Wielding a Red Sword

by Piers Anthony

  "You are welcome to borrow my copy."

  "By the time I get to it, I suspect, I shall have to ask your predecessor."

  "I'm sure he will agree." Mym considered for a moment. "I think I could do something to locate that man you want, because I can phase into minds and learn their thoughts."

  Chronos brightened. "Yes, I had forgotten! If you would do that—"

  "It might take a little time, no pun intended."

  "I can give you time," Chronos said with a smile. "In fact, I could arrange for a shipment of grain to be delivered here, by changing the time frame."

  "Then why don't I try to spot your man, while you see to the grain?" Mym sang, pleased. "We can do each other some good, which is the way it should be."

  "The way it should be," Chronos agreed. "But first—" He lifted his Hourglass, and Mym saw the trickle of sand within it change color. The moving men froze, joining the already-frozen ones. There would be no action here until the Incarnations were finished.

  Mym mounted his steed, and they trotted after the departed helicopter. The horse climbed the air as if it were a mountain; when they had sufficient elevation, Mym was able to see the flying machine in the distance. "Follow that scientific device," he told the horse.

  Werre accelerated, churning up fleeting contrails as he galloped. Mym wondered whether any mortals were watching this part of the sky from below; what would they think of those cloudlets? But probably the divots were no more visible than the horse and rider were. Mortals simply couldn't see the supernatural, ordinarily.

  They overhauled the helicopter and entered it. Werre stood on its deck, part of him overlapping the wall. Of course it didn't matter; the horse related only casually to the mortal world. Otherwise his weight would have caused the helicopter to skew and lose altitude.

  Mym sat in the pilot's lap and sank into his body, phasing in. Soon he was reading the thoughts. The man had no knowledge of the nature of the bomb he had dropped; he thought it was some kind of gas to immobilize the enemy. Where had he picked up the bomb? From a guarded military truck that had driven onto the military airport and departed forthwith.

  Dead lead, there. But Mym knew how a military operation worked. There would have had to be clearance for that truck, and the officer in charge of airport security would know about that. So he disengaged from the pilot, remounted Werre, and headed for the airport.

  As it happened, the security officer was on one of his frequent coffee breaks when Mym found him. That was no problem; Mym phased in and drank spiked coffee with him. He introduced the thought: What about that truck? Had the clearance been tight? Yes, it had been; that truck had come directly from the New Devices Lab, and all was in order.

  And what did he really know about that Lab, Mym mused, inserting the thought. Well, not much, but its clearances were of the highest nature. The General in charge of it brooked no interference by any other department and was a very bad man to cross.

  Mym got the name and address of the General and rode there. He didn't know how long this would take, and there was a fine green lawn outside the building—there might be a drought in the farmlands, but they found plenty of water for the military premises—so he turned Werre loose to graze and used the Sword to move himself inside.

  The General was watching the battle. He had a closedcircuit television system, with pickups stationed beyond the freeze-zone, and was using his controls to switch from one camera to another. Even with telephoto lenses he was having trouble getting a clear picture; nothing seemed to be happening.

  Mym phased in and tuned in to the General's thoughts. The man was frustrated. Obviously the bomb was working—but why weren't the backup forces moving? They had nullifiers! Curse this inadequate equipment!

  Mym had no sympathy for the man's frustration; he only wanted the source of the technological breakthrough. He shaped a thought and adapted it to the General's train of thoughts so that it seemed a natural bypath. Could there be some flaw in the system? What did he know about the designer? Could the man really be trusted? If the equipment had some secret liability—

  The General was of a naturally paranoid turn of mind, so this thought took hold readily. He plunged into a review of what he knew about the somewhat oddball genius who had abruptly come up with the time bomb, when the horrendously financed laboratories of nations far, far wealthier than Cush had been unable to make this breakthrough. The time bomb promised to be the key to suppression of the Nubian rebels now and conquest of the world tomorrow. But only if it worked perfectly. The individual who had devised it was, ironically, a Nubian himself, a refugee from the drought who had sought whatever employment he could get and turned out to be extraordinarily clever with electronics meshed with magic. No one else really understood what he was doing; indeed, the device seemed impossible on the face of it. But they had tested it on an isolated peaceful village, and it had worked: the villagers had remained in absolute stasis for six hours, then abruptly resumed activity as the effect wore off. They had been amazed at the sudden jump forward by the sun, not realizing that the world had lived through six hours in the seeming blink of an eye. Then came the companion discovery—how to protect men from the stasis. That had worked too.

