“You,” said Jinian. “And Barish.”
“I,” he admitted, “and Barish. And a few others, though most of the so called scientists were second rate academics caught in a strange web of vanity and ambition. They stayed under the mountain, caught up in their dreams of research¾research on `monsters.’ When we would not let them have Didir, they created monsters of their own. And we, the rest of us, came out from the mountain into this new, supposedly uninhabited world…”
“Supposedly,” prompted Jinian.
“Well, supposedly. There were living things here. There were intelligent creatures here. There was material the bio-engineers could use, mixes, crosses, deliberate and inadvertent. Children began to be born with many Talents. The Talent of Didir proved to be real. Barish said it was simply evolution, a natural evolution of the race. I said no, it was this world, this place.”
He was silent for so long after that that Jinian had to prompt him again.
The rest of us were silent, afraid if we spoke we might stop him, interrupt his disclosure and never learn what he would tell us.
“Well, the poor fools stayed under the mountain. The Talents began to be born, and to grow, and feed on one another. Some were good people. Others were truly monsters. Barish was always an activist. He decided to intervene, to make plans…
“He stole one of the transport machines, disassembled it, brought it here to the wastes. Then he sought out the best of the emerging Talents, seduced them with hope and high promises, and brought them here. There were twelve with Barish, the Council. They made plans. They would accumulate those among the Gamesmen who had notions of justice, accumulate them like seed grain, and when the time came, they would plant that crop for a mighty harvest.”
He returned to us by the fire, shivering, though the night was not yet that cold. “It was not enough to plan a great future if one might not be alive to see it. So he asked me to work with him to develop a strain of people who would be immune to the Talents of Gamesmen and immutable through time. Well, we had longevity drugs and maintenance machines as well as the transport machines themselves. It gave us centuries to work. When there were enough of the Immutables, Barish made a contract with them. They were to find the good seed among the Gamesmen and communicate those names to those under the mountain. Those under the mountain would have them picked up, blued, and stored in the ice caverns. He got their agreement very simply, by playing on their fears. He told the `magicians’ that those identified were a danger to them, a danger to be removed but preserved as a later source of power. They believed Barish. Everyone believed Barish.
“And so, the Immutables became the `Council.’ Up until the death of Riddle’s grandfather, some eighty years ago. The chain was broken then. We may never know why.”
“And Barish himself,” prompted Jinian as I was about to do so.
“And Barish himself lay down beside the eleven others he had brought up here to Barish’s Keep. Once every hundred years the Immutables were to come and wake him, bringing with them some brain-dead body which he might occupy in order that his own not age, for he wished to save his lifespan for the great utopian time which was to come. And once every hundred years I met him in Learner, he in one guise or another, I always as Queynt, to talk of this world and its future. Once a century we would argue about the methods he had chosen, I urging him to waken his stored multitudes and learn from those who had been here before he came; he saying that there were not yet enough, to give him just another hundred years…”
“Until?” I asked, knowing the story was almost at an end.
“Until some eighty years ago I came to Learner to meet him only to find it in ruins. No Barish. Until I came up here to find his Keep, where I had been only once before, to find tumbled stone and Wind’s Bones, abysses and fallen mountains. I went to Dindindaroo to ask Riddle¾the current Riddle of that time¾where Barish was. Dindindaroo was in ruins, Riddle dead, the new Riddle ignorant of the very name of Barish.