“Yes, Paia, like me. But there is a serious oversight in my design: without hands, I cannot replace my own monitors.”
Is that a hint? The God would be furious. She stares up at the gray-and-brown landscape, scanning for familiar details. “But it’s good you can do some repairs. There’s nobody else around who’d know how to fix you.”
“Not locally, no.”
She’d like him to elaborate on that odd remark, but the image distracts her. “Wait! What’s that?”
In the middle row of screens, way off to the right, Paia spots a thin pale curl rising from the side of a rocky valley. “Smoke! Can you get in any closer?”
The computer makes an odd sound, soft and indistinct, like laughter. “I can kiss the hair on a bee.”
“Really?” Paia wishes there was a human face built into this machine. She wouldn’t care if it was real or not, but she’d like a pair of eyes she could look into, and know she’d made contact.
“Here we go. Magnifying. Resolution, five meters.”
“Yes! Look!” She spots the telltale geometry of broken roadways and struggling kitchen gardens bounded by fieldstone walls. “Close in.”
“Resolution, one meter and zooming. Beginning enhancement and scintillation correction.”
The image dances and implodes. Suddenly it’s like standing in among them, or like floating just above their heads: scrawny, ragged, soot-faced people racing about, trying to beat out the last embers of the fire that has consumed their hamlet. Blackened stone foundations smolder. Paia counts several dozen crumbling squares that recently were houses and barns. Lone figures, a man with one arm, an older woman, stand forlornly beside small piles of salvaged possessions. A naked child gingerly picks through smoking rubble.
“Is this one of our villages?” Paia asks. She means the God’s. These people look different from the usual run of the Faithful in the Temple. No healthier or more prosperous, but . . . well, brisker in their movements, more determined somehow, even in this moment of grief and desolation.
“Working.” The House Comp can be remarkably terse where the God is concerned.
In a corner screen, a recalled long view of the valley is overlaid with the red-and-blue lines of an old road map. The village had been called West Eddy. Paia does not recognize the name from the Temple roster, but if this village does pay tribute, it should be due some relief aid to help its inhabitants recover from this disaster.
“Son Luco will know. I must remember to ask him.”
“Luco will not help this village.” The House Comp never uses Luco’s honorific.
“He will if I tell him to.”
“He won’t.”
“Why not?”
The computer does not answer. Instead, the big central image of the burned village is replaced by an extreme close-up: one woman’s head and torso, as she brushes hair back from her damp forehead. She is young and Paia can see she’s been crying. But her face and hands are smudged with ash, so clearly her tears have not kept her from working alongside the others to put out the fire. She drops her hand and lets her red-eyed gaze flick upward. Her thin jaw hardens. She raises her hand again, balled into a fist, and shakes it twice at the sky.
“Turn it off!” Paia recoils in guilty panic. “What if the God sees it?”
Uncannily, it seems as if the young woman has aimed her rage directly at the House Comp’s camera, and shot it into Paia’s chest.
“As you wish.” The images vanish into mirrored black, reflecting only the dim lights playing on the console.
“Why did you show me this? Why? The God would be angry.” In truth, it is she who is angry. She’s been caught off guard, and upset.
“You did ask to look around outside.” There is a faint but significant pause. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Sitting in chill darkness, Paia chews her lip. In the days when the House Comp was her tutor, dispensing discipline was not in his programming, so this was the tone he’d take when she misbehaved or didn’t study her lessons. She used to get mad at him then. Once she went so far as to pound her fist on his console. He rewarded her with a brief but frightening electric shock, which was allowed, under the definition of self-preservation. Paia learned not to push the computer too far. But punish her though he might, the House Comp would never betray her to the God. She decides to take the chance.
“I’m sorry, House. I didn’t mean to . . . there is something else, actually.” And then she’s unsure how to say it. “If you heard the phrase, ‘what price survival?’, would it have any meaning to you, other than the obvious? Like, is it a quote or something?”
“Where did you hear it?”
