Jeff’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You know him?”
“Knew him, long time ago. I doubt if he remembers, but we’ll see.” He sighed. “I guess I’d better track down Spirit and say my hellos, then get down to business. Then I got to sit down with the old man for a spell.”
Jeff told him where Spirit might be found, and Matson went off, leaving Sondra behind with Jeff. She dismounted and let her horse graze for a bit.
“So.” she said, “what do you think of the great man?”
“I’m impressed.”
“You do look a lot like him, or like him when he was younger. I can see it in you, and I think he could, too. He likes you.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t have guessed from his manner.”
“Oh, that’s as nice as he ever gets. You don’t want to see him when he’s in a bad mood. Still, I think he’s having the time of his life getting back out and into action again.”
“Your mom didn’t object?”
“Mom and he split years ago. I don’t think they were ever really in love. They just got married when both needed somebody and stayed together just for us until my brother and I were grown.”
“Sondra—what’s this business about? I mean, it’s been all this time and nothing, and suddenly, now, here he is.”
“I don’t think I can tell you that right now, Jeff. It’s the Guild that asked him, and he’s operating as their representative. Still, he’s seen Spirit off and on with me the past few years and I think he’s always felt a little guilty about not seeing you. He’s just never been all that good one on one with other people, and unless it’s something like this he’ll never make the first move.”
“Well, I can understand him staying away from Grandma, but it’s been more than eight years since she got swallowed up in New Eden.”
“He’s been busy lately with the Guild, training new stringers and holding down some important Guild posts. That’s the way it is in the Guild—anybody who lives through all he has gets the power and the position. He’s the only false wizard to make it this far in anybody’s memory.” There was more than a little pride in her voice.
They paused for a moment, and then Sondra asked, “What do you think of your mother?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. I’m getting used to it now, but I wish I understood it better.”
“I wish any of us understood it at all.”
What they both referred to was the change in Spirit the past few years. She had the most restrictive spells in the history of World upon her, and even Jeff tended to think of her as a wild thing, a child of nature not truly human. No speech, no understanding, no use of clothing, tools, buildings, or other artifacts—just her, wearing her emotions and nothing else and taking a tender if childlike delight in things. She’d been that way for his whole growing up, but eight years ago, during the turbulent time when her world had come apart, she’d changed. It was not that she could do or use anything more, but it was more in the way she moved, the way she looked at things, and the way she reacted to those around her.
One could almost swear, for example, that Spirit was totally aware of what was going on around her and perfectly understood everything and everyone with whom she came in contact. She examined everything in the most minute detail, including things that the spell prevented her from ever comprehending, and you swore that she could almost peer inside a person’s soul and know its innermost thoughts and feelings. There was something in her eyes and her manner that was at once reassuring and alien, unknown and unknowable.
The truth was, Jeff had gotten used to that by now, but could never really get used to his mother becoming rather heavily sexually active again. Intellectually he knew that it was perhaps the only pleasure she could really have in common with the rest of the human race, but it’s pretty tough to think of your mother doing that, and with total strangers both male and female. He was too embarrassed to raise the subject, though, particularly when he already knew the response—but she wasn’t anyone else’s mother, after all.
It had been more than eight years since New Eden had taken Nantzee and failed at Mareh, and many things had changed other than just Spirit.
Jeff had studied long and hard with Mervyn and with others of great power, and was a formidable wizard. He was the kid just hanging around only when with Sondra or Mervyn; otherwise, he was a strong and powerful figure who was getting a measure of fear and respect in his own right. He traveled widely throughout World, and was as good with a gun as he was with a complex spell. He still tended to be far too emotional in crisis situations for his own good, but he could be cold and deliberate as well. Still, while he was known as an adept of Mervyn’s, he kept his lineage concealed from others and his objectives as well. Ivan, for example, knew of him of course, but thought of him as one of Mervyn’s employees detailed to keep track of the current leader of the Seven. The wizard had no idea that Jeff tracked him for his own purposes, and to a more dangerous end.
