Of Mavin and Himaggery and Mertyn when they heard that the machine could be fixed? Of their plans to raise up the hundred thousand from their long sleep and bring them all to the purlieus of Lake Yost and the Bright Demesne? They were determined to raise them all in one place and build a better world from them.
Windlow-Barish, hearing this, was puzzled and torn once more. He started to say, “Now wait just a minute. That’s not the way I had planned…” But then he fell silent, and I could sense the intense inner colloquy going on. Then the argument started all over again, and this time Windlow-Barish had things to say which Himaggery listened to with respect.
Later, of Jinian and Himaggery.
“Will you have Rules?” she asked. “In your new world?”
“There will be no irrevocable rules,” he said ponderously.
“How will you live?”
“We are going to try to do what Windlow would have wanted,” he said. “He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game. It was the laws, the rules which made Gaming. It was Gaming made injustice. We can only try something new and hope that it is better.”
She left it at that. I left it at that, thankful that the thing Windlow had cared most about had a chance to survive.
Of Barish and Didir, standing close together and so engaged in conversation that they did not see me at all.
“Well, my love,” he said. “And are you satisfied?”
“How satisfied? You told me to lie down for a few hundred years so that we might wake to build a new world out of time and hope and good intentions. So I wake to find others building that world, others in possession of your seed grain, others planning the harvest, another inhabiting you, my love. Perhaps I should think of something else. Have a child, perhaps. Raise goats…”
“There are no goats on this world, Didir. Zeller. You can raise zeller.”
“Zeller, then. I will domesticate some krylobos, become an eccentric, learn weaving.”
“Will you stay with me, Didir?”
“I don’t know you. This you. Perhaps I will. But then I would like to know what it is that Vulpas knows. How has he lived all this time while we slept?”
“Will you stay with me, Didir?
“Perhaps.”
Of Buinel and Shattnir, drinking wine in Barish’s Keep.
“And my thought was, Shattnir, that he should have written it down very plainly, not in that personal shorthand of his, and have made at least a hundred copies. They could have been filed in all the temples, and certainly it was a mistake to confide in only one line of the Immutables.”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Shattnir, cold, impersonal.
“It’s not a question of it mattering. It’s a question of correct procedure! If he’d only asked me, I could have told him…”
Of Trandilar.
To me. “Well, my love, and what does your future hold of great interest and excitement?”
I blushed. “I haven’t had a chance to think of it yet, Great Queen.”
“Ah, Peter. Peter. Great Queen? Gracious. So formal. Do we not know one another well enough to let this formality go? Do you need to think about it, really? I should have thought your future would have raced to meet you, leapt into your heart all at once like the clutch of fate.”
She was laughing at me, with me. She stroked my face, making the blush a shade deeper, and then went on.
“You do not want to be part of Himaggery’s experiment, do you? There is scarce room in it for Himaggery and Barish, let alone any others. You would not live under their eyes and Mavin’s? No. I thought not.” She beckoned over my shoulder to someone, and then rose to hold out a hand to Sorah who sat beside us, laying her mask to one side.