“I, um . . . read it somewhere.” She leans forward again to whisper, even though there is no one else in the room. “What do you think, House?”
“Searching,” the computer replies blandly, and then, “I can find no reference for this phrase.”
She’s not sure what she’d expected to hear. She doubts that the computer is capable of withholding requested information, but an unconditional negative surprises her. “Nothing? Nothing at all?”
“Do you wish me to conduct my search a second time?”
That scolding tone again. Paia sulks. She can almost suspect sarcasm. “I thought you were my friend, House.”
A very definite pause this time. “I am your friend, Paia. I am the best friend you have.”
Alone in the dark, Paia searches for an appropriate response. Instead, she hears the God’s summons. Not a voice, but a power inside her, compelling her to come to him. Immediately. Has he found her out already?
“I have to go, House.”
“Remember what I said.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Do hurry back.”
“I’ll try. Thanks for your help.”
“No problem,” says the computer. “Have a nice day.”
She hardly hears him. She is like iron to a magnet. The God is calling her toward the Temple, toward his own inner sanctum, the huge hollowed-out second story above the Sanctuary that allows him entry from the air. He will be in God-form then. For the first time in a long while, the idea frightens her. In God-form, he is a physical presence in the world. If he wants to, he can actually do her harm. Still, Paia hurries, through the brightening and darkening aisles of the Library, into the dim outside corridor, down the hidden stair. She hurries as if to a forgotten appointment, or a secret tryst.
And she hurries because she believes in him. She is eager to prostrate herself before his magnificence. For as she discovers anew each time, in God-form he is the irresistible force, the supernatural beauty. He is the heart-stopping, soul-shaking miracle that won her faith in the first place. He is the Impossible Thing.
He is a dragon.
The God will not use the word, does not allow it to be spoken anywhere. New converts at the Temple are warned that just saying the word is punishable by death. He is the God to them and must be, nothing more, nothing less. One day, a few years after his arrival, he stood in man-form behind Paia in the Library while she called up dragon images on the House Comp’s screens. She showed him medieval dragons carved in stone or rendered in gilt and turquoise in illuminated manuscripts. She showed him twining Celtic dragons in beaten silver and bright Chinese dragons embroidered on silk. Dragons on pottery, pen-and-ink dragons. Full color animations and virtual dragons. The choices were endless, but not all that varied.
“You see?” she told him. “You look just like them.”
“They look like me,” he replied. But he scanned them thoroughly, made her search the House Comp’s entire repertory of dragons as if looking for something in particular. When Paia was done, the God nodded. He seemed satisfied, his attention already moving off in some other direction. And that was the last time the topic of dragons was open for discussion between them.
She halts outside the human entrance to the God’s Sanctum. She brushes her hair back, wipes sweat from her upper lip,
straightens her robe. She’s sorry not to be appearing before him in the Veil of Gold. That outrageous garment is as popular with the God as it is with Paia’s chambermaid, though Paia thinks the cool white Robe of Purity shows off her tawny skin to good enough effect. Then she has an idea. Quickly, she unbraids her elaborate Temple hairdo, letting her dark auburn curls cascade in ringlets down her back as only the young girls do. Perhaps this will help put the God in a more sentimental mood about her. She shakes her hair back and opens the door.
It is hot and stygian inside the Sanctum, as usual. Paia thinks of the black steel-and-plastic lair she’s just come from. The only real difference is the extremes of temperature. And size. The God’s Sanctum is as big as the entire Temple below. Paia waits inside the door for her eyes to adjust. The God is silent now. He ceased his insistent, irresistible summons the moment she stepped through the door. She can feel him waiting somewhere in the darkness. He likes her to find him. When she still trusted him completely, Paia enjoyed this game. Even now, her heart quickens with anticipation, as if for a lovers’ tryst. Because this is the moment when she feels her special connection to him most strongly. In the absence of sight and sound, if she goes into herself and listens with that other sense, she can know where he is.