  But now they were using both for the first time in the field—and something was wrong. The protected troops seemed to have succumbed the same as the unprotected ones. If this were betrayal—

  Mym phased out, having gotten what he wanted—the identity of the scientist who had made the breakthrough. The General had no notion of the technology; all he knew was that the devices worked—up to a point. The scientist was the real key.

  The man was not in the lab today. He had been granted leave to work at home, because that was where he worked best. They had tried to keep him at the lab full time, but that had led to no accomplishments. Because the erratic genius was his, they had to let the man operate in his own fashion.

  Mym went to the man's home. It was unpretentious, not even in the better section of the city.

  The man looked just like an unemployed farmer. He was in patched, baggy clothes and he was asleep on his battered couch. This was the genius scientist?

  Mym hesitated. Should he try to phase in to the sleeping man? He had never tried that before.

  He lay on the man, sank into him, and phased in. He was getting expert at positioning himself so that all senses aligned, but still it always took a while to get the complete mind tuned in. The mind was much more than the physical brain, and the brain was no simple mass of tissue! Each brain had its own idiosyncratic patterns, no two even remotely similar in the cellular detail of the routines, and he simply had to discover the way of each one by guess and error.

  And this one was different, not in configuration, but because it was asleep. Sleep was a whole new mode. Furthermore, it was dreaming. It was hard enough to adjust to the particular brain and mind, but harder yet to grasp that alternate reality that was the dream state. Some folk presumed that dreams were simply an alternate consciousness, governed by the same rules as those of the waking state, as if the person merely stopped from one room into another. It was not so!

  Mym was the man—and the man was walking through a section of a park. There was an overhanging tree, its branch seeming very large and heavy. Then there was a face, the face of a woman, eclipsing the tree; in fact the tree was gone, sloughed off without further attention. The woman was the man's mother. But she was dead—and now there was a gravesite, and across it walked a bird of some sort. And now a bowl of rice, but there was not enough; the bowl was almost empty. Memory of hunger surged up—years of hunger. A dog appeared—and a stone flung out, catching the dog on the rump, and it ran away. Anger; the animal had escaped. Poor aim; the stone should have struck its head, knocking it out. Water, a large lake, remembered from long ago, a wonder redoubled in this time of drought.

  Mym realized that he was seeing the cuttings from an idling consciousness—those snippets of information and memory and feeling that bobble
about just below the surface of thought, as if awaiting their opportunity to be drawn to full examination, and sometimes breaking through when the critical mind was relaxing. The conscious mind tried to make sense of these almost-random bits, forming them into dreams, but that sense was nonsense, like forming a story from random words, meaning sometimes seeming to manifest, but illusory. He could not afford to drift along with this; he had to discover how this man had made the time bomb breakthroughs.

  So he inserted his own thought of the bomb and watched while it had its effect on the melange. The bomb—a dream, in this case a dream within a dream, a memory of that. Sleep, and dream of hearing a call and walking toward it and discovering a door in the wall, one that had not been there before. Opening that door, entering a passage with a glow at the far end. This was working beautifully; it was a familiar memory, that played itself off when triggered. Walking toward that glow, discovering it to emanate from a book. Success, written in some unknown language, but in the dream he could read it as if it were his own, realizing that the pages of this book contained all that a man might need to know about improving his condition. He put his hand to the cover—and drew it away, for the cover was burning hot. Indeed, flames surrounded the volume; it was from them that the glow came. But he knew that there was no other way to read the book, and that if he did not do so now, he might never have another chance. So he nerved himself and touched the cover again, and lifted it, and the flame wrapped about his hand and burned it hideously, destroying it, but now the book was open, and there were the words that would facilitate his destiny of success. And they were the words of the formula for the time bomb.

