Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  She met Ghirra’s wondering glance. “It’s true. I just know it is.”

  “How quaint,” Clausen uncrossed and recrossed his legs as they rested on the table. “A long-lost civilization. That and two fifty’ll get you on the subway. I’m sorry I’m not convinced, but neither will the Courts be. A lot of worlds have been here and gone.”

  Danforth rounded on him hotly. “Christ, isn’t that the whole point? This world should be gone, but it isn’t! It’s still supporting life, in debatable fashion perhaps, but supporting it none the less!”

  “I don’t see how all this should affect…”

  “Damnit, you can take the commercial politics of this situation and shove ’em for all I care… and I don’t give a shit about my funding! A good scientist can always find backing! Meanwhile, before you go digging up the place and disturbing things, there’s a major mystery to be solved here: by all known rules of the universe, this planet should be an airless chunk of charcoal by now due to collision with the Coal Sack!”

  Clausen chose to let the slight against CONPLEX pass unremarked. He lifted his open palms in a Gallic shrug. “Which it is well on its way to being! Check your figures again, Tay. The worst may be yet to come. That’s what the Sawls think, correct me if I’m wrong. I’m not offering my support for any precipitous abort, but I think it would be wisest to just do our thing as quickly as we can and get out.”

  Watch out, Weng! Megan worried. He’ll co-opt your initiative and have you on the defensive again.

  But Danforth was running with the ball. “But don’t you see the point? That old civilization is not lost! It’s still here, or what’s left of it, having metamorphosed as it engineered its own survival!” He waved a hand across the table, so emphatic that Liphar cringed into his seat. “These folks saw what was going to happen long ago and went into emergency mode, They went underground, dug out the cave systems, built a new lifestyle. They adapted food sources to the new conditions.”

  “And they tried,” said Megan, “to assure the survival of knowledge as well, by establishing a tradition of extensive record-keeping. The only possible advantage to the Sawls of preserving a list of every birth since the year one is to encourage a memory of their long-ago past.”

  “But the memory faded over the enormous stretches of time involved,” added Weng. “Science was forgotten. Goddesses were invented to explain vagaries of the weather that included periodic global devastations of the population. History became myth.”

  Megan nodded. “And the record-keeping merely ritual.”

  “No,” said Ghirra suddenly, then seemed surprised by how quickly he had their attention. He shook his head gravely. “The Toph-leta is mystery, yes, but there is knowing for us in the guildbooks.”

  “I didn’t mean…” Megan began apologetically. She wondered If there was a tactful way to tell someone they weren’t as clever as their ancestors.

  “The guildbooks tell the old knowing of the generations,” Ghirra insisted. “A guildsman gives his knowing to his apprentice, but if he forgets a thing, the guildbooks keep the knowing to be found again.”

  “Or not found,” said Clausen lazily. “Clearly, if Taylor is to be believed at all, there has been a major degradation of knowledge since your alleged ancestors saw the handwriting on the wall.”

  “They held on to what was necessary to survive,” defended Susannah.

  “The guildbooks hold the knowing,” Ghirra repeated, as much to himself as to the others. “The guildbooks hold the science.”

  “Ghirra…” On the verge of a meaningless sympathetic remark, Susannah held back at Stavros’ raised hand.

  “What’s in your mind, GuildMaster?” he asked softly.

  The healer hesitated. “If I know a… ilvesh…?”

  “Infusion,” Susannah supplied.

  “In-fusion. Yes. I make this one to cool a sick heat of children. I write this in the book of my guild, and this is science. You, TaylorDanforth, make the machine to take away the heat in the air.” He stretched his arms wide in gratitude for the coolness inside the circle of the force field. “You write that in a book. That is science, yes?”

  “Well, yeah…?”

  Ghirra appealed to him for understanding. “The PriestGuild have guildbooks also. These tell the playings of the Sisters, and the signs of the Arrah. This is their knowing from the generations. This is their science.” He glanced around for a response, but focused on Danforth’s perplexed scowl.