She moves forward, sightless but not blind. There are columns in this cavernous space, hewn out of the solid rock, and pitted spots in the floor. He guides her around each of these, with a wordless negative here, an unspoken positive there. This is a good sign, Paia decides. When he’s in a bad mood, he lets her run into things. The dark cavern is like an oven. Her body is slick with sweat. The white gown clings to her back and legs. She sheds it, dropping it behind her on the warm stone. She feels him near, the God, the magma-heart of the heat. She reaches, finds the hot, smooth curve of a claw as high as her waist.
BELOVED.
“I am here, my lord, to worship thee.”
His presence fills her, drowning out all other thought. She runs her hand along the polished arc of his claw to where the hard ripples of the sheath begin, and the slick scales of his mammoth paw. She imagines she can see the glimmer of gold and the flash of deep ruby that traces each rounded plate. She grasps the edge of a scale and pulls herself up to straddle the base of his claw. His voice in her head is a sighing like oceans, an invasion, a caress. The heat of him against her nakedness is too much to bear. Paia flattens herself against his broad foreleg, her thighs gripping the flawless curve of ivory, and lets the holy ecstasy take her in waves.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The trip is a rough one this time. N’Doch expects he’d have gotten used to it by now, but even so, he ends up short of breath, with his head between his legs and his gut in his throat. He guesses that the hard sound of retching he hears behind him is the first-timer bearing the burden of inexperience. He glances around, sees the baron on his knees in the dust, a sorry comedown for a man who was sure he had the upper hand a few eternal seconds earlier. There is no gleaming curve of hand-wrought iron beside him: the scythe didn’t make it, and N’Doch thanks his own good luck for that.
The girl is on her feet already, watching the baron with something like pity, though N’Doch knows it’s a lot more complicated than that. At least she’s got the sense to leave the man alone to lose his lunch in private.
Besides, she looks a little woozy herself, and she almost never shows it. N’Doch lurches up to a squat, then steadies himself with his hands while his head clears. He can feel the sear of the sun on his back, like home, only different. Redder, is what occurs to him, like some kind of filter’s been drawn across the light. Right away, he’s sweating. He strips off the heavy wool tunic he’d had on when the girl alerted him. He’s got his short-sleeved linen underneath, the closest thing the weavers could manage to a decent T-shirt.
“Phew. Musta come a long way this time.”
“Yes.” The girl comes over, offers him a hand.
N’Doch waves her away. “I’m fine.” He appreciates the thought, but he doesn’t need her reminding him how much faster she recovers from this dragon-transit stuff. He feels for the pack he’d hugged to his chest as if his life depended on it, since at some point, it might. It’s there beside him in the dust. He noses around inside for his new sandals. Off to one side, on a bit of a rise, the dragons have settled in to wait for the humans to get a grip. The big guy’s pawing at the dirt and sniffing it. Water has her blue-velvet nose straight up in the air. N’Doch admires the sinuous slim curve of her neck. He can hear their murmuring in his head, as they take stock of the surroundings. None of it sounds very promising.
“It’s hot,” says the girl.
“Heh, we knew it was gonna be.”
She looks around, coughs. “And dry.”
“We knew that, too.” But it was his dream image they’d followed, so maybe he’d been better prepared for the reality of it. He hauls off his boots, stuffs them into his pack, and ties his sandals’ complicated fastenings, wishing for something nice and simple like velcro. If he knew where he was, he’d go barefoot, but he’s got to admit, he’s finally getting some sense in his head about which risks are the ones worth taking. He gets his legs under him squarely and stands. Gazing around, he lets out a low whistle.
They’ve landed on an elevated roadway, or what’s left of one. A wide one, eight lanes at least. To the right, the shattered pavement curves away onto solid ground dotted with rock and scrub, and the ruins of what might have been a group of commercial buildings. He sees bits of faded images and lettering too bleached out to read. To the left, the road rises optimistically, then ends in a tangle of corroded steel and rusted rebar. N’Doch takes a few steps in that direction, wondering how stable the wreckage is likely to be. “This was, like a big highway, and this here was a bridge or something.” He sweeps his arm in a describing arc. “Big curving son of a bitch.”
