Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  As Cromis entered the bunker, the door whispered malevolently to him, but it left him alone. The light shifted frequency several times as he stood there staring at the vanishing point of the gently sloping passage. Vague, unidentifiable musical sounds were all around him. Growing from the walls were clumps of crystal that reminded him of the Metal-Salt Marsh; they pulsed regularly.

  He felt no fear.

  “Remain where you are, Lord Cromis.” Trinor’s voice seemed muffled, distant, as though affected by passage through the open door. “I shall expect to find you when I come through—”

  He entered with sword drawn. He grinned.

  “Just in case you had planned . . . Well, of course, I’m sure you hadn’t.” He raised his voice. “Bring the Queen through first.”

  When they had assembled, the Northmen sullen and silent, keeping their eyes fixed on the floor and mishearing their orders, he made Tomb take the lead. “Any . . . defences . . . you should disarm. Remember where the knife is held, dwarf, and who holds it.”

  That corridor stretched for two miles into the earth. Shortly after they had begun to walk, they found that the incline had levelled off. The nature of the walls changed: the clumps of crystal were replaced by yard-square windows, arranged at four-foot intervals. Nothing could be clearly discerned through them, but they were filled with a milky light in which were suspended vague but menacing organic shapes.

  There were no turnings. Their footfalls echoed.

  There were no junctions or side passages. They did not speak.

  They came eventually to a great circular chamber, in the centre of which columns of light and great rods of shadow wove patterns impossible to understand, like spectral dancers at the end of Time. Its roof and walls, all of green diamond, made a perfect half-globe. Twelve corridors, including their own, led off it from twelve vaulting arches. Otherwise, it was totally featureless.

  Those columns and cylinders of light and darkness flickered, intertwined, exchanged their substance, reversed their directions of motion. Motes of brighter light appeared suddenly among them, hovered like insects, and vanished. A single musical chord filled the place, a high cathedral resonance.

  Cromis saw nothing he recognised as a machine.

  “You had better begin,” said Trinor to the dwarf, looking uneasily about. His voice was taken by the diamond walls and flung about. As if in response, the visual display of the brain increased its activity. “It is aware of us. I would like to leave here as soon as possible. Well?”

  For a moment, the dwarf ignored him. His ugly features had softened, there was a gleam in his knowing eye. He was enraptured. He sniggered suddenly, swivelled slowly on his heel to face the traitor.

  “My lord,” he said satirically, “you ask too much. It will take a century to understand this.” He shrugged. “Ah yes, you hold the knife, I remember.” He shook his head sadly. “I can shut it down in a week—perhaps a little more. It is a matter of finding the right . . . combination. A week: no less.”

  Trinor fingered his scar.

  For the next few days, Cromis saw nothing of Tomb or the Queen: they were kept in the central chamber of the complex, constantly under the eyes and swords of the reluctant Northmen, while he and Grif were limited to the cargo hold of the airboat, and lived out a dreary captivity among the dead sloths.

  Each day, a Northman brought them food.

  Cromis’s in-turning nature enabled him to come to terms with this—he made verses while gazing from the porthole at the unchanging waste—but it betrayed him also in the end, in that it kept him unaware of Birkin Grif’s shift of mood.

  Confinement chafed the big Methven. He grew irritable and posed questions without answer. “How long do you suppose we will live after the shutdown? Tell me that.” And: “The dwarf cares only for his machines. Are we to rot here?”

  He took to sharpening his broadsword twice a day.

  Later, he lay morose and withdrawn on a pile of bloody pelts, humming songs of defiance. He tapped his fingers dangerously.

  Each day, a Northman brought them food.

  On the sixth day after the discovery of the central chamber, Birkin Grif stood behind the door of the hold, honing his sword.

  The door opened; their jailor entered.

  He had an energy blade in his right hand, but it did him no good.

  Grif stood over the folded corpse, eyeing with satisfaction its pumping stomach wound. He wiped his broadsword on the hem of its cloak, sheathed it. He wrested the flickering power-blade from its tightening grip. A terrible light was in his eye.

  “Now,” he said.

