Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  ***

  Lyda blinked, as she woke from the virtus state. It wasn’t sleep, Alessandro thought, but it wasn’t so different from the first stages of sleep. He’d seen people go into them and out of them before, and suddenly he thought the problem Lyda had was not with her contact chip but with the fact that the nearest portal into the Lifenet must be thousands of miles away, in the nearest big city. There might be a beacon up on the mountain, but he doubted it. Whatever portal there was in the facilities there, it would be triggered to those living there only.

  Still her going under and coming back again had been so fast, he didn’t need the twitching of her lips and her sigh to know she had failed. “I don’t think he heard me,” she said. “He looked startled at first, so he might have glimpsed me. But all I saw of him was his face — nothing more. The rest of his virtus never came into focus and I was disconnected almost immediately.”

  “When you have time,” he said. “If there is a pause or a moment you can try, try to reach Charlie Cavlar or Lynn Hut. They are the other two people who work with me, trying to make sure those who disappear are well and that no one has fallen slave to anyone else in the real world or in the virtus. “So that virtus spaces aren’t stolen — that sort of thing. If you reach either of them, given them the same message I gave you before. But I see we can’t count on them.”

  “I told you my connection was weak,” she said, looking so distraught that he smiled to reassure her, though he didn’t feel any reassurance himself.

  “I knew your connection was weak,” he said. “I saw it myself, remember? It was an off chance. For the main chance, I think we’re going to need to find our way up this damned mountain of the gods of yours, and, at the top, find a way in, somehow.”

  “What will that do?” she asked.

  “They’re bound to have a portal attuned to the chips of those who live there,” he said. “They’re bound to know how to attune it to the chips of newcomers too. It will have more power,” he said. “With it we can break in.”

  “And do you know?” Lyda said. “How to get in? Yourself?”

  “No,” Alessandro said. “We must take care not to kill the guards, is all. But first — how do we get to the top of this mountain?”

  “The path the people take every year, in Spring, is safe,” Lyda said. “They climb the path and they get to the top safely.”

  “And I suppose it’s watched too?” Alessandro asked.

  She nodded. “There are eyes. And the path has no vegetation anywhere near it. It is exposed to all. Of course it is. The gods above — I think there are only two, or at least, everyone speaks only of two — have to be able to see how many are coming. And it’s forbidden to take weapons on the path, arrows and knives andB“

  “So the path is in effect out,” Alessandro said.

  “But there is no other way,” Lyda said. “Every other way is blocked. There are horrible things waiting for you — monsters and illnesses and poison. People have tried you know? When they were mad at the gods, for sending us plague and wars. They sent groups of warriors and young men, with fire in their hearts climbed up. They never came back, and they never reached the top. Sometimes, if the gods were generous, their bodies were returned to us, months later. You can’t climb the mountain anyway but through the path.”

  “But if we climb through the path they will kill us also,” Alessandro said. “Do you doubt it? I might as well to go back to your city and be eaten.”

  ***

  Lyda, granddaughter of the gods, a maiden of the people answered the god and said, “Might as well die trying then, for try we must.”

  And they walked beneath the Earth in tunnels so narrow that they had to crawl along them. While they were in the tunnels yet, Lyda of the golden hair tried to call onto the gods, but none listened to her. She crept along the tunnels, then in silence, till they came to a place on the face of the mountain, where freezing cold winds blew.

  Alas, cried the god. Alas for my magical coat. But he had it not.

  But he had senses men had not — hearing and sight beyond the mortal ken. With them he spied around and with his god-strong fingers he held onto the side of the mountain. Calling on his magic to multiply his strength, he folded Lyda in his right arm, and he carried her, up the sheer mountain where there was nowhere to rest.

  Long they climbed, till his fingers ached, till his fingers bled, till he felt as though he must die. But his magics supported him, and he went on.

  In a sheltered crevice on the rock they rested, her warm body against his.

  ***

  She smelled of sweat. Not the old, unwashed smell of flesh that never saw soap, but of the sweat of their exertions. And she leaned against him, warm and soft in the small crevice. He could feel her heart beat fast through his back held against his chest. He wondered how long they had.

  If he was right, then the alarms on this part of the mountain were not actively controlled. They would be controlled by sensors that set them off when any signs of life approached. And that, he thought, meant that though the people at the top might not know they were here — and at that they might because surely they would know when their defenses activated — yet he doubted there were many safe places along the mountains.

  The place where they were seated was little more than a rounded indentation in the rock, big enough only for their bodies to press together into it, in a seated position, their legs folded under them. They were far up enough that they could see treetops extending into the distance.

  The new economy had meant fewer people living in the real world at any time. Many of the younger people, who had spent little enough time in the world outside the virtus didn’t even live in it at all. Their physical bodies were merely the holders of their virtus persona. They lay in coffin-like structures in the big cities, while nanos kept them alive and fed and healthy and their minds traveled the world or worlds of theirs or others’ making.

  Fewer people were born too. Sex in virtus was just as good as the real thing. Or perhaps not, but it involved much less of the real thing’s drawbacks — the unpredictable feelings, the awkwardness. It was perfect all the time. And sterile.