“Ah,” says the girl.
She’ll remember the few cars and trucks she saw when she was in his home time, but no way she’s seeing the bridge he’s got in his mind’s eye. N’Doch gives in. He lets the dragons send her the image.
“Ah,” she says again, her eyes widening.
“Yeah. Can’t tell what took it out, though. Whatever it was, doesn’t look real recent.” He heads for the edge.
“Be careful,” she calls after him.
N’Doch has to laugh. If he was being careful, he wouldn’t be here in the first place. The roadway ends about fifty meters upslope in a wide, crumbled tear, like something took a great big bite out of it. Something huge. Godzilla, he thinks. He eases up to the point of no return and looks over.
Water.
The land falls away from under the roadway in steep slides of rock and rubble, dropping maybe twenty meters into a murky green bay that stretches into invisibility on either side. The opposite shore is hazed by dust and distance and hot red sunshine. N’Doch knows the bridge that stood here could never have spanned this gap, unless they had antigravity or something. He licks his lips. There’s a definite salt tang in the dry air. He wants to ask the dragon: you got any idea what went on here? But that would be two concessions, too close together. He can feel her watching him.
He expects to see palm trees like the ones that line the ocean shores at home. But the vegetation here is sparse, low, and piney. It looks like it’s seen better days. He sees nothing living where the water laps the rocks below. No fish in the shallows, no snails or starfish. Not even seaweed. He squints down into the green water again. It looks tepid and thick. N’Doch nods, deciding it’s just possible that the whole bay’s been taken by an enormous algae bloom. He knows all about that sort of thing.
He turns, walks back to where the girl is still pretending not to notice the first-timer struggle for breath. N’Doch sees the guy reach blindly for the sword that isn’t at his hip. He’s sick and out of it, but a weapon is his first semi-coherent thought. He’ll come around all right. N’Doch approves of the reflex, but it puts him back on the alert. He’s less
sure than the girl that the dude’s obvious survival instincts won’t be used against him. He’d advised against bringing him, but what the hell? It wasn’t his call.
“There’s like an ocean out there,” he reports. “Maybe a bay of some kind. Don’t know for sure, but I think the water’s a lot higher than it was when the bridge was built.”
“Do you mean there’s a flood?”
“Now? Don’t think so. Looks like this water’s been here a while.”
The first-timer groans and coughs, then sits back on his heels, wiping his beard on his sleeve. He mutters something incomprehensible that, milliseconds later, through the miracle of dragon simultaneous translation, makes itself known to N’Doch as pretty foul language, even by his personal standards.
He smirks at the girl’s blush. “I don’t think his royal highness is too happy about this.” He’s said it that way to lighten up the mood a bit, not to mention that he can’t pronounce the dude’s name too well, with that weird vowel he can’t get his tongue around. But the girl hears something else, and shoots him a glare.
“He’s not a royal anything. He’s only a baron.”
“Only. Well, ex-cuse me.” N’Doch lets out a high whoop of hilarity. “I’m only a nothing.”
She blinks at him. “You are a bard, N’Doch, and a dragon guide. This is not nothing.”
She’s so serious, it’s no fun even tweaking her. He’d thought her sense of humor was on the upswing, but he must’ve had that wrong. He sighs. “C’mon, you gotta admit—it was a rough trip. Let’s give ole whatsisname a hand.” He goes over, sticks out a palm.
No surprise, the guy does exactly what N’Doch had done. He waves the help away irritably and staggers to his feet. He quick-searches his body for injury, and seems puzzled when he finds none. “Mother of God,” he growls. “What happened?”
“The DRT,” returns N’Doch sympathetically. “Read that as Dragon Rapid Transit. Don’t worry. It gets easier after the first time . . . Sort of.”
But Baron K. does not have the advantage of a dragon translating in his ear. His dark eyes narrow at N’Doch, then sweep past him to take in the wrecked landscape and then the dragons. For a moment, he says nothing. Then N’Doch sees his brain switch into overdrive.
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