The Spark

by David Drake

  “They’re windows onto nodes where the sun is up when it’s night here,” Guntram said. “There are eleven of them in the castle, and I don’t know of any that exist elsewhere.”

  He smiled. “I suspect that if there were more of them known, Jon would have brought them here. They show different locations at different times of day, but I’ve never heard anyone identify the image as something he saw in real life along the Road.”

  “They’re bigger than any Ancient pieces in Beune,” I said. “A lot bigger.”

  Guntram smiled. “That one,” he said, pointing to the window on the left, “was the size of my palm when it was brought to Dun Add. The other one—”

  He pointed again.

  “—was about half that size. I spent months in growing them, months. But a lot of that was in coming to understand the structure.”

  “Sir!” I said. Then I said, “Guntram, can you teach me to do that?”

  “Yes, I could,” he said. He wasn’t a boastful man, but I could tell it pleased him that I understood just how amazing the thing was that he’d told me. “But we’d have to find the seed piece first. If you find one, bring it here and we’ll explore it together.”

  For a moment my mind was lost in thinking about the many bits and pieces of Ancient artifacts that I’d amassed over the years but hadn’t repaired. Mostly I’d decided they were too fragmentary to be worth the effort, but with a few I just hadn’t been able to figure out the purpose. Would I have been able to recognize a chip from a window like those above me?

  Guntram was looking at me, waiting for me to speak. I blushed. “I’ll do that,” I said. “I surely will.”

  To the right of the door was a piece that looked like a shiny blue mirror. It vanished, then reappeared, time after time. It seemed to cycle about every five seconds.

  I stepped closer and entered it with my mind. It was slipping between Here and Not-Here. I couldn’t tell where it had been manufactured, and I didn’t have any notion what it was really meant to do.

  I guess it was discourteous to slip into a trance that way, but come to think—that was what Guntram had done when we first met, checking out my shield. At any rate, he was still smiling when I looked up.

  “You have a lot of things from Not-Here,” I said, looking at the egg-crate shelves on that wall. I was pretty sure that most of the artifacts there were partial, but it’s hard to be sure of that—especially when they’re from Not-Here—without actually going into them. Even if I’d been willing to do that, there were just too many things to get into in less than a week.

  “You recognize them,” Guntram said. He sounded approving. “Do you find them in Beune?”

  “In the neighborhood,” I said. “Not very much shows up in Beune itself, but there’s places not very far out in the Waste where I prospect for things. A couple places throw up mostly Not-Here artifacts. I usually can’t do anything with them, but I found a ball that I could make come back to my hand after I threw it.”

  “Really?” said Guntram. “You didn’t chance to bring it with you, did you, Pal?”

  “I’m sorry, Guntram, that was three years ago. I traded it to a peddler who had a bolt of blue cloth that I gave to Mom for a dress. She made a really nice dress out of it.”

  We’d buried her in that dress. I sucked my lips in, thinking how much I missed her.

  Turning my head a little, I said, “Trade is what I do mostly with stuff from Not-Here. There’s a place not far up the Road toward Gunnison. I lay pieces out there and come back in a week or two. Sometimes they’ll be gone and there’s artifacts from Here instead. And once—”

  I fished out the coin I wore around my neck on a thong and handed it to Guntram.

  “—there were three of these where I’d left a plate that didn’t seem to do anything. They were gold and silver mixed. I kept the one for a lucky piece.”

  Guntram handled it and looked up at me. “Do you have any idea what the markings are?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “It seems to be a cross on one side and a star with a lot of points on the other, but it’s so worn that’s just a guess.”

  Guntram carried the coin over to a littered table, then squatted to look for something on a shelf. He came up with a round, flat object and wiped the dust off on the sleeve of his robe.

  When he set the coin on top of the flat thing, an image in bright green light appeared above the metal. It was not only bigger than the coin, the image was as sharp as if it had just been struck. It was a woman’s face, straight on. She was sticking her tongue out, and instead of hair she had snakes writhing from her head.