  Alessandro leaned his chin against Lyda’s blonde hair, smelling her herbal scent, feeling her heart beat as a faster echo of his own, and tried to remember how long it had been since he’d held a real woman like this — how long since he touched a real body like this.

  “We are going to die, aren’t we?” Lyda asked, her voice a little sob at the back of her throat.

  “It is possible. It is likely,” Alessandro said. And this too was new, because it had been far too long since he thought of his own death as possible, much less as likely. He’d been looking at life as an unending panorama stretching to infinity, but it might end now, today. Somehow the thought made every feeling sharper — the hair against his chin, the prickly wool against his skin, the air he breathed.

  Lyda nodded. “Everyone dies,” she said, in a tone of acceptance. “But at least we’ll die trying to save others. If we can just get the gods to stop interfering with them — life is not so bad.”

  ***

  We’ll fight the gods for the sake of the people, Lyda, the strong maiden said. And she pulled the god with her out of the shelter, and up the mountain again.

  Here, where they were now, the way was easier. It was easier to find a place for a foot or a hand. Lyda climbed beside the god and he no longer had to carry her. And for a moment she allowed herself to think perhaps the freezing winds and nowhere to put her hand or foot had been the challenge.

  And then the birds came, with cruel beaks, flying at them and ready to kill them. The maiden’s flesh they pierced once and twice, till blood ran down the pale skin.

  Then the god called upon his powers. With his unerring eyesight he guided stones thrown by his strong arm. Once, twice, three times, and the birds fell, the stones splitting the skulls where the gods’s commands dwelled.

  And yet they kept coming th
rough the day, as morning turned to afternoon.

  Any normal man would have perished. Impossible to kill all the birds fast enough. Impossible not to succumb to the assault. But the god was not a man, and his hand moved faster, faster than it should have been possible. One by one the birds fell, until there were no birds.

  ***

  They stood, holding each other, waiting for the next onslaught. “ few rivulets of blood had dried down her face, from where a bird had torn a little bit of scalp and another made a wound on her forehead.

  “Isn’t your arm tired?” she asked.

  And he marveled that she could think of him when she must be hurting more. Her feet looked cold in their sandals, and her skin was abraded from the difficult parts of the climb. But she was worried about him, and he answered her, “It will pass.”

  He looked up the mountain where he now saw a tall, dark building. The top of it was a glass enclosed tower, but the rest looked much like the official buildings anywhere, poured of liquid dimatough and allowed to harden. This one was black and looked like a dark, flowing piece of lava.

  Inside, it would be light — since the color was just a matter of polarization. In fact, from the inside it would look like the whole tower was glass. And if there were people there all the time — and not just at the time of the spring ritual — they would be watching them from up there. Following their every movement. The rest of the way up the mountain was bare of trees and made for a difficult climb. They would be exposed.

  “I think,” he said. “Up from here it will be even tougher than what we have met with so far.”

  “Then we shall go forward,” Lyda said. “For to turn back would be to meet the same perils for nothing.”

  “And I don’t relish the thought of being eaten at the bottom of the mountain.”

  “And my people can’t take much more of the wars and the plagues. The last plague sent by the gods killed most of the older people — except my father — and more than half of the babies. We will now be easy prey for other cities and, depend upon it, the gods will incite them on us. I don’t want to be led away as a slave.”

  Alessandro took a deep breath. “Let’s climb,” he said.

  ***

  Up they went, up the sacred mountain. And the gods from their perch saw all and sent golden warriors of metal and glass. Many of them, so many that there were tall ones, whose stature obscured the stars, and tiny ones, crawling along the ground — so many that they made the ground look as though it were covered in a golden, moving carpet. Each of them held a whirling and sharp blade.

  And the god cried out, “Lyda, granddaughter of the gods, what powers did the god your father’s father, he of the golden hair and the healing touch give you? Save me now with your powers, for I am undone.”

  ***

  From a distance, watching the automatons approach, Alessandro thought Lyda and himself were as good as dead. This was how he would meet his end. This was how he would die. He would be cut to pieces by the whirling blades of robots. He would die here and be forgotten.

  Lyda too must have thought the same, because he saw her reaching to her ankle strap for her stone knife. He envied her for a moment, wishing that somehow, he’d thought to bring with him weapons or at least a thick tree branch with which he might defend himself from the assaulters.

  But then he realized it would be worse. Lyda, with her knife, would have hope. Foolish hope because there was not any way in which that stone knife could stop the onslaught of sophisticated dimatough robots. And it was worse, he thought, to have hope and lose it just before you died than to know you were doomed from the beginning.

  Alessandro knew he was doomed. It had been a quixotic adventure from the beginning, and even though he didn’t know it would lead to his own death, he would never have got into it if it hadn’t been for Lyda’s beautiful face, her enigmatic words.

  And now they’d die together.

  “Back up,” Lyda said, and gestured with her knife. “Back up. To the part where the mountain is sheerer. The bigger ones’ soles don’t look as though they’ll hold them on.”

