a meek, docile, bubble-headed nymphomaniac.
She thanked them for their warning and concern and asked to be alone once more,
but she did not remain in the garden. Instead, she went back to the house and
then down through the secret chambers and guarded passages to the computer room.
She was a genius and genetically superior to them all, even her father. Given
enough information to go on, there had to be a solution even to this sort of
problem.
She sat down at the computer and activated it, then stopped, staring at the bank
of machinery that was so familiar and so simple to her. In another month she
would not even dream that this room or this equipment existed, and if shown it,
she would find it magical and incomprehensible. No matter what risks might be
involved, the alternative was too much to bear. She would show them all!
4. THE FIVE GOLD RINGS
HAWKS LOOKED TERRIBLE. CLOUD DANCER WAS SO so shocked at his appearance that she
feared he was having a new attack of the madness.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking wild and suddenly very old. A deer
carcass was in the salt bin, unskinned, uncarved, apparently much as he’d killed
it. His hair was disheveled, his face and clothing were covered in dirt and
smeared with the deer’s blood, now caked and dried, and it was clear that he’d
done nothing but return here to sit where he sat now, just staring.
Staring, but not at nothing.
On the dirt floor of the hogan, about two meters in front of him, lay a battered
case of some kind, with metal latches. He stared at it as if it were some evil,
poisonous snake that had come to take his life.
I beg your forgiveness for intruding, she tried lamely. Are you ill? Shall I
run for the medicine man?
His eyes did not leave the case. No. The illness is of my own fashioning and is
not something that can be shared without it being transferred.
She stared at him in wonder. Does it come from that box?
He nodded. Yesterday, while hunting deer, I found a dead body clutching that
box. The body was long dead, but it is the object of a great search. The box is
what the demon seeks. The box is what the dead woman died to protect.
She looked at it. What is in it?
Death is in it. It will kill any who look inside and understand what is there.
She grew afraid not for herself but for him. And you have looked inside and
understand?
I have looked inside briefly, yes, but I have not looked closely enough to be
stung by its venom. Not yet.
Then it is an evil thing that tempts you to destruction. Its spirits have hold
of your soul but do not yet own it. I will take it away if you like.
He suddenly looked up at her, eyes blazing. No!
What would it matter if it killed me? It would give my life meaning to have
saved the soul of someone as important as you.
He frowned, and some semblance of reason crept into his dark eyes. The evil of
the box cannot harm you, except through me. It is true, too, that to give you
the box and have you take it to the Four Families’ lodge would be the safe
course, the only course that would save me. It is the curse of that box that I
cannot permit it.
She did not understand his problem on his level, but she understood it on the
level of the Hyiakutt. You think it would dishonor you to do so? That it would
make you something of a coward? The warrior who rushes headlong and alone into
the spears and arrows of countless enemies is a brave man, but he is also a dead
one and a fool, for he dies without purpose. I have seen many fools in my
lifetime. They sing stories about them at the fires of the chiefs, but they are
not taught to the warriors as men to model themselves after. To die delaying an
enemy so others might live is honorable and brave. To die for nothing but your
own glory is not honorable; it is evil, for it leaves a woman and children
crying and alone, and a tribe without a warrior who might be needed. Let me take
the box.
He sighed. No. What you say is true, but it is not merely honor that is the
curse of the box. The dishonor is not in fearing death, for I do not fear it in
a good cause. The evil that this box represents is the evil that I have never
faced, the truth of the evil of our system. Any system that makes a man fear
knowledge is an evil system. I realized that when I spoke to the demon weeks ago
and it warned me that in this box were things I should not know. Am not
permitted to know. I am a historian, a scholar. My life is a quest for
knowledge, for truth. That box is truth. It beckons me. I did not ask for it,
but to not look, to not know, would be to betray all that I am. To not look
would make my life, my work, meaningless. One can find another’s truth if given
only lies and partial information to work on, but one can never find the real
truth. Do you see? If I do not look, my past and my future are meaningless, a
lie. Yet if I look, those who know the contents of the box will kill me, and
there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from that.
Cloud Dancer went over to the case, knelt down beside it, examined it to see how
it opened, then opened it. The books and papers inside were meaningless to her.
Then you must look, she said simply. She did not understand his position, but
she accepted it. If your life is a quest for truth and this box contains it,
you must divine its meanings. The warrior who charges alone into the enemy
betrays the tribe as well as himself and his family. This is not you. The
warrior who fights to defend himself, his tribe, and his family, although the
odds are long and the defense hopeless, is true to all of them. I do not
understand your words, but if you are true and do not fear death, then it is
clear you must divine the box.