  “I don’t recognize it either,” said Guntram. He looked up toward one of the windows he’d created, but it seemed to me he was thinking about things more distant than the rolling waves of treetops.

  Guntram cleared his throat and said, “I offered to help with your injuries, Pal. If you’ll come here, please, and lie down?”

  He walked to the end of the big room and moved a pile of fabric off what turned out to be a broad couch and set it on the floor. I’d thought the fabric was bedding, but it shimmered when it moved and I wasn’t sure that all of it was Here.

  “Am I taking your bed?” I said. “Because I slept worse places on the Road than your floor here. I don’t mind doing it again.”

  “No, no, you’re helping me test this,” Guntram said. “Just lie down and I’ll move the cover piece over you. I won’t put it over your head, though I think that would be all right.”

  I leaned my pack against the side of the couch and lay down on my stomach. The surface had a little give, like a pile of fresh hides.

  “Now just hold where you are…” Guntram said and did something at the end of the couch. He brought a clear sheet out of the mechanism and drew it up till it covered my shoulders. I expected it to snap back when he let go, but it just lay over me. My skin felt a little warm, like I’d been in the sun too long.

  “How does this feel?” he asked.

  “Well, not bad,” I said. The muscles in my back stopped aching, and my forearms were relaxing too. I moved my arms slightly; the pain was a lot less.

  “It’s good,” I said. “This really does help.”

  “I assembled this couch from three partial units,” Guntram said. “Joining the parts took me as many hours as I spent on both those windows together, so I’m very pleased to have finally be able to test it. Thank you, Pal.”

  I stretched my legs and feet out as straight as they’d go. That meant scooting up the couch a little or my toes would’ve pushed the cover sheet down.

  “Guntram?” I said, wriggling my torso a little in pleasure at not being in pain. “Granted my shield didn’t work and I got banged up a lot worse than most warriors would, if they’re really sparring out there they’re going to get bruised. Even at twenty percent. Why didn’t you ask one of Jon’s warriors to test your bed?”

  “I don’t know whether they don’t trust me…” Guntram said, “or if they don’t trust the Ancients. I offered the use of the couch as soon as I’d completed it, but nobody was willing to try. Eventually I almost forgot I had it.”

  “More fools them,” I said. I took a deep breath and rolled onto my back. No jolt of pain grabbed me. When I rubbed my ribs where Easton had jabbed I could feel a bit of discomfort, but nothing more than I’d have gotten if I’d walked into the corner of a bench in my workshop.

  “I tried it myself, of course,” Guntram said. “It doesn’t seem to have any effect on old age.”

  I looked at him hard because of what I heard in his voice, but his face was in shadow from the windows. I wondered how old he really was.

  “Shall I get up now, sir?” I said. “I mean, is it all right if I look around at your things now?”

  “I have no more information than you do, Pal,” Guntram said, “but I can’t see that it would harm you.”

  He cleared his throat and added, “Speaking personally, I’m pleased to have someone to show my collection to
. My gleanings, rather. I’m glad to be alone most of the time, but I occasionally find myself regretting that I’m alone all the time.”

  I rose and looked at what appeared to be a stuffed lizard some three feet long, which hung nearby by wires from the ceiling. It seemed out of place among the shelves of Ancient technology.

  I probed it with my mind and found nothing. Not corn husks, not cotton batting, not dried peas: nothing. I looked at Guntram.

  “It’s a machine, as you suppose,” he said. “It snaps at flies. I suppose I should have warned you not to wave your finger in its face.”

  “People who do that deserve to lose their fingers,” I said. “But I don’t see the mechanism. Or anything.”

  “The mechanism is in Not-Here,” Guntram said. “I don’t know how or why the Ancients created a perfect linkage between Here and Not-Here. I don’t even know if the Ancients were from Here or were not. It seems rather a pointless toy, though an amazing one.”