  “And the smaller ones?” Alessandro asked.

  “We can crush them with rocks. For that matter, we can throw rocks at the larger ones,” Lyda said. “And it will give us time.”

  “But time for what?” Alessandro asked. He started collecting small rocks from the mountain and putting them on the sling he’d tied from his tunic to allow him to keep pebbles and hit the birds fast enough.

  She shrugged and smiled. “I was hoping you would think of something. Why do they home in on us? What are they sensing?”

  “Heat,” Alessandro said. As he spoke he was backing up with her. “Body heat.”

  And on this, he recalled that he could produce his own weather, for a while. He hadn’t used the ability in very long. It was not needed with the adaptable suit. But now... He thought about it and concentrated, sending cold breezes to blow in a tight cone about him.

  He was never sure how it worked, but remembered, long ago, reading that moisture and heat were pulled from the air in just such a way as to cause breezes to blow around the person.

  “Lyda,” he said, from within his very own storm that was causing him to shiver. “Can you do this?” The golden carpet of tiny robots — each of them looking like the result of an unfortunate meeting of a chopping machine and a cockroach — was very close now. He saw them veer from him and towards Lyda.

  And then Lyda nodded, once. “It helps keep my people in superstitious awe,” she said. And then the wind started around her too, creating a zone of extreme cool. The robots stopped.

  ***

  They walked amid the hordes of mechanical warriors, but thanks to the wind of invisibility, they were not seen. They climbed in great steps now, up the side of the mountain to the tower, and there they stopped, staring at a wall as dark as night, as strong as diamond.

  We will need something that can pierce this, the god said. And with a smile, he stole the blade from an immobilized mechanical warrior.

  “They will have built them,” he said, “to take on armored enemies.”

  In such a guise he spoke and took the blade, and with it he banged against the great wall, while chips flew. And Lyda saw what he was doing and she too got a blade and helped him.

  The wall broke under their attack and, suddenly, they saw the interior of the tower and two gods standing there, holding the magical weapons that make death at a distance trained on them.

  “Charlie,” the god said, his voice tired. “And Lynn.”

  And the maiden realized these were the undergods on whose help he had counted.

  ***

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Charlie said and smiled, looking unpleasantly at Alessandro from behind the burner he held in his left hand. “Surely you are not so stupid as to think that someone running an illegal scheme wouldn’t have done their best to insinuate themselves into your confidence and become as close to you as possible. That fool, Blaise, told us you were trying to get reconnected. We thought you might be stubborn enough to make it up the mountain and we thought we’d come here and stop you.”

  Alessandro thought that the suit he’d discarded at the base of the mountain. It would have helped stop laser rays now. But thinking that, he thought how the suit could give one a feeling of invincibility. How easy it was to take off. He reached into the sling in which he’d collected the small pebbles. He was glad to see that Charlie didn’t even flinch or seem to notice the movement.

  Technology, no matter how great, was only as strong as the mind controlling it. And Charlie’s mind had never been that powerful. This was why he hadn’t been allowed in as close as Blaise.

  Alessandro lamented for Blaise, whom he guessed must have been dropped as he had, and was probably right now the centerpiece in a banquet for Lyda’s hospitable city men. But even as he thought it, he was using his enhancements and the same skill he’d used on the birds. One stone hit Charlie on the hand, making
him drop the burner — another one took Lynn’s burner and — before they could recover and use their own enhancements to move faster than the body would normally allow, three more stones went, one, two three to each of the contact points on their suits. Their suits opened and started falling, even as they dived for the burners.

  And Lyda had reached Lynn’s dropped burner first, and was holding it on both of them.

  “Do you know how to use that?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen and felt them used in virtus,” she said, with a smile. “While I was lurking, trying to figure out who could help us.”

  Alessandro tied them up. They didn’t resist. He wondered if they had other accomplices to whom they were even now sending messages. “I must get on the virtus,” he said.

  The room they were in was mostly empty and must normally be a storage room of some sort. At the far end there was the shimmer in the air, the hole in the ceiling that betrayed a grav well. If Alessandro knew how these buildings were constructed, the controls would be at the top.

  He ran towards the grav well, flicked the controls so it pulled him up, and stepped in it.

  There were seven floors and then a narrow room and... He’d brought Charlie’s burner with him and he almost fired before he realized that the man sitting on one of the chairs was Blaise and that he was fast asleep. “ sleep drug. Like what they must have given Alessandro himself.

  Near him was another, empty chair. And on the wall, tiny, the portal for the Lifenet.

  Alessandro was studying the portal when Lyda came in. She too pointed the burner at Blaise, but dropped it when she realized the man was no danger.

  “Will that allow us to get on the virtus?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yes. There are controls to allow whoever is within reach to tune his chip to it. Here. Let it sense your chip and then mine.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll go to my virtus space, and summon to me those people who are used to working with me to pursue criminal offenses. And we’ll tell them all. Quickly. It is possible at this very moment there are accomplices of the conspirators headed here to stop us. We need as many people to know of this as possible. Most won’t care. They won’t. But if they are even now calling for help...”