Sondra had retired from riding the string, and hadn’t been seen much in the past couple of years. There was word that she’d had a child of her own and was working in the mysterious place where stringers trained and raised their children and coordinated the commerce of World, but she was closed-mouthed about it and Jeff knew better than to ask. And now, suddenly, both she and Matson had come out of hiding on some mysterious business. Jeff didn’t know what it was, although he was dying of curiosity, but he knew that this wasn’t just a family gathering and social call. Certainly it had something to do with the fall of Mareh just two months before, not by outside attack but by a clever and nasty New Eden-inspired revolution from within backed by black-clad troops. With total surprise and treason from within on very high levels, the Anchor that had fought New Eden to a draw eight years ago was now in its enemy’s hands, and even now the population was being systematically rounded up and “processed” in Flux as Nantzee’s had been. New Eden now held an entire cluster of four Anchors around a Hellgate and essentially controlled the Flux in between as well.
Although now surrounded by his enemy, Mervyn had been preoccupied for years with the location of Toby Haller’s journal, convinced somehow that it existed. With New Eden’s threat waning after the initial defeat at Mareh, and with the Seven going their separate ways and involving themselves in individual mischief rather than collective action towards their ultimate goal, the threat that had seemed so imminent eight years earlier now was long forgotten. Mareh’s fall now might awaken it. but it would take more than that action to create a feeling of crisis on the rest of the planet.
Jeff hadn’t seen Mervyn much since Mareh’s fall, and hadn’t wanted to. That development had totally depressed the old wizard, and he was something of a holy horror. He hoped that Matson would at least cheer him up.
Matson had been warned of Mervyn’s mental state, but found the old wizard as cordial and active as always, which was something of a relief. He took the offered plush padded chair and took a swig of excellent beer. Knowing that the old man didn’t mind, he took out a cigar and lit it and looked very much the Matson of old.
“I’ll come directly to the point,” the legendary stringer began after the niceties were done with. “The Guild has recently uncovered something that is of equal concern to it and to the Nine. They’ve asked me to go and investigate it, and I’ve already done so, and there’s real reason for concern.”
“I knew it would take something disastrous to bring you out in the open again. Go ahead. When the sky has fallen on your head and you’ve been knocked helpless and senseless by it there’s no room for anything but more bad news.”
“New Eden has a way of communicating through Flux.”
Mervyn’s heart seemed to stop for a moment, and he knew instantly that he’d been wrong. The moment you truly believe things can’t get any worse there is a fickle law of chance that says it must. “Communicating? Through Flux?”
Matson nodded. “I know they can do it. I’ve spent the last two weeks monitoring their calls. It’s a fairly crude system using an on-off binary code, and they can only send one message at a time through a given string, but it’s real enough. The theory’s always been known to the Guild, and we’ve kept it a tight secret. We never were able to use it ourselves, first because we didn’t have the amplifiers needed to make it practical and second because even a limited use would show to everybody that it was possible.”
“You have crystallized all of my nightmares in one comment. You say you knew this was possible all along?”
He nodded again. “You must know that the Guild grew out of an ancient military order. We have most of the ancient manuals and the like from those days, and we’ve always kept ourselves as a military group. Right now I’m a full colonel, for example, although we never use those ranks outside our own.”
Mervyn knew the military organization and structure well, but he had no idea that so much of the ancient writings had also survived.
“This knowledge is only known to field grade officers and above,” the stringer told him. “I didn’t know it until just a few years ago myself, although I always wondered why it wasn’t possible. After all, a string’s only energy in a fixed form. If you can send signals over wires in Anchor like they discovered during the Empire’s time, there’s no real reason you can’t use the strings for that as well. The only reason I figure it took ’em so long to figure this out for themselves was that we had all the books on the subject and they had more immediate things to think about. They got it now, though. They’re using a relay network of their own strings off the beaten paths, but they’re in constant two-way communication with Bakha and Nantzee and probably Mareh too by now. They had to rig their own to keep it secret from the stringers on the main routes, but one of our people got off the beaten track on a tip from a Fluxlord and found it anyway.”