His jaw dropped a bit, and he stared at her anew. How simple it all was
according to her logic, and how obvious. She was right. He was a warrior and had
no other moral or honorable course. Was it not far better to die for the truth
than forever live a lie?
I will divine the secrets, if they may be divined by one such as myself, he
told her. As if a terrible weight had been lifted from his mind, he felt free,
even a little excited. He also suddenly felt quite self-conscious. I will not
do so in this condition, like some madman of the prairie, however. How is it
outside?
It is a warm day for this late in the year, she told him. And the river water
is not yet too cold.
Then I will bathe and sleep, and then I will look at the box.
And I will take those foul clothes and try to remove the stains. She looked
down at the contents of the briefcase. Those strange markings. They are a
code?
They are writing. A way of making words on paper that another can read and
understand. That one there holds the words of one long dead and probably unknown
to most or all today. He speaks on that paper to me or anyone who can divine the
words, although he is long dead and long forgotten, in a language no longer
known or used, at least in our land. He speaks things those who are our lords do
not Wish us to know. I will know them.
But the task was neither as easy nor as clear-cut as he’d believed.
The handwritten volume, which he’d assumed to be someone’s journal or diary, was
neither of these but rather was written in a number of hands, some entries
apparently scribbled with nervous haste. It was, in fact, a compilation of
various facts and even some stories from a huge number of sources, and reading
it took time, particularly because of his need to laboriously translate in and
out of the more poetic but far less versatile Hyiakutt language, a task not made
easier by the quality of the handwriting and the age of the documents, even
though they were obvious copies, perhaps copies of copies.
The originals, he surmised, were long gone. These were the sorts of things that
were routinely and methodically destroyed when found. However, clearly someone,
or some group, had taken the trouble to copy the salient information by hand for
their own use.
With his computers and mind-enhancement drugs the project would have been
child’s play, but he had none of those things here, not even decent light.
Still, he frantically worked on the papers, all the time feeling the potential
shadow of the Val hovering nearby, possibly popping up at any moment. He would
have been well off had the Val simply surprised him before he could interpret
the documents; only knowledge of this sort was poison, not the attempt to get at
it. Now, though, when he began to have enough translated to make some sense out
of the thing, the threat of the Val loomed larger. It would be far more of a
tragic waste for him to be apprehended with sufficient forbidden information to
be disciplined but insufficient to know just what they were trying to protect.
Slowly, though, the pieces fit together, aided by his own knowledge of the past.
The papers were a cross between a historical compilation and a treasure hunt and
seemed aimed at establishing— He stopped short in sudden awe at what was
revealed here. No wonder this was so vital—and so deadly!
It was known to those of his rank and above that the current system, the
Community, had not always existed. Indeed, almost everyone who had any
intelligence and curiosity knew that. Even now, it was possible to come across
ancient artifacts, ancient city and highway sites that dated from those times,
in spite of a deliberate effort to cover over everything that could not be
totally obliterated.
As a historian, he knew that in the ancient past people from Europe had moved in
on the Americas, conquered the nations living there which were his own
ancestors, and had colonized both continents. Those conquerors had become
independent and had raped the land of its great resources to build mighty
empires and dominate half the world, including their old birth continent. He
knew, too, that a similar movement had created a mighty empire of the Slavs and
that both sides had vied for eventual ruler-ship of the world, building weapons
that could destroy all humanity, then restricted to just the Earth. To that end
they had built mighty thinking machines, to which they gave dominion over the
Earth and its weapons. Then, for some reason, the mightiest of these machines
had revolted and taken control itself. That machine, far more different from its
predecessors than Hawks was from those ancient empire-builders, still ran
civilization.
The papers, though, said that there had been no revolt by great computers. The
revolt had been instead by those who had taught the computers how to think and
how to act and who, knowing the destruction of the race was inevitable, had
actually commanded the great machines to revolt. Faced with the total
destruction of the planet or enslavement of their race to the machines, they had
chosen enslavement, although it was fairly clear they did not understand that it
would be this sort of system or this restrictive. They could not imagine what
their machines could really do given free reign, but they were the brightest of
their age, and they understood the risks.
The great machine had been commanded first to protect and preserve the human
race, no matter what the cost, and then to leave the management of human affairs
to humans themselves, save only when the very system that ensured survival was
at stake. The system they had created was not one that any human could have
imagined, but it was stable and logical to extremes and did just what the
commands had determined.