The Books of the Wars (54 page)

"I just want to know why, why all or
any
part of this happened. May still be happening."

"This?"

"The war, the love, the road, Thorn River," Aden suggested for he was not entirely sure himself.

"The eye would not tell you why, only how."

"Didn't it tell the Office why?"

The doctor shifted in his chair again. His smooth oval face remained toward Aden, perceiving him in all medically and psychologically useful spectrums, vaguely comical in its pretensions at humanity. "I don't know." The voice seemed to come from somewhere else, so abrupt was the change in its tone; it was harsh and disjointed, as if it had been synthesized on the spot.

"Is that why the Office is closing?" Aden asked.

"I wouldn't know about that. Even the rumors"—the voice becoming more conspiratorial—"hardly include the eye or what it showed us. Only that it's gone blind lately." The doctor threw his outspread fingers up and away from his hand, attesting to the frailty of mere machines. "Nothing seen from it for months. Just interference patterns and static."

Aden nodded in agreement. Logically, there could be no great identity between the eye and the Office or the war. No matter how important the information received from it could have been, the eye was only a small part of each. But it had been so great a part of him; the memories of its omniscience grew, it seemed, to fill up the emptiness that he now perceived to have been left by Gedwyn.

"But it is still there, in the creature?"

"The unicorn?" The doctor replied ingenuously, "Oh, yes. At least before the carrier waves went dead. We could be fairly sure of that."

Aden thanked him and did not think at all about why a doctor should know such things.

They thanked him for his years when he left the hospital, gave him some money (apologizing that there was not more), new clothes and a service weapon.

He was empty. His left eye remained empty, covered by a leather patch; his body was still heavily woven with dead wires, empty couplings, disconnected links, empty vacuum chambers, power leads branching from his nervous system into cavities that had held the various mechanisms of the Office.

The Office and its war had been taken from him, and he could find nothing in his world to replace them. There had been the short memory of Gedwyn, but he had requested the doctors to blur this, for her remembrance had been very painful.

He therefore continued to dwell upon the Office and the war, as he had done for all the preceding years. True, the Office's war had not offered one much of the terror and exhilaration that it had provided for other people on either side. As soon as action broke out in any area, the Office always withdrew its personnel to quieter places. The battlegrounds were the conceded laboratories of the services. The Special Office preferred to watch its enemy and its powers in repose.

It had been a comparatively gentle sort of espionage, carried out by people who lived most easily in paradox, contradiction and indirection. It was predictable that the Office should have become faintly alien even to itself.

Politicians had regularly questioned which side the Special Office had really been on. The Office, not officially existing, naturally declined to respond to their accusations.

But information had been obtained, and had found its way into the computer pools of Aden's world. Most of the Office's strange, abstracted evaluations wilted under the fanatic empiricism of the services. But enough had proved valuable enough to keep the Office alive for centuries.

Indeed, as Havinga had said, one of the minor breakthroughs of the past decade had been Aden's emplacement of the eye with the unicorn. The monthly block transmissions, five-second bursts of accumulated information and observation, had for a few months provided the services with the first hints as to how the internecine battles of the men of power were fought.

But like most of the information provided by the Office, it smelled too strongly of the other world. Even before the Office was formally closed, the services and the Border Command had stopped listening to it. They had made what was judged adequate studies of the Holy City's internal politics, and reduced those studies to green-bound notebooks filled with Llwyellan Functions.

That had apparently been enough for them. Aden wondered why it had not been enough for him.

He was too old or too young to be doing this. He had not been ordered. All his commanders had been scattered, perhaps like himself, and he had known only a few of his fellow agents.

Get there, he thought. Get there and find out why he had come and then why he had left. At first he was preoccupied with just taking another step or another breath in the high country air, but that lessened in the month since he had left the fortress at Dance. He was following approximately the same route he had taken when he had left the City. The diminishing power of the war had only slightly changed the geography.

The alpine valley was about five kilometers across with a stream traced along its northwestern edge. Sharp granite walls rose two or three hundred meters on either side, featherings of melting snow running from the ridgeline at intervals. The grass and wildflowers seemed particularly brilliant, but that might have been due as much to the clarity of the air as to the plants themselves.

His remaining eye was sharp. Although he had not fully compensated for the loss of depth perception, he could easily pick out mountain sheep grazing along fracture lines in the valley walls, a kilometer or more distant. They fed on patches of grass and scrub plants that surrounded the ruins of hermits' pavilions.

The powers of this world, like those of Aden's, had not been uniformly devoted to the prosecution of the war or in ostensible practice for it. Aden had always found some comfort and interest in the renegade mystics that were attracted to the interface between the enemy worlds. Of necessity, they avoided areas of frequent activity like Joust Mountain or the Holy City, but gravitated to areas like this. He had sometimes thought he would have liked to have done so himself, assuming a new name and holding himself out as a teacher of worldly science or a traitorous magician depending on which side a passing visitor might be fleeing from.

