Ringships

by Peter Claisse

  ‘Down by the docks, they keep using the cranes.’

  ‘Perhaps something has gone wrong with their ship.’ She suggested.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Tiana replied and was gone.

  34

  The officers from the Atlanta were back three days later explaining that the director was completely unconvinced. This time they brought an electronics technician with them.

  ‘Of course, he’s not convinced. He doesn’t believe any of it.’ Paul replied. ‘That’s how we escaped so easily.’

  ‘It gives us a big problem.’ The captain replied. ‘He is saying that you are breaking the truce set up by the Unicorn. The ringship moved again last night and the field keeps changing and he says that if you don’t stop he’ll come here and stop you.’

  The discussion made little progress. The visitors claimed to believe them and seemed sincere with their problem but had absolutely no solutions to offer.

  ‘There is nothing to see.’ Lynella said. ‘We just sit there and look as if we are daydreaming. If you tried to get us out to find out what we are doing, we would be badly injured when the link was broken but all you would see would be us collapsing unconscious on the floor. Not much proof of anything we are saying.’

  This was, however, the only possible thing they had to show to support their story so the whole group gathered in the old room below the castle. The three strangers were positioned carefully on the opposite side of the table between a pair of guards, so they could not interfere.

  It seemed strange to be entering the network with so many people watching, but Lynella had no trouble with the demonstration because she knew that there would be absolutely nothing to see to show what she was doing.

  In the room, there were several palace retainers, some of the crew members from Atlanta who had defected and some guards as well as the visitors. The space was large and enough chairs had been brought for them all but, with some unspoken agreement, they remained silent. At first, they studied the ornate furnishings and, in particular, the inlaid gold patterns in the table, but soon their attention began to waver and some even fell asleep.

  Paul and Lynella tried to keep their voyage as short as possible but, as soon as Tiana met them she was determined to hold their attention for as long as she could. She started on a long list of exactly which machines had been used at the city and suddenly stopped and said.

  ‘I could find the right gate.’

  Paul took a moment to realise what she was saying.

  ‘How?’

  ‘One of the mages just told me where they were going to go.’

  ‘Those mages can’t tell you things – they just feed back what you tell them. They only exist as part of you.’

  Immediately she was gone and was replaced. The personality was not so bold as Tiana – to Lynella it seemed to have much in common with what Tiana had been when they had first found her.

  ‘Who are you?’ She asked.

  ‘I am the Lord of the island.’ The reply seemed to have taken a supreme effort to produce but it was not the actions of a puppet mouthing the words of its master. This was an individual, broken free of the flickering mass that they had seen before.

  ‘The Lord of the island departed with the ships.’

  This time the reply was slow to come. ‘I am an image of the one who left. That makes me no greater but no less and not even identical. I am shaped by my experience as they will be by theirs if they are still living.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Paul asked.

  ‘For me the concept of time is complex. My memories are spread through different ages, but I have not existed through them. I have been a visitor who has sometimes seen others but only rarely been seen by them as you see me now.’

  ‘How many others are there like you? Do all the hundred now have free will.’

  His responses seemed to gain clarity with every word. ‘Freedom is an illusion. There are some who can do what I am doing but none of us are free any more than the lady Tiana of the mountain halls who can do so much that I cannot do. Even you in the physical world, you just exist within different limits to ours, but you still have limits to your actions.’

  As soon as they were out of the network, they knew that they must return. Early the next day that were back in the room, glad that the visitors had gone.

  For something as strange as the network, Paul found it difficult to say how it seemed more strange than normal but somehow, as soon as he entered, he was sure that it was. It was as if he had been in the boat that he normally sailed on the sea was now in an ocean of thick oil. If he stopped to look he saw everything as it should be, the waves were still there, and even the gulls, but getting through the entrance, something he scarcely even remembered doing before, now took a significant effort. In the distance, he could see Tiana looking at him. She was moving freely looking in from normality at him and Lynella beside him struggling to reach her. Suddenly she seemed to reach out and he felt that she was using all her power. For an instant, he was sure that it was a trap but then he realised that her target lay back where he had come from. There was an explosion and huge waves came past him but then the water was clear.

  Regaining his balance, he asked her what it was.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She replied. ‘But it is not all. There are many changes happening in the network that I cannot explain.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t the mages finding their old powers.’ Lynella asked.

  ‘I know them.’ She replied, leaving no room for doubt. ‘Remember that I knew them in your world as well. I know that they are changing, but I knew what they were before, and I know what they are becoming. The presence that I just destroyed was alien.’

  Paul took quick note of her easy assumption of her ability to destroy a presence in the network but saw no sign of hostility from her. He knew that neither he nor Lynella could project any power at all when away from their jewels.

  She tried to explain what the alien presence was in the network. She seemed helpful and co-operative, and they tried together to work out what was happening. Her explanations were difficult to follow, but all centred on the words un-natural and alien.

  She stopped and seemed to tense. ‘I must withdraw’. She said suddenly. She started quickly back towards the stump of the tower.