  “More, more,” said Danforth impatiently.

  Ghirra shrugged nervously. “The PriestGuild say the Toph-leta is the Sister-gifts, but I think this, TaylorDanforth, that the Toph-leta is the most old of guildbooks. This holds the most old science.”

  He ventured delicately into the expectant silence he had created, working hard at his limits within the alien language. “If the first PriestGuild write in a book how the Arrah, the weather, goes, what is the signs, all that, and this book is the Toph-leta of PriestGuild, I think this book must has knowing how the ancestors make the Arrah, like Susannah say about the hakra and hjalk and all the plants, like TaylorDanforth make his machine.”

  “Wait—made the weather?” Megan was sure she had mistaken his line of reasoning.

  Danforth’s scowl flattened with disappointment. “You’re saying your damn priests control the weather?”

  “Not doing a great job, if that’s the case,” remarked Clausen, but he allowed Ghirra some renewed interest.

  “No, TaylorDanforth. I say one time my ancestors make the weather, to save the people from the Darkness… the too-much-heat that comes.”

  “Climate control?”

  Megan hoped it was true. Stavros steepled his fingers on the table and leaned his head into them.

  Danforth’s chair rocked with his resistance. “Climate control?”

  “You search this thing that makes the weather, TaylorDanforth.”

  “The weather now, not a hundred fifty thousand years ago!”

  “The made-plants and the made-animals are here. We are here, what the ancestors made us. Then this weather can be here also. Why not, TaylorDanforth?”

  Tay will never make a teacher, mused Megan. Too easily frustrated by the gaps in another’s knowledge.

  But though the abyss of understanding between the Master Healer and himself was encouraging him to shout, Danforth struggled to remain reasonable. “First of all, the genetic engineering is still Susannah’s informed guess. Second, you can’t just make a climate and leave it at that. Weather doesn’t just exist, man! Something has to make it work, make it move!”

  “The Sisters make it move,” said Ghirra easily. “Like here this machine makes the air cold.”

  “And there’s your X-factor,” said Weng with satisfaction.

  Stavros looked up with a private smile. “We’ve been here before, GuildMaster.” He flattened his palms on the crate top and sat forward, assuming his neutral translator’s voice. “Ghirra is suggesting that the Sisters are not goddesses at all but man-made weather machines.”

  “The force field as big as the Ritz!” grinned Clausen. “I like your style, honored doctor.”

  Control the weather of an entire world?

  Danforth wasn’t sure why the suggestion unhinged him so. Perhaps because it was the kind of fantastical explanation that he had been resisting, perhaps because it came from Ghirra.

  He liked the Master Healer, had been convinced to accept him as an able doctor, but he still found it hard to allow any Sawl the respect due an equal in the realm of ideas. Even his recent delving into possible hints and parallels to be found within the Sawl mythology had been done in a spirit of desperate concession to necessity.

  I don’t believe this shit, he’d told himself, but it can’t hurt to look into it. Tabula rasa, eh? Any angle… all avenues of inquiry.

  He made an effort to pull his voice within a range of calm. “Does he have any idea what miraculous machinery it would take to control the circulation of an entire planet
?”

  Stavros regarded him impassively. “Perhaps he does. Why don’t you ask him?”

  Danforth could feel Weng’s encouragement spreading like heat from the head of the table. He knew exactly what she was going to say.

  “Something’s moving it around, did you say, Dr. Danforth?”

  Even that long ago, I must have suspected. “You buy this idea, Weng? You? Who’s around to goddamn run these machines?”

  “I certainly find it an intriguing idea in an area that has not been overpopulated with other possibilities.” Weng shot a surreptitious glance at Stavros. “At least it offers a technological rather than a mystical base.

  “It also explains the global nature of the phenomena, as well as the confinement of the actual weather, activity to the narrow habitable zone. As to the issue of who would run them, I’m sure CRI would be the first to assert that a well-designed machine often runs better without human interference.”