Mervyn was silent for a moment, although his mind seemed totally incapacitated for a brief period. Finally he said, “You realize what this means’? If the Seven can learn how to do it, and they will, it’s touch-and-go if we could stop them from opening the Hellgates.”
“Yeah. Well, don’t think we haven’t thought of that. Luckily it’s not that simple. You need a lot of amplifiers to link up the whole of World in even the most basic communications net. They need twenty just to establish and maintain the network they currently have for this cluster, so you can see what it would take to connect all seven Gates.”
“The operative thing is that it can be done,” the wizard noted. “What can be done eventually will be. What is primitive now will become sophisticated fast. It’s been that way since we opened the magic box of ancient writings and began to compile and study them.”
“Well, it’s possible to run thousands of messages—even voice messages—over the strings at the same time. I’ll tell you that much. But in all those years they’ve never built a bigger and better amplifier, and the signals you send tend to fade out as they go. They have to be received by another amplifier and returned to full strength and then transmitted again down the line. Of course, it’s done at the speed of light, but so long as they can’t get more power they can’t use fewer amplifiers than they do now. My best guess is they don’t know how those amplifiers work any more than you or I do. They don’t understand half of what they’re using now. They just find the instructions, build ’em, and use ’em. The machines they use aren’t any different than the ones Coydt used almost thirty years ago. If they don’t understand how they work, they can’t build ’em better.”
Mervyn sighed. “I wish I could be optimistic even about that. If what you say is true, and remains true, it becomes something of an advantage for us. It reduces the problem to purely military terms—disrupt only one transmitter and you destroy their whole plan, and the locations of those transmitters would have to be known and tested. Considering what Coydt alone was able to accomplish, and given the principles of it, they may find a way.”
“Well, I don’t want to panic you, but there’s always been communication through Flux, you know.”
“What?”
Matson shrugged. “It’s like a web, sort of. Every single temple is in contact with every other temple through that top center spire of theirs, sending out a continuous signal. The four Anchors in a cluster intersect through the Gates, and there’s an identical signal running from Gate to Gate through the whole thing. We’ve always known there’s something funny about those temples. You know that.”
“Soul Riders,” Mervyn mumbled.
“Huh? What?”
“Soul Riders. That’s where they get their orders from. That temple network or grid. You know, a very long time ago, when you infiltrated Coydt’s takeover of Anchor Logh, Suzl met up with the Guardian. The way she told it was too confusing to make any sense, but you remember, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Sure. It actually turned Temple Square into Flux for a very short time to get us out of there. But that was the Guardian of the Gate.”
“I wonder. Do we really know just what the Guardian is? Or even if it’s anything like what it calls itself? Suzl said that the power coming into the temples went not only to the power transformers but down, down into the ground below the temple. We tried and tried to repeat that sense she had, but to no avail, and, of course, she was no longer available for it. But what if she was right? What if the temple is only a building over what’s really there? I’ve occasionally intercepted signals coming from some source to the Soul Rider within Spirit. I got an undefined sense of it, once or twice, as the sort of speech machines might use to talk to one another. I don’t know why—it was far too fast and too complex for any human mind to more than sense. Still, I’ve always wondered. Under each temple, say, a machine. A great amplifier, as it were, setting up the rules for World, keeping Anchors stable. A great machine beyond our imagining that not only governs, it thinks.”
Matson chuckled. “A thinking machine? Thinking like a man?”
“No, not like a man, I’d wager, but thinking all the same. You’ve seen Spirit?”
“Yeah.”
“You wouldn’t notice as much of a change in her as I would. I’d almost swear, though, that she and the Soul Rider had somehow come together as one individual. You know—it all fits. If I were a big machine that thought, but was stuck far underground in one location, I’d have a way to find out what’s going on beyond my own immediate area. The Soul Rider would be its eyes and ears.”
The stringer thought it over. “Well, maybe, but if so why would Spirit still have that damned spell? Seems to me that any machine that smart could break it. Even Suzl managed to do it, if I recall.”