  Paul and Lynella were confused and discussed whether to follow. They agreed to go cautiously and check for traps.

  At the tower, they could see her in the distance, but she was too far away to call out, so they looked around carefully and followed. Almost as soon as they were past the junction with the pathway to the source Paul realised that this had been an error. He could now feel the alien presence and it was behind him.

  Turning, he saw a person. It was not a presence, it was a person. It was not floating on the sea where he was, it was walking through it. It was not even a person of this planet, it was wearing clothes from earth, from an era long after the original families had left. Now he saw it was a man, young and fit and walking towards him. Soon he was joined by a woman. Also, young and very attractive. Looking even closer, their clothing reminded him of pictures he had seen of his grandparents when they had been young.

  ‘Can you see them’? He asked Lynella nervously, wondering if they were some sort of construct of the network that only he could sense.

  She did not need to reply. Her total attention was fixed on them.

  ‘They came here two generations ago. He said. Where did they land? Where are their bodies. How are they here?’ He kept asking questions as if somehow the answers would be given.

  ‘We must try to go back.’ Lynella said, but showed no sign of moving.

  The couple had stopped now. They were close enough to see their faces clearly and, to his horror, Paul thought he recognised them. His mind raced through his recollection of the ship’s company, friends and family from home, everybody he knew but he could not place them.

  ‘You will not be permitted to return.’ The man spoke with an elegant clarity
.

  Once again, Paul looked at Lynella. This was the worst nightmare. It was what had happened to Tiana. With no free will their bodies would be fit for nothing except death. Unless, he suddenly thought in a moment of desperation, these people with their strange alien powers could take them over. Their minds might be permitted to pass through the end of the highway, but it would be little comfort to join the souls of the dead.

  Tiana had come back and was now with them. Having feared her just minutes before they welcomed her.

  ‘Now you have seen them.’ She said, sounding as frightened as they were. ‘There are more than these two, but they all use the same power.’

  The guard in the castle basement was pleased that he had been given the privileged but simple assignment of making sure nobody entered the room while Paul and Lynella were in the network. He would look in occasionally but thought it better to stay outside most of the time and had found himself a chair which he had positioned in the corridor by the door. He was just about to sit down when he smelled smoke. Running in he saw the two motionless figures at the table and the smoke pouring out from underneath it. Throwing one of the empty chairs away from it he dived under and saw a small black box fixed to the underneath of the table which seemed to have melted in places and was burning with small flames charring the wood above it. Using his dagger, he prized the box loose and pushed it across the stone floor. As the smoke cleared he scraped away the hot charred surface to make sure the table would not burn and climbed out to look at the box. Seeing that it was no longer burning he turned to Lynella. She coughed slightly in the clearing smoke but was still in the network and unaware of what had happened. Seeing no more fire he ran for help, kicking the smouldering remains of the box into the corridor as he went.

  ‘Is it part of the gateway to the network?’ He asked Angus as people ran to help from all directions.

  Angus picked it up and looked at it. It was still hot, but he needed to know. His mind raced. Might he have to call the monks to try to replace it? In the room, Paul and Lynella had still not moved. Did they know what had happened? Did they need to know?

  At that moment, the two officers from the Atlanta arrived. ‘It’s got electronic circuits’. Smith said, leaning over to look at it. ‘They must have put it there when they came from the Atlanta. I knew we shouldn’t have trusted them.’

  ‘What did it do?’ Angus asked.

  They looked at it more carefully, exchanging quick remarks when they identified the burned-out components. Soon they were able to tell him it was a transmitter. It recorded activity at the gateway and let them spy on it from the ship.

  35

  Paul and Lynella were retreating. What terrified them, was that they were retreating away from their means of escape, hurrying back with Tiana towards the mountain. She seemed to run back and then pause by each junction just long enough for shadowy forms to emerge from the pathways and rush on ahead of her. The aliens had not attacked them, they just seemed to fear nothing and pressed on ahead driving everything away in front of them.

  At last they fell back towards the great machines. Tiana drew energy from them and the retreat stopped. Paul and Lynella let their minds into and through the rooms and levels feeling comfort and energy flow from them as they went.

  ‘Now we are like Tiana.’ Paul thought and felt as if an icy wind had blown through him. He tried to rationalise his position. He was a practical engineer and proud of it. He could believe that somehow the gateway enabled people with special natural skills to transmit the data that defined their sentient being into this network. Artificial intelligence was common on earth, although it had become clear that the routes the development had taken for several generations past were leading them to a dead end before they could achieve real sentience. Now he knew that his whole mind was in the network he paused to wonder what was in his body. Could it be a copy, so he could end up with two different futures as was happening to the mages Tiana had re-created? He moved quickly on. A battle was coming; how would it be fought? Thinking of networks, his mind immediately turned to computer viruses. But these were images of a human brain which was not like the computers with their vulnerabilities. This battle would be fought with pure energy. The networks that lost would be burned out, like a computer in a lightning strike.

