visited like an old friend had never occurred to them. To them she was a nightmare creation, an image of a person but not a human being. Added to that she happily admitted to killing the two mages before they could leave.

  ‘We never thought.’ Lynella started tentatively.

  ‘No, you didn’t think did you.’ She snapped back.

  ‘What was it that you wanted help with?’ Paul asked, hoping that all she might have been after was a sort of social visit.

  Tiana started replaying the images of the final battle of the mage wars. After the first few minutes, Paul and Lynella were impatient to know where it was leading, but still amazed by the detail of the scenes. Seeing them again, without the real battles going on around him, Paul started to analyse what they were. These were actual images that Tiana had seen at a time when she was very closely linked to the machine. Somehow, they had been stored in far more complete detail than would have been possible for a human brain. Since she now existed in the machine, she was able to replay them at will. There would have been few new images to replace them. The machine had no eyes, the only new images would have come from the eyes or memory of others linking to it. That meant that there had been nothing for three hundred years and now just him or Lynella.

  ‘It was not my fault.’ She was saying now. ‘I was asked to be their leader, the node through which the power would flow. Keeping control was almost impossible, it had never been done before. Yet they blamed me, only me, and punished me in such a cruel way.’

  ‘They made you immortal.’ Lynella cut in. ‘Surely they will all be dead by now. At least you are alive.’

  ‘Life is touching, seeing, hearing. I know, and I can feel but that is all I have. That leaves me to think, over and over through generations of mortal life and what I think about is revenge.’

  ‘You can’t take your revenge on the dead.’

  ‘They may still be alive. They have gone through a portal and time will be different. They may have died within seconds of our time, but they may still live.’

  ‘So that is what you want help with.’ Paul replied, wondering what had happened to the Unicorn when it ent
ered a portal. ‘One of our ships is going through a portal but it couldn’t possible carry your great machine and anyway there are thousands of portals and it could never find the right one.’

  ‘There is a ship in the mountain. I have showed it to you. I could travel in it, but it would take two mages to fly it. I could have gone with them, the last two could have taken me but they would not.’

  And so you killed them, he thought. He had the feeling that during this exchange she was advancing towards them. Her approach before had always been tentative and seeming desperate. Now she had come well out from the mountain and was moving confidently along the pathway. Could they pass? He wondered. What was the pathway anyway? Some sort of complex circuit linked together by wires running under the sea along the line of pylons. What would happen if they did pass? Might they change places? He drew back but she just came forward faster.

  ‘You would be asking a lot from us.’ He said, feeling that he had to make excuses. ‘We would go on a very dangerous journey to try to take somebody else’s revenge on people we never knew.’

  ‘Meet them now.’ She replied, standing aside. He had always assumed that she was alone but now a sudden crowd seemed to surge past her, as if mocking his doubt that people could pass. He saw that they were mages with rings encrusted with huge jewels. They came charging towards him, but he sensed immediately that they were not complete personalities like Tiana. They were not stopping because they had no free will to make them stop. They were fragments of memory, real in many respects, but not sentient. He held his ground and felt them brush past, fading as they went. The fragments were, as Tiana had said, very vivid and gave him an immediate picture of who they were and what they had been before.

  Lynella was still beside him. ‘Who were they?’ she asked.

  ‘They were the hundred, all but the two that I killed.’

  ‘But they weren’t people like you.’ Paul interrupted. ‘Those were just copies of images that were in the machine that you have assembled together and can move about. They must have been left there when the mages used the machine but the personalities themselves were not trapped like you.’

  Suddenly he thought it through. Tiana, totally isolated from living beings, and also from the souls that had passed through to the end of the highway, had searched through the machine to see what she could find. Piecing together the fragments, she had tried to make constructs to cushion her isolation, or possibly just targets for her hatred.

  They were retreating back past the pylons as Tiana strode on towards them, not seeming to hurry but not giving them time to stop and look around. Still Paul could not work it out. If she could come this far and work the machines how was it that nobody in the kingdoms knew she was there. At the rate she was moving anybody using the lights in the castle should have seen her.

  They reached the stump of the tower. For one terrible moment Paul thought that they would miss the turn to take them back to the castle and end up trapped at the source. Then he saw it and they hurried into it. Tiana had stopped at the tower.

  ‘Who did this?’ She asked.

  ‘I did.’ Lynella replied.

  Tiana stopped as if to absorb this information.

  ‘How come you have not been here before?’ Paul asked.

  ‘You don’t understand what you did, do you?’

  ‘What I did. I haven’t done anything to this tower.’

  ‘No, what you did to release me.’ Paul was completely confused but Tiana went on to explain, slowly revealing his terrible mistake. When the mages had driven her into the machine they had trapped Tiana by setting locks around her to prevent her from roaming around the planet. Like all of the mage locks the key was a jewel and they made sure that she had no contact with jewels. It was his bad luck that he had been the one to link a jewel to the network when he had been in the tower trying to help Lynella trapped in the mountain.