Mervyn sighed. “That’s true, but how would we know how a machine thought, or what its motives and purposes might be? Still, it’s a fascinating idea.”
“And another thing—why would it use so few eyes and ears? I mean, the Soul Riders can only see and hear so much. Most of what’s going on would pass ’em by.”
“One piece of the puzzle at a time,” Mervyn told him. “Every answer gives a hundred questions, but that’s still a step forward. If I only had Toby Haller’s journal, that might supply the missing pieces.”
“Sondra told me about that. We always put that down to a fairy tale.”
“So did I—but I know where a copy is now. It’s exactly where I thought it was all along, but I could never be sure. I think I’d die happy if I could but read it.”
“Huh. So why haven’t you gotten it by now?”
“Because it’s in Adam Tilghman’s personal library in his house just off Temple Square in New Eden. That’s pretty damned hard to break into, for one thing. Oh, I have agents in New Eden—lots of Fluxgirls there since the start whom I was able to cover with dual personalities—but they’re all under a lot of restrictions and spells. None of ’em could read and tell which one it was, and it’s not in printed form but contained in a module with a lot of other junk, probably not labeled as such but prominent enough to be missed. The fact that it’s known and yet unattainable has come close to driving me mad for years now!”
Matson put out the stub of his cigar and scratched his chin a moment. “You think it’s that important?”
“I don’t know, but I know it must have something. Tilghman captured the High Priestess of Mareh, you know. He knew he couldn’t break her spells, but he brought her, stripped naked, back to New Eden just two weeks ago and displayed her in Temple Square. When they were through torturing and debasing her and realized they could never get her to recant, he had her brought to the house in chains and forced to read the journal. My associates and I use the Holy Mother Church, but we are not compelled to actually believe in it like she was. She was faced with truths she couldn’t deny yet the spells would not allow her to accept. It drove her completely stark raving mad. She’s a lunatic with no reason at all now, held like an animal in a cage on public display in their zoo.”
“So the legend of the thing is borne out. You sure you want to read this thing?”
“As I said, I don’t have the problem she was confronted with. But even if it had the same result, I would gladly do it. It won’t, though. Coydt read it, and he was just as insane before as after. Tilghman read it, and perhaps many others. If our enemies have read it, I think it is vital that we do as well. Now more than ever, with the real threat that this communication system presents. We’re pretty sure there’s something terrible beyond those Gates, but we don’t know what. We do know that our ancestors were so frightened of whatever it was that they sealed them off and then systematically reduced human civilization to a state of ignorance of its own technology, even its origins, just to keep those seals secure. They did a very thorough job, but not thorough enough. We’re now beginning to relearn vital parts of what was lost, destroyed, or suppressed. There is a very real danger of those Gates reopening, and we don’t have the skill to suppress civilization again, even if we wished to. It becomes vital, then, that we know what we might be facing.”
“I know enough,” Matson told him. “It could be nasty, but it sure isn’t hopeless.”
Mervyn stared at him. “What could we do. in our primitive ignorance, that our ancestors with all their machines and technology could not?”
“Seems to me it’s the old story of World and nothing more. Look at World. The stronger and more powerful a wizard is, the more he thinks he’s some kind of god and the less he thinks or knows about things that aren’t wizardly, you might say. When you can zap somebody with your little finger you never bother to learn how to shoot a rifle, or win a bareknuckle fight. They couldn’t milk a cow, or grow a flower in Anchor. Nope, it’s all magic, magic, magic—but what do you really know about your magic? Can you actually invent a spell, or do you just know the procedure to follow so that the spell flows into and out of your head? I don’t mean the simple stuff, I mean like Pericles. Could you write down the formula for it on paper? Sure, you know how to command a flower to grow or appear, but do you really think about how that flower’s made? All the biochemistry that goes into that flower? Do you understand it?”
“You know I don’t.” Mervyn replied. “No human mind is capable of such complexity.”