  He could see the pathway they had come along. There was now a whole crowd of people gathering at an invisible line that Tiana had drawn. He moved closer, standing with Tiana and Lynella and the ranks of ancient mages. He kept reminding himself that none of them existed in the physical reality of the world outside. It made little difference. He knew that he could die in either reality.

  ‘Who are they?’ He asked Tiana as they stared across the divide.

  ‘They are your people. Look at them. Some of them dress like you.’

  Before he could reply they struck. All moving in unison they threw their energy forwards. The whole mountain shuddered as the machine took up the shock. In an instant, he sensed it. This was not a continuous flow of energy, it was pulses. He knew those pulses, he had felt them in every transit. This energy was not drawn from the boiling magnetic magma in the planet, this was drawn from the fusion reactor on Atlanta. Somebody was using the fusion ring and was driving power into the network from it.

  ‘Yes, they must be from a ship. The power is from a ship.’ He replied as they recovered from the blast. ‘But I still don’t know who they are.’

  Their costumes were outlandish but familiar. The couple he had seen before were dressed from one generation, but the whole crowd looked as if they came from a fancy-dress party. Wearing clothes from almost every period of the history of earth, even Roman, and some dressed as characters from fairy stories.

  They pushed forward, forcing Tiana to withdraw even further into the mountain. She stood her ground in the first of the great halls.

  She was gathering the mages. Paul and Lynella did what they could as she threw power from the rings in the lower halls back at the invaders. Their faces showed no sign of surprise or even anger as they fell back towards the doorway to re-group.

  The next time they attacked it was worse. The pulsing energy seemed to fill the whole hall as they drove through it with a force that could not be stopped. Many of the mages seemed to collapse under the weight of it but Paul, Lynella and Tania and the more self-willed mages fled down a pathway at the other end.

  ‘This goes to the core of the machine.’ Tiana shouted. ‘There is no way out from there’

  They turned. Drawing from the image of her ring, Lynella struck with a massive burst of energy. For a moment, their attackers seemed to be driven right out of the network but seconds later they were regrouping. Paul held Lynella to stop her falling and carried her as they fled on towards the core.

  He looked up and Tiana had gone. Instinctively he knew where she would go, and they went after her down to the highway of the network. Emerging into the void they saw her in the distance and knew that she was near the end of it. They were next to her as she crossed the final boundary to meet the souls of the dead.

  The ancient mages stood before them in a massive angry crowd. She was pleading with them.

  ‘Kill me and you will all die.’ She shouted. ‘All has changed. The fabric of the network is threatened. You must come with me into the void to defend it.’

  One of the mages she had killed shouted back. ‘In the void, you rule, and you will kill our souls.’

  ‘I shall leave this place.’ She replied quickly. ‘I am almost prepared. My companions will take me through the portal in the last ship.’

  Paul felt the crowd suddenly focus on them. ‘We shall go.’ Lynella confirmed. ‘There is no place for us here any-more.’

  Still the crowd stood its ground, accusing her of trying to trick them into changing the order which had stood for so many generations and let them live on in peace. They made fire with their hands and threw it towards her in waves of pure energy, driving her back to the void.

  But in th
e void, there was chaos. The invaders in their many costumes had driven forward to the boundary at the end of the highway without enough energy to cross it and others were piling into them from behind. They scarcely seemed to notice as Paul, Lynella and Tania pushed back through them.

  The highway was changing now. Cracks were appearing in the surface and its whole structure was falling apart as the mechanisms that sustained it started to fail. The boundary itself wavered and fell.

  Suddenly the tide of movement changed. The souls of the dead mages charged through, clearing all in their path. Paul saw a Roman soldier fighting with his short sword suddenly stop as if to wait for instructions only to be thrown to the ground by the attackers and vanish.

  Following the advancing army, they emerged again into the halls in the mountain. Here they met a Viking fighting desperately with long sword and round shield. In the instant before he fell, Paul recognised him. An actor from a film he had seen long ago. Then another.

  He shouted to Lynella. ‘They are constructs. The computer has made them. They’re from films’.

  Passing the tower again they turned towards the source. They found the interface. Paul knew where he was – he was at the exact centre of the source. On the surface, directly above this node of the network, the ancient mages had built a city. Under the terms of the compact they had destroyed the city, but they had left a single stone with runes carved into it to mark the node. He remembered how the stone had first made him realise that they would find other people on the planet. He also remembered how the excavator has so easily removed it and they had tried to forget it.

  Now he was examining the interface. It was a perfect piece of Engineering, linking the old with the new. He knew the man who would have built it. He was always there when anything went wrong, and he could always fix it. He was a brilliant hardware technician. He would have had the patience to explore the fine filaments in the node and link them in turn to the hard wiring of the ship’s computers; finally programming it when the data from the radio link came in from the gateway in the castle. It formed a far stronger link than his ring of piles that supported the structure. It was an open doorway intended to let the ship control the last unexplored part of the planet. But a doorway could be used in either direction. He went through and the souls of a thousand mages followed him.