  He read them, though he was illiterate, and they burned their impressions on the inner surface of his skull, never to be forgotten. He retreated and in a moment he was back in his own room. The dream faded out, and his hand was whole again, but the seared image in his skull remained.

  Mym pondered, slightly shaken by the intensity of this borrowed experience. He was not illiterate; that was the farmer. But what was the true source of the information? The farmer could not have developed it from his own subconscious; the technical information was far too sophisticated.

  But the formula for the time bomb was only part of it. What of the spot nullifier?

  Mym nudged the sleeper toward that, and the remembered dream returned. It was similar to the first. The call came in the dream within a dream, and the door in the wall appeared. He entered and walked down the sinister passage—and his right hand became a charred mass, its malady restored. He came to the dread book. Success, the alien word intelligible even to the illiterate, fire reaching up from it. The right hand was useless; he had to use the left to lift the cover, and when he did that, the flame scorched it into charcoal. But the words were there, different words, and the fire of their formulation reached in through his eyeballs and singed their imprints on the interior of his skull. Now he possessed the nullifier, and the magic was complete.

  He backed away and emerged again, and once more his hands were restored, and he was awake, with the letters of fire against his pulsing brain. All he had to do was repeat those twin formulas to those who could interpret and apply them, and success was his.

  Mym knew that the man had done so. He now had the excellent life he had desired. Yet now that he had it, it seemed somehow inadequate. He could not tell anyone beyond the secret project of his significance, because that would make him a target for enemy agents, so he had to pretend to be no more than a simple farmer who had come into wealth. That was unsatisfying. He desired acclaim. He wanted beautiful women to seek him for his personal attributes and charm. He wanted the heads of state to consult him, to take him seriously, and to compliment him on his knowledge.

  Mym recognized the problem. The farmer had been bitten by the worm of desire for fame and could not be satisfied with only part of it. He was driven to seek more than he had, more than success.

  Perhaps stirred by Mym's realization, the dreamer entered a new phase. The dream within a dream formed.

  "I wouldn't do that," Mym said in the dream. But the dreamer shrugged him off. The worm of ambition was too strong; its poison had spread too far. It could not be denied.

  Mym withdrew himself from the dreamer. He watched as the man made walking motions with his legs, and door opening motions with his hands. Then more walking—and the two hands curled up as if de-nerved, becoming useless claws.

  There was a pause, and Mym realized why; the man was trying to figure out how to open the magic volume of Success when both his hands were useless husks. After a moment, one leg stirred; he was lifting the cover with a toe.

  Mym did not stay. He could see the progression: each additional piece of information would cost a part of the body. After both feet were gone, the man would have to open the book with his teeth, and his head would be incinerated. That would be the end of him; his mundane body might seem unchanged, but his mind would be dead.

  Mym summoned Werre, mounted, and returned to the site of the battle. Chronos was there, waiting for him.

  "I thought you were going to go facilitate a shipment of grain!" Mym sang, half-challengingly.

  "I did—last week," Chronos replied.

  "But it has only been a few hours!"

  "You forget my nature."

  Now Mym remembered Chronos was the Incarnation of Time. Chronos could step into last week and return to the present. "Where is the shipment, then?"

  Chronos sighed. "I did what I could do, but found myself balked by a greater power."

  "What power is that?" Mym asked, alarmed.

  "Human corruption." And Chronos explained. He had found the bottleneck, manifested, and by dint of some fast talking gotten the train moving toward its destination—only to have it held up at the next station by officials who were determined to collect a decimating tax on its wares. This was a relief train, not taxable, but they affected not to understand that, and unloaded a segment of its cargo. The same thing happened further down the line. At every stop, more was taken, until the train was empty—before reaching its destination. Corrupt officials had stolen the entire cargo. Against this, Chronos was powerless; he could manipulate time, but time was not the problem here. Human greed was. Greed had defeated Time. The grain was now being sold on the black market; none of it would reach the starving folk for whom it had been intended.