“So what you are, as a powerful wizard, is a guy who knows how to push just the right buttons—just like those guys in New Eden know how to read the manual on how to work their machines, and how to make ’em, but they don’t really understand them. Same difference.”
“But if you can use that power, what’s the difference in practical terms’?”
“A big one. Like I said, you get to be a wizard, you forget or never learn the practical stuff. I think it’s the same with machines. In fact, I’m sure it is. You get born into a society that is completely run by machines. You take those machines for granted. You pick up some little communicator and you talk into it and the exact person you wanted to talk to picks up his and talks back. Neither of ’em know how it works. It’s always been there, and if it breaks they get a new one. They don’t even think of how it works. They take it for granted, just like wizards take their powers for granted. Now let’s take those Gates. Whatever’s been kept out, if it’s still there and still alive after all these centuries, is from the same kind of machine culture as our ancestors. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have made the Gates at all. They’d have used something else.”
“I’ll grant you a point for argument’s sake. That’s assuming they’re keeping out somebody rather than something—a weapon, perhaps, or Flux flowing unrestrained or uncontrolled. It could be a natural calamity.”
“Not likely. If it was something like that, you might seal ’em off, all right, but you wouldn’t keep what’s there a secret, and you sure wouldn’t go to all this trouble to keep humanity down. You’d want everbody to know just what the disaster was. Up north in Anchor Jamzh they got a big lake. You ever see it?”
The wizard nodded. “Long ago, but I remember. It’s quite impressive.”
“I learned to swim in that thing. But it’s not a natural thing, it’s something left over. There’s a real thick dam across the valley there made of the same stuff as the temples, although it’s layered over with rock and dirt. Everybody knows what would happen if that dam ever broke. All that water would tumble out at once, instead of over the falls, and take out half the Anchor. Not even the craziest nut has ever thought about blowing up that dam. Looking after it is a sacred duty. Same thing with the Gates. If it was some kind of natural thing, they’d have dammed it up for sure, but they’d take pains to make sure that everybody knew what it was from the moment they got out of diapers. Uh uh. Instead we get demons from Hell. So I figure that’s pretty much our way of looking at just what they were keeping out. The savages, the monsters, whatever were at the door and they knew they were outnumbered or outgunned or whatever. So they barred the doors, told us there were evil demons there, and took away all we knew to keep somebody from waving a white flag and surrendering or making a deal with the enemy.”
Mervyn was fascinated. “Go on.”
“Well, let’s assume that the enemy’s still there. Hard to believe after a few thousand years, but who knows? Maybe nobody’s home. Maybe they gave up and forgot us a long time ago. Maybe it was even us—some early New Eden revolution or something. With their machines and total control of Flux they could probably come up with a nightmare we couldn’t even have now. But maybe they’re so complete that they’ve been there for all these centuries and are just waiting for one of their machines on the other side to say the door’s unlocked. Well, if it is, I’d say we probably have a better crack at them than our ancestors did.”
“Indeed?”
“They’re gonna have to come through the Gates. We know where they’re coming. They’ll be real confident, more than any Fluxlord you’ve ever met. They’ll have the power of gods, thanks to their machines. All their defenses, all their tactics, will be geared to fighting somebody just like them. They’ll face millions of flies who can sting and bite and the only thing they’ll have against those flies are twenty ton sledgehammers. Cannon don’t do much good against a mass attack by cockroaches.”
“I wish I had your confidence. More, I wish I had that journal. It would tell me what I had to know! I’m sure of it!”
Matson sat back and lit another cigar. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Mervyn suddenly felt excited again. “You mean that? You’re going there?”
“I have an audience with His Nibs the Judge himself. That’s why they sent me. I’m the only man who’s an outsider that they respect enough to talk with as an equal. The guy who killed Coydt van Haas and, of course, the guy who came up with the plan to let them live and keep their spoils of war. Give me the layout of the house, if you’ve got it, and anything else I’ll need. Maybe I can’t, but if the thing’s as important as you say I might be able to manage it.”