  I looked at Guntram. “There’s other Makers in Dun Add,” I said. “The clerk at the enlistment counter said there were. Why are you alone?”

  “There are at least twenty Makers working in Dun Add,” Guntram said, nodding. “They’re under Louis, who is by far the best Maker I’ve ever met. The best I can imagine ever being born. I trained him, so I should know.”

  “But if there’s so many,” I said, “then—did you fight with Louis?”

  “Nothing so dire,” said Guntram. He picked up a small cylinder from a shelf, then put it back.

  “A communicator,” he said idly. “If I could find another one, I believe we could accomplish amazing things. Speak all the way across the universe, even.”

  I didn’t speak. Whatever had cut Guntram off from the general society of Dun Add was none of my business. I was sorry I’d asked.

  He looked at me. “Jon believes in unifying Mankind in order and justice,” he said. “Louis believes in that goal as strongly as Jon does, perhaps more so. They met when they were quite young and rose together to where they are now. They believe.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. I was standing straighter without being aware of it. “I believe that too. That’s why I came to Dun Add.”

  “Yes, I recall you saying that,” Guntram said. He looked to the side. There was a sort of smile on his face, but it seemed sad.

  “Guntram?” I said. “Don’t you believe that?”

  He met my eyes. “What I believe, Pal,” he said, “is that things were and things are and things will be. That’s all that I feel sure of.”

  I nodded to show that I’d heard him. There wasn’t anything I was willing to say.

  “Pal?” Guntram said. “Do you ever wonder who built the Road?”

  “Built the Road?” I said. That was like asking me who built dirt. “Sir, I don’t—I didn’t, think anyone built it. God built it. Didn’t he?”

  Who could build the Road? Who…?

  “Have you ever examined the structure of the Road as you would—”

  Guntram picked up a device from the table beside him. It was a block the size of a walnut in its husk. Tubes came out in three directions.

  “—this color projector, for example?”

  “I tried,” I said. Of course I had. When I first realized I was a Maker, before I even knew the word Maker, I’d looked at the structure of everything around me. The Waste had a grain, so to speak, a direction; but the Road had nothing at all. The Road just was. “I wasn’t able to.”

  “And yet the Road exists,” Guntram said. “It joins all the portions of the universe, Here and I believe Not-Here.”

  “Sure the Road is Not-Here,” I said. “Beune used to be Not-Here a long time ago. There’s a layer deep down in mines where I can feel rock that had been Not-Here once. And I think that in the Waste, there are places that used to be Here but aren’t anymore.”

  “I’ve never travelled to the Marches,” Guntram said. “Perhaps I should, but there’s so much here to occupy me.”

  His fingers drifted idly across the shelves before him. “People bring me artifacts,” he said. “Bring them to Jon or Louis and they pass them on to me if they don’t see any use or aren’t interested in the use. They keep the weapons, of course. But there may be things out there which wouldn’t interest anyone but me.”

  I sniffed in self-disgust. “I was a fool to think that my weapons would be of any use in Dun Add,” I said. “I see why everybody thought I was crazy.”

  “Umm…” Guntram said. “No, not crazy, but certainly ignorant. You’d never fought anyone before?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “And you didn’t have a practice machine which would have allowed you to practice without a human partner,” Guntram went on. “They’re fairly common. There’s over a hundred in Dun Add, and there are others elsewhere. But not on Beune, I gather.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know where the nearest to Beune would be.”

  “If you’d had any practice,” Guntram said, “you’d have realized that with your shield at full power, it was unable to protect you from an opponent who was able to move. In a line of men at arms, you might have been all right. If you wanted to join the regular army…?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t,” I said firmly. “I want to go home.”

  “As you wish, of course,” said Guntram, nodding. “In single combat, though, your only chance would be to land a blow. That would mean with your shield off or at very low level. Even in a sparring match, that would mean taking a bad drubbing before you were able to strike.”