  Cromis found himself dulled and slowed by horror.

  “Grif,” he murmured, “you are mad.”

  Birkin Grif stared levelly at him.

  “Have we become cowards?” he said.

  And he turned and ran from the hold, quick and silent.

  Cromis bent over the ruin that meant death for the Queen. In the distance, cries of pain and surprise: Grif had come against the Northmen in the forepart of the ship, berserk.

  The nameless sword in his hand, Cromis followed the trail of slaughter. On the command bridge, three dead men. They sprawled grotesquely, expressions of surprise on their faces, their blood splashed over the walls. The place stank. The open hatch yawned. Wind blew in from the desert, filling the dead eyes with fine dust.

  Outside, the wind tugged at him. A fifth corpse lay at the entrance to the bunkers. The door moaned and hissed as he entered. “OUROBUNDOS,” it said. It snickered. Cromis caught up with Grif halfway down the corridor that led to the brain chamber—too late.

  His ragged cobalt mail was smeared with blood, his hands were red with murder. Over the corpse of his final victim, he faced Norvin Trinor. And behind the traitor, their blades spitting, stood ten Northern wolves.

  Trinor acknowledged Cromis’s arrival with an ironical nod.

  “I did not expect quite such stupidity,” he said. “I will make no more contracts with you. I see they are worthless.”

  Birkin Grif ground his heel into the chest of the dead Northman. His eyes sought Trinor’s, held them.

  “You have killed your queen,” Trinor said. “Yourself, too.”

  Grif moved a pace forward.

  “Listen to me, Norvin Trinor,” he whispered. “Your mother was had by a pig. At the age of ten, she gave you a disease. You have since licked the arse of Canna Moidart.

  “But I will tell you this. There is still Methven enough in you to meet me now, without your dirty henchmen—”

  He turned to the Northerners. “Make a combat ring,” he said.

  Trinor fingered his scar. He laughed. “I will fight you,” he said. “It will change nothing. Four men are with Methvet Nian. They have instructions to kill both her and the dwarf if I do not shortly return to them. You understand: die or live, you or I, it will change nothing.”

  Birkin Grif dropped the stolen energy blade and slid his broadsword from its scabbard.

  The dead Northman was dragged away. In the strange milky light from the windows of the corridor, the combatants faced each other. They were not well matched. Grif, though a head taller, and of longer reach, had expended much of his strength in the cabin of the airboat: and his slow, terrible rage made him tremble. Trinor regarded him calmly.

  In the days of King Methven, both of them had learned much from tegeus-Cromis—but only one of them had ever matched his viperish speed.

  They clashed.

  Behind the windows, queer objects stirred and drifted, on currents of thick liquid.

  Two blades made white webs in the air. The Northmen cheered, and made bets. They cut, and whirled, and leapt—Grif cumbersome, Trinor lithe and quick. Fifteen years or more before they had fought thus side by side, and killed fifty men in a morning. Against his will, Cromis drew closer, joined the combat ring, and marked the quick two-handed jab, the blade thrown up to block . . .

  Grif stumbled.

  A thin line of blood was dra
wn across his chest. He swore and hacked.

  Trinor chuckled suddenly. He allowed the blow to nick his cheek. Then he ducked under Grif’s outstretched arms and stepped inside the circle of his sword. He chopped, short-armed, for the ribs.

  Grif grunted, threw himself back, spun round, crashed unharmed into the ring of Northmen.

  And Trinor, allowing his momentum to carry him crouching forward, turned the rib cut into an oblique, descending stroke that bit into the torn mail beneath his opponent’s knees, hamstringing him.

  Grif staggered.

  He looked down at his ruined legs. He showed his teeth. When Trinor’s sword couched itself in his lower belly, he whimpered. A quick, violent shudder went through him. Blood dribbled down his thighs. He reached slowly down and put his hands on the sword.

  He sat down carefully. He coughed. He stared straight at Cromis and said clearly: “You should have killed him when you had the chance. Cromis, you should have done it—”

  Blood filled his mouth and ran into his beard.

  tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of the Pastel City, who imagined himself a better poet than swordsman, clenched his long, delicate fingers until their rings of intagliated, non-precious metal cracked his knuckles and his nails made bloody half-moons on his palms.