  ‘I managed to copy it.’ She was saying. It has taken some time to make it work and now I am just finding out what I can do.’

  33

  Back in the castle it was, as always, difficult to describe to the others the way in which a personality could interact on the network. For many of them the whole event was something close to a dream which Paul and Lynella had shared; a story which could be enjoyed and then forgotten. The old steward was sitting quietly by the fire and everybody had assumed that he was asleep until he started to speak.

  ‘Some years ago.’ He started, waiting a moment for everybody to stop and listen. ‘We lived here in the castle and the greatest threat we could imagine was an attack from the dragons. We feared them but thought that we could just about defend ourselves. Next, we found out what the monks could do but we also found Lynella was a mage so, although we were worried about them too, we thought we were safe. After that, the Atlanta came and defeated us and the dragons but eventually the Unicorn came, and we returned home and thought we were safe. Now we have Tiana and I fear her more than I feared any of the others. She is releasing the power that destroyed this planet before and she has the fear and anger to use it.’

  The steward had clearly considered his analysis at length and seemed relieved to have shared it with them. He looked at them one by one across the rim of his glass to gauge their reaction. As far as Lynella could judge, they all took him seriously. Any remaining doubt ended when the globe above them started to pulse with light. Paul and Lynella exchanged glances to confirm that neither of them were controlling it. They knew who it was, but the presence was so faint that they could not detect it. The display lasted for less than a minute, rising in intensity and then fading slowly away. At its peak, the pulses seemed to tremble showing a whole spectrum of colours. The effect was beautiful, showing hints of uncontrolled power and chaos that would follow from it.

  Early next morning, a Jeep pulled up at the castle gate. A simple white flag had been tied to the aerial. It came very slowly because the captain of the Northern keep was escorting it on horseback. Looking down from the high castle windows Paul could see that he appeared unhurt and even relaxed so they went down with more curiosity than fear to meet the visitors.

  The Jeep was being driven by one of the Atlanta’s officers and his passenger was the acting captain. The greetings from captain Turner and the officers who had left the ship with him were sincere if somewhat subdued. The visitor made a very few brief complimentary comments about the castle and how fine it looked and then came straight to the point.

  ‘What do you know about the old ship that flew in last night.’

  ‘What ship?’ Paul asked immediately.

  ‘Good. So, it wasn’t you. I didn’t believe it would be and we managed to persuade the Director to leave it to us to find out. Were those great stone things at the end of the road from the monastery to the source full of big iron rings last time you looked?’

  ‘What? You mean the crucibles? No. One was empty, that was the one the abbot used to attack you when you brought the Atlanta down.’

  ‘There are two empty now.’ He said simply. ‘The missing one flew around in a few crazy loops last night and landed about a mile north of us. It scared the hell out of us.’

  Nobody could reply to this. They stood in shocked silence.

  ‘It’s worse than that.’ He went on. ‘While they were doing it the field strength itself went up and down. Unless we find out what is doing it; it won’t ever be safe to take off.’

  ‘We didn’t do it.’ Lynella replied. ‘But we know who did.’

  ‘Who are they then. Is it the monks or something to do with that man and his dragon?’

  ‘No. It’s somebody who died over 300 years ago.’

  At the city, the work on the Cleopatra progressed well. The firing from the mountain continued but it seemed to the crew that whoever or whatever was controlling it had lost interest. It was now almost routine, there would be occasional flashes that lit up the night sky and every three days a blast that scorched the forest a bit more. The machines around the harbour c
ontinued to move from time to time at random but rarely responded to being moved during the work. Captain Turned was suspicious that something worse was being planned, but Adam continued to sail about in his fishing boat at night without problems.

  Paul and Lynella went back into the network. This time there was no need to travel, Tiana was at the entrance to meet them. She had grown in strength and confidence as she spread her image through every part of the systems established by the mages at the height of their power.

  ‘Why did you move the old ship? It is of no interest to you; it can’t leave the atmosphere’. Lynella asked as soon as contact was made.

  ‘You won’t forget about me this time will you.’ She replied, clearly enjoying the exchange. ‘There is something alien at the source. I can sense it and I decided to make sure that it knew I was here.’

  ‘How did you change the planet’s field?’ Paul’s question caused confusion as she required explanations to understand his unfamiliar language. In the end, it emerged that she had little idea what she had done; all of which was making her more determined to try it again.

  ‘When are your friends going to sail back from the city?’ She asked suddenly.

  ‘We don’t know.’ Lynella replied. ‘We are worried about them. We don’t know why they have been so long. We don’t know what had happened to them.’

  ‘They are still very busy. What are they doing?’

  ‘They only went to harvest the crops.’ Lynella felt she was being drawn into giving information away but was so glad to hear that they were still alive and working she decided to risk it. ‘Where are they working?’