  "But the government!" Mym protested. "It should be protecting the train, not robbing it!"

  "When the train is destined for a segment of the country that is in rebellion against that government?" Chronos asked.

  There, of course, was the underlying reason. The government would not permit a rebellious province to be fed, for that could strengthen the rebellion. So it permitted the graft while protesting innocence.

  Mym clenched his fist. "There is justification in war!" he sang. "To abolish governments like that!"

  "Perhaps so," Chronos agreed. "It is athesis you have made to me before."

  "I have?" Mym asked, startled.

  Chronos smiled. "In future years, your framework." Then he frowned. "I regret I have not fulfilled my part of the bargain. Therefore if you—"

  "No, you made an honest effort," Mym sang. He was learning more about the limitations of the Incarnations when meddling in human affairs. Mortals could be so determinedly short-sighted and wrong-headed! Were they really worth helping? "I have discovered the source of the technological breakthroughs on the manipulation of time—or part of it. A man had a series of visions or dreams that revealed the key formulas to him. Eliminate that man slightly before he eliminates himself, and there will be no breakthroughs."

  "Not a scientist?" Chronos asked, surprised.

  "Not a scientist. He dreams of a special chamber in which is a fiery book labeled Success, and it burns him when he takes the information."

  Chronos frowned. "All in a vision? That seems familiar."

  "Oh? How?"

  Chronos shook his head. "I—suspect I should not burden y
ou with my conjecture, as I am drawing on memories in your future. Let me just say that I am not sanguine about this."

  Mym sagged. Chronos' incidental revelations about the future had confused him before; probably it was indeed best to let this matter drop.

  But what was he to do about the battle that remained frozen? He chewed on his lip as he looked out over it.

  "Do not be concerned," Chronos said. "When I eliminate the breakthrough, none of this will have happened. You may supervise the battle as you choose."

  Mym wasn't sure quite how that would work, but was willing to find out. "Very well." He described the location of the key man.

  Abruptly the battle resumed—but not as it had been. This time the defending farmers were getting the best of it, and no time bomb dropped.

  "You prefer this?" Chronos inquired.

  Obviously the man had been at work, traveling back and forth in time. Now reality had changed, at least for this region. The breakthrough had never happened.

  Mym shook his head. "I think I have had enough of battle for today—even if none of it happened. I'm going home."

  "This is the way it often is in my domain," Chronos said.

  Mym wondered how the man maintained his sanity. Who could guess what convolutions Chronos had endured—that never happened? He made a gesture of camaraderie and mounted Werre.

  Chapter 12 - GAEA

  Rapture was away increasingly as time passed. She was very positive about her mortal job and seemed to be doing well, but it apparently made considerable demands on her. Mym was glad that she had adjusted so well, but the frequent nights alone bothered him.

  Naturally Lila was available. When he couldn't sleep, he took walks in the garden, and she was always there. Of course she was ready, willing, and able to serve as his concubine, but a complex of considerations prevented him from exercising this option. For one thing, she was from Hell, and he still distrusted the creatures of Satan on general principle. For another, he was becoming uncertain of Rapture, and that made him less rather than more inclined to use another woman. Had Rapture been solidly established and pregnant, it would have been virtually his duty to use a concubine, so as not to place demands on the bearer of his Heir; as it was, a concubine was premature. His seed needed to be saved for the Heir, rather than expended frivolously. So to use a concubine at this stage might be to suggest that he did not desire Rapture or seek an Heir, and that was not the case. Also, and this was an insidious consideration, he was not certain that Lila was a virgin. It was, of course, necessary for a man to know a number of women, as no single woman could provide essential variety, but it was important that a woman know only one man. It would demean his princely heritage if he were to consort with an unchaste woman. The creatures of Satan, by all accounts, were of questionable pedigree, and their forms here in the spirit realm were malleable, so Lila well might be a pseudovirgin.