  A huge, insane cry welled up out of him. Desolation and murder bloomed like bitter flowers in his head.

  “Trinor!” he bawled. “Grif! Grif!”

  And before the turncoat’s hand had time to reach the energy blade his victim had discarded—long, long before he had time to form a stroke with his arm, or a word with his lips—the nameless blade was buried to its hilt in his mouth. Its point had levered apart the bones of his neck and burst with a soft noise through the back of his skull. tegeus-Cromis shuddered. He threw back his head and howled like a beast. He put his foot against the dead man’s breastbone and pulled out his blade.

  “You were never good enough, Trinor,” he said, savagely. “Never.”

  He turned to face his death and the death of the world, weeping.

  “Come and kill me,” he pleaded. “Just come and try.”

  But the Northmen had no eyes for him.

  12

  His face fired up with hate and madness, the nameless sword quivering before him, he watched them back away, toward the chamber of the brain. So he kicked the stiff, bleeding face of their dead captain. He crouched like a wolf, and spat: he presented them with lewd challenges, and filthy insults.

  But they ignored him, and stared beyond him, their attitudes fearful; and finally he followed the direction of their gaze.

  Coming on from the direction of the door, moving swiftly through the milky light, was a company of men.

  They were tall and straight, clothed in cloaks of black and green, of scarlet and the misleading colour of dragonfly armour. Their dark hair fell to their shoulders about long, white faces, and their boots rang on the obsidian floor. Like walkers out of Time, they swept past him, and he saw that their weapons were grim and strange, and that their eyes held ruin for the uncertain wolves of the North.

  At their head strutted Tomb the Dwarf.

  His axe was slung jauntily over his thick shoulder, his hair caught back for battle. He was whistling through his horrible teeth, but he quieted when he saw the corpse of Birkin Grif.

  With a great shout he sprang forward, unlimbering his weapon. He fell upon the retreating Northmen, and all his strange and beautiful crew followed him. Their curious blades hummed and sang.

  Like a man displaced amid his own dreams, Cromis watched the dwarf plant himself securely on his buckled, corded legs and swing his axe in huge circles round his head; he watched the strange company as they flickered like steel flames through the Northmen. And when he was sure that they had prevailed, he threw down the nameless sword.

  His madness passed. Cradling the head of his dead friend, he wept. When Methvet Nian discovered him there, he had regained a measure of his self-possession. He was shivering, but he would not take her cloak.

  “I am glad to see you safe, my lady,” he said, and she led him to the brain chamber. He left his sword. He saw no use for it.

  In the centre of the chamber, a curious and moving choreography was taking place.

  The brain danced, its columns of light and shadow shifting, shifting; innumerable subtle graduations of shape and tint, and infinitely various rhythms.

  And among those rods and pillars, thirteen slim figures moved, their garments on fire with flecks of light, their long white faces rapt.

  The brain sang its single sustained chord, the feet of the dancers sped, the vaulting dome of diamond threw back images of their ballet.

  Off to one side of the display sat Tomb the Dwarf, a lumpen, earthbound shape, his chin on his hand, a smile on his ugly face, his eyes following every shade of motion. His axe lay by his side.

  “They are beautiful,” said tegeus-Cromis. “It seems a pity that a homicidal dwarf should discover such beauty. Why do they dance in that fashion?”

  Tomb chuckled.

  “To say that I appreciated that would be a lie. I suspect they have a method of communication with the brain many times more efficient than crude passes of the hand. In a sense, they are the brain at this moment—”

  “Who are they, Tomb?”

  “They are men of the Afternoon Cultures, my friend. They are the Resurrected Men.”

  Cromis shook his head. The dancers swayed, their cloaks a whirl of emerald and black. “You cannot expect me to understand any of this.”

  Tomb leapt to his feet. Suddenly, he danced away from Cromis and the Queen in a queer little parody of the ballet of the brain, an imitation full of sadness and humour. He clapped his hands and cackled.