  I snorted. “I got the drubbing anyway, didn’t I?” I said. “And didn’t land a blow.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Guntram said. He walked over to my shield and touched it with his fingertips. “This is a wonderful piece of work, though. And even more wonderful as a work of imagination.”

  “It’s crap for fighting, though, which is what I needed it for,” I said. I was shocked at how angry I sounded. For as far back as I could remember—for as long as I’d been aware of more of the world than the sides of my cradle—I’d dreamed of being a Champion. Of being a Hero of Mankind.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m a bigger fool than anybody I met realized. Even bigger.”

  “Can I offer you something to eat, Pal?” Guntram said, obviously embarrassed. He took his hands away from my shield.

  “No sir,” I said. “But if you could give me a place to sleep for the night, I’ll get out of your life the first thing in the morning. A patch of floor is good enough.”

  “I can do better than that,” Guntram said, leading me to the opposite end of the room. “Though you’ll have to help me clear away the things lying on top of the bedding.”

  We cleared a proper bed. Guntram’s couch had healed my aches and pains, but it had left me feeling as tired as if I’d spent all day climbing a mountain. I was asleep almost the instant my head hit the rolled pack I was using as a pillow.

  CHAPTER 5

  And One More Thing

  I wanted to slip out without disturbing Guntram, but he was already up. The real windows at the top of the room were bright, though they faced north so I couldn’t tell exactly where the sun was.

  I’d overslept. Though nobody was expecting me anywhere, so I ought to say I’d slept later than I’d meant to. I guess I needed it.

  “I had the servants make up a packet of bread and sausage for you,” Guntram said, gesturing toward a large bundle beside the door. “There’s also a skin of wine?”

  The food would fill my pack exactly as full as it had been when I left Beune. Either that was a very fortunate chance or Guntram had a good eye.

  I grinned. My bet was on Guntram.

  “Sir, thank you,” I said. I took the waxed linen ground sheet out of my pack and put the food in, piece by piece. That way I was sure of just what I had. “I’ll pass on the wine, if you don’t mind. I like it, but it’s stronger than the ale I’m used to. I don�
�t think that’s a good choice for me on the Road.”

  From the smell, the sausage was spiced pork. I realized how hungry I was, but it would delay me if I said that. I’d get out a ways from town before I had anything to eat. Guntram’s kindness embarrassed me, but most of what had happened in Dun Add embarrassed me. I was getting used to the feeling.

  I checked my purse to make sure I still had the chit for Buck, then lifted the pack onto my shoulders. I remembered doing the same thing in Beune just a few weeks ago. About a dozen of my neighbors had come to see me off.

  Folks back home thought I was weird, true enough, but I think they liked me pretty well. I hoped they’d be glad to see me back.

  I clasped hands with Guntram. “Thank you, sir,” I said. “If you’re out toward Beune, I hope you’ll stop in and see me. And if I find a piece of window—”

  I nodded toward the back wall.

  “—I’ll bring it to you, I promise.”

  “Good luck, Pal,” Guntram said. As I walked past him out the door he added, “I hope you find what you’re searching for.”

  I thought that was a funny thing to say, since I wasn’t looking for anything; I just wanted to go home. But I went down the stairs—carefully, because I had thirty pounds on my back—without turning to ask about it. I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to go home.

  Nobody said anything as I walked through the Aspirants’ Hall to get to the outside door. The woman at the counter gave me a nod and I nodded back, but none of the loungers even noticed me.

  I wasn’t sure I’d remember which door was the stables, but the ventilation lattices in the upper wall marked it even without the barks and whining even before I got close. I fished my chit out and walked inside. There were several fellows ahead of me before I got to the ostler’s cage.

  He looked at my chit and called, “Riki! Four thirteen!”

  He gestured and added, “Stand aside and your dog’ll be right down.”

  I moved out of the way. After a moment, I squatted to shrug off my pack. It was going to be a while before Riki, whoever he was, brought Buck to me. I felt bad all over again for leaving him alone all day. I knew I was just looking for another reason to kick myself because I was down.