  “To quote the Tale of Origins again,” offered Megan, “the king/parent who was skilled in the ways of power—now read ‘weather’ as Stav’s program suggested and we all pooh-poohed—died or went away. Perhaps I was wrong to assume no mention of a Creator.”

  Danforth fidgeted, preparing to make the leap. “Well, I suppose…”

  Clausen sighed elaborately, “Oh go ahead, Tay, try it on for size. No worry of committing a scientific faux pas here. You’re among friends.”

  Danforth thought of CRI recording every word and might have refused them the benefit of his wild speculations, were it not for the flattering eagerness with which the Master Healer awaited his reply.

  “All right,” he said hoarsely. “It’s really very simple, given the assumption that the power and tech exist to do it. If you are faced with a heating up of the planet that is life-threatening to its biosphere, one way to deal with the crisis is to manage that heat, pull the excess to, say, some uninhabited area and to manage the moisture accordingly.

  “Something like this would seem to be happening on Fiix: a zone of relative habitability is diagonally wrapped around the planet, caught between hemispheres dominated by extreme cold-wet and hot-dry foci. The anomalous southwest-northeast prevailing winds that cross this zone are the general mechanism for the exchange of heat and moisture necessary to keep the system in some sort of equilibrium.

  “However,” he reminded them emphatically. “It’s not in equilibrium. Observing the Fiixian weather is like watching an aerialist teeter for balance. And the process is clearly not supporting the zone of habitability at the present moment, in fact it’s beating the shit out of it!”

  “One point for, one against,” said Clausen. “The score is tied, honored doctor. What do you say to your machines’ lethal inefficiency?”

  “I ask this question for all my life,” Ghirra replied steadily, “since that time I decide no goddesses could want this much deaths.”

  “ ‘Hast thou comprehended the earth in its breadth? Declare if thou knowest it all,’ ” Megan intoned. “At least Jehovah let Job know what the reason for his suffering was.”

  McPherson broke her long silence unexpectedly. “Maybe the machines are broken.”

  “Or breaking down,” Megan added after some consideration.

  “But then they’ve broken down before,” Susannah pointed out. “And recovered before. Look at the guild records: a long history of global Devastations, followed by periods of relative calm.”

  Clausen glanced at his watch, then rolled his eyes upward. “You mean we should expect the repair crews any minute?”

  “Maybe,” she replied seriously, to challenge his reflex scorn. “Or if the guild records are true—and we did hear the same history in Ogo Dul—then maybe we have a periodic culling mechanism here. The wipe-outs are global and regular. Their coherence in space and time does look a bit unnatural. I know it sounds cruel, but some kind of built-in might have been necessary to keep world populations to levels that the reduced habitable zone can support. Maybe the Sawls have been proved to be too skilled at survival.”

  Megan shook her head. “There are plenty of strict population controls worked into the guild laws already.”

  “That could be a case of redundant systems,” said Weng.

  “Even the strictest of birth control programs couldn’t stabilize the entire ecology,” Susannah argued, “only the internal Sawlian one.”

  Danforth sensed the cascading of wild speculation toward the solid ground of accepted fact. “Wait a minute!” he cried into the face of their enthusiasm. “Wait just a goddamn minute!”

  “You’re worried about what drives it,” guessed Clausen pleasantly.

  “Among other things!” Danforth grabbed his temples, pressing inward. “A minor detail among other minor details, like the entire physics of the exchange process!”

  “And what’s your opinion of the good doctor’s suggestion that fields are being manipulated to produce these results?”

  Megan bridled at the subtle derision Clausen masked as encouragement. She pictured spectators at a suicide yelling, jump! jump! “I don’t think Ghirra means force fields specifically,” she declared.

  “But an entire planet!” Danforth gestured helplessly. “The required energies are unimaginable. You’d need a substantial fraction of the solar constant!”

  “Gigabuckets,” Clausen chortled, then said with easy dogmatism, “But where there’s energy to do the work, the work will be done.” He leaned back, nodding. “Yep, it would take one hell of a power source.”