  “Cromis,” he said, “it was a master stroke. Listen—”

  He sat down again.

  “I lied to Trinor. Nothing was simpler than dealing with the geteit chemosit. Those golems stopped operating twenty minutes after I had entered this room. Wherever they were, they froze, their mechanisms ceased to function. For all I know, they are rusting. Cellur taught me that.

  “What he did not tell me was that a dialogue could be held with the brain: that, I learnt for myself, in the next twenty minutes. Then—

  “Cromis, Cellur was wrong. One vital flaw in his reasoning led to what you have seen today. He regarded the chemosit as simple destroyers, but the Northmen were nearer to the truth when they called them the brain-stealers. The chemosit are harvesters.

  “It was their function in the days of the Afternoon Cultures not to preventthe resurrection of a warrior, but to bring the contents of his skull here, or to a similar centre, and give it into care of the artificial brain. This applied equally to a dead friend or a foe actually slain by the chemosit—I think they saw war in a different way to ourselves, perhaps as a game.

  “When Canna Moidart denied the chemosit their full function by using them solely as fighters, she invited destruction.

  “Now. Each of the ‘windows’ in this place is in reality a tank of sustaining fluid, in which is suspended the brain of a dead man. Upon the injection of a variety of other fluids and nutrients, that brain may be stimulated to re-form its departed owner.

  “On the third day of our captivity here, the artificial brain reconstructed Fimbruthil and Lonath, those with the emerald cloaks.

  “On the fourth day, Bellin, and Mader-Monad, and Sleth. See how those three dance! And yesterday, the rest. The brain then linked me to their minds. They agreed to help me. Today, we put our plan into effect.

  “Twelve corridors lead from this chamber, like the spokes of a wheel miles in diameter: the Resurrected Men were born in the northwestern corridor. At a given signal, they issued from their wombs, crept here, and slew the guards Trinor had left when he went to his death. The fourteen of us stepped into the light columns. From there, by a property of the brain complex, we were . . . shifted . . . to the desert outside.

  “We waited
there for Trinor and his men. By then, of course, he was . . . otherwise involved. We eventually reentered the bunker, and arrived in time to save you from yourself.”

  tegeus-Cromis smiled stiffly.

  “That was well done, Tomb. And what now? Will you send them back to sleep?”

  The dwarf frowned.

  “Cromis! We will have an army of them! Even now, they are awakening the brain fully. We will build a new Viriconium together, the Methven and the Reborn Men, side by side—”

  The diamond walls of the chamber shone and glittered. The brain hummed. An arctic coldness descended on the mind of tegeus-Cromis. He looked at his hands.

  “Tomb,” he said. “You are aware that this will destroy the empire just as surely as Canna Moidart destroyed it?”

  The dwarf came hurriedly to his feet.

  “What?”

  “They are too beautiful, Tomb; they are too accomplished. If you go on with this, there will be no new empire—instead, they will absorb us, and after a millennium’s pause, the Afternoon Cultures will resume their long sway over the earth.

  “No malice will be involved. Indeed, they may thank us many times over for bringing them back to the world. But, as you have said yourself, they have a view of life that is alien to us; and do not forget that it was them who made the waste around us.”

  As he gazed at the perfect bodies of the Resurrected Men, a massive sadness, a brutal sense of incompleteness, came upon him. He studied the honest face of the dwarf before him, but could find no echo of his own emotion—only puzzlement, and, beneath that, a continuing elation.

  “Tomb, I want no part of this.”

  As he walked toward the arch from which they had issued, his head downcast so that he should not see that queer dance—so that he should not be ensnared and fascinated by its inhumanity—Methvet Nian, Queen Jane of Viriconium, barred his way. Her violet eyes pierced him.

  “Cromis, you should not feel like this. It is Grif’s death that has brought you down. You blame yourself, you see things crookedly. Please—”

  tegeus-Cromis said: “Madam, I caused his death. I am sick of myself; I am sick of being constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time; I am sick of the endless killing that is necessary to right my mistakes. He was my friend. Even Trinor was once my friend.