  Susannah searched Stavros’ face for signs of pain that might explain his apparent withdrawal from the discussion. He sat with lowered eyes, listening quietly, his good arm flung protectively across the back of Liphar’s chair. Aguidran shifted her weight soundlessly behind him, and the other rangers took this as permission to readjust their own stance. A ripple of movement passed around the table, Stavros stirring the last of all.

  “Given that such machines could exist, Taylor,” he proposed with studied deliberation, “would you be willing to say they’d explain all the weather anomalies you’ve observed on Fiix?”

  Danforth pondered a moment, looking doubtful and a little trapped. “Now I know you’re more sold on the goddess theory than the doc here is himself, and personally, I find that even harder to swallow than his machines, with or without human supervision. But no, I’d have to say in all honesty that no weather machine I’d design would behave this way. Theoretically, there are gentler, more efficient and potentially more life-sustaining ways to manage heat and water than slamming’ packets of one or the other around like cannonballs.”

  Clausen yawned and began a series of halfhearted calculations on his wrist terminal.

  “Maybe Ronnie’s right,” said Susannah. “Maybe they’re broken.”

  “Or maybe they’re not,” said Megan, “but the machine’s design reflects some builders’ preconceptions about the nature of weather that are lost to us through the passage of time.”

  “Who would ever conceive of weather as necessarily lethal?” Susannah countered.

  “The Sawls are not far from that kind of thinking right now,” said Megan.

  Stavros shook his head. Susannah noted that when he laid his hands again on the table, they rested palm up, his fingers lightly curled as if protecting some treasure held within.

  His guar-fire.

  A passing stab of jealousy caught her by surprise. Not envy. Susannah had no desire to share the pain in Stavros’ hands, but the accompanying mysticism had come to occupy the full center of his being. She believed that he believed it, but it made her nervous. And she could not compete with it for his attention.

  “What you are all avoiding,” he said with the kind of total conviction that disregarded other opinion, “is the notion of intention. The apparently conscious aspect of the Game. Because that, Taylor, is what Arrah really means, not weather at all, but ‘game,’ ‘struggle,’ ‘contest.’ ”

  Susannah thought it a true measure of
the changes wrought during Danforth’s convalescence that he did not respond to Stavros’ irritating tone. Instead he turned a thin, ironic smile to Weng. “Commander, I think this is more in your area of expertise. Would you care to attempt a specific application?”

  Weng toyed with the edges of another stack of notes. “I believe Dr. Danforth is referring to my recent efforts to use game theory as an analytical tool with regard to the dilemma of the local climate.” She fixed Danforth with a neutral stare. “You hope, I assume, for mathematical proof that gamelike patterns can exist without needing to imply intention?”

  “Numbers are not an answer to this question,” said Stavros more gently.

  Danforth rubbed his eyes. “Look, I’ll admit it’s been real hard lately to watch some of this shit coming down without jumping to the conclusion that there’s some nasty consciousness out there having a field day at everyone’s expense. But those kind of desperate conclusions are what occur to you in extremes. By the light of day, they don’t satisfy.”

  Clausen broke off his calculating to offer slow applause. “Well, bravo. Then may I suggest that we explore a few more scientific avenues before falling down on our collective knees?”

  “How much chance would CONPLEX stand in the Courts against actual living goddesses, after all?” Stavros murmured.

  “Give it up, Ibiá, Even your pals won’t go with you on this one.”

  “You were telling us about game theory, Commander?” Megan prompted.

  Weng seemed pleased to be offered the gift of their whole attention. “Well. If the data were a simple list of numbers, we would ask ourselves, what do these numbers have in common, and what is the mathematical function that could have generated them? That function, once derived, would constitute the ‘rules’ that determine the various ‘moves’ of the ‘game.’

  “We then look at the pattern of these ‘moves’ in search of the ‘objective.’ In the case of Dr. Danforth’s weather data, the patterns have indicated movement in response to one another. Thus we conclude that there are two sides, if you will, two sets of pieces. Patterns within the patterns indicate strategies, that is, relationships between moves that lead to consequences.