His feelings, he thought, must be like that the robot doctor had toward the new societies in the Taritan Valley: vague envy at the stability they had apparently found and frustration at his inability to come up with a good reason for not joining them.

He had been walking for some time before he realized that the wildflowers and long meadow grass were giving way to a neatly trimmed avenue. The wind did not touch the individual blades of this new grass, nor did it move the brittle china blossoms of rosebushes, chrysanthemums and ground orchids. The stream beds, too, became sculptured as they moved across the valley floor.

Aden slowed. He touched the gun in its shoulder holster for assurance. The pavilions he had come upon before had all been in disarray and ruin. The bodies of their occupants were bone or ash; whether they had fled from his own world or that of magic, they had apparently received a common message or come to a single conclusion. And they had left.

They had also been crazy in the first place. One could never expect too much of them and the Special Office had regarded the information they freely gave to its agents with great caution.

The northern slopes of the valley became a recognizable garden, perfect, immobile, rigidly held by a power Aden recognized as non-rational. Luxuriant creepers with lavender and white blossoms were frozen against carved rock outcroppings, hiding terribly suggestive shapes with wings and talons and crowns of fire. Small rodents were similarly paralyzed between dust-muted flower beds. The skeletons of birds were trapped in the seasonless growth. He could feel the brittle grass snapping under his boots and shattering like glass.

The pavilion was largely open, being little more than an intricate lattice of arches, columns and curling gables, and there was a magician seated on a flower-choked throne near its center.

It looked too fragile to have withstood the mountain weather, but Aden guessed that the structure and the garden around it had been sturdy enough to have stopped time, and, therefore, rain and wind should have been minor concerns.

He was satisfied with his lack of open fear. Logically, he should have stopped when he first saw the grass standing against the wind, drawn the gun, fitted the sight and let the Office's circuitries decipher their meaning. But the Office, unlike the services, had never depended totally on machines nor abdicated to their way of thinking. He told himself that he had recalled his old training, dredged it out from under his ruined heart and protective surgeries, and evaluated the situation correctly. Time was stopped here; one who was moving through time and therefore dying could be trapped only if he stopped too. That must have been what happened to the birds.

The beauty of the pavilion slowed him and invited his senses into its confusing tracery. The magician inside of it was magnificently clothed, seemingly in orchid blossoms, beaten flat, and overlaid on heavy gold foil. A book which he knew would be poetry, although he had never learned more than a few of the hundreds of script languages the wizards had written in, was open on his lap. The eyes were closed, yet the shadowing around them hinted powerfully at awareness. As he tried to steer to the right of the pavilion, he also noticed that its shadow contradicted the position of the sun; they were held in place by the magician's spell as absolutely as the lives of the flowers and the meadow creatures.

The immortality of the garden was that of a single moment. The magician had chosen one instant, when the relationships of all the things around him, from the line he was reading to, possibly, the specific quanta of light that was falling upon him from remote galaxies, conformed to some scheme or balance which he judged to be perfect.

It was not precisely a suicide. The uniqueness and unity of its conception slowed Aden further. He wondered where the boundary layer of the spell might be, how many angstroms above the captive flowers it hovered. The gun could understand all of it; but he found that he could not reach for it; he could only feel the anger of its mechanisms against his chest between the lengthening interval of his heartbeat.

Aden knew what was happening and part of him cursed with the gun at his stupidity and vulnerability. If he had had the eye, he would have understood all of this; the magical beauty would have been quantified and he could have protected himself against it. But it was not so completely terrible. It was like all the enchantments he had known in this world, though only those cast by the vaguely remembered love had touched him so closely.

The association eroded the surgeries and in an instant he grasped her name. Panic spread through him with the same, measured rate as had the realization of what was happening to him. He strained his eye back to the pavilion and searched through the thick, dawn shadows that covered the magician's face. Despite the hour she had apparently chosen to capture, she looked much older than he remembered. That, the doctor had mentioned to him once in a different context, was how it almost always was.

He remembered what the Office's hospital had tried to protect him from, and in the remembering slowed even more, half wishing to pass into the spell. But he could not do that. The birds had been trapped in it, but had not been chosen by Gedwyn to be part of it. So it and she held them there, transfixed by her beauty to die of exposure and thirst and starvation.

Aden felt his heart closing in around itself. He continued to look, and although the thickness of her robes completely disguised her body, he began tracing its contours, remembering its extraordinary softness and warmth, even in the artificial summer of the garden. He remembered, for the first time, how little they had spoken; but that only allowed him to believe that he could remember each of her words and the time and place she had said them. He found his body more densely inhabited by her than by the scars of the war or by the wire nets and antennas of the Office, and wished with frightful intensity that he would slip completely into the spell.

The sound of the approaching ship cut cleanly between him and Gedwyn; then it reached inside of him too, and separated him from her memory.

He was far enough to the side of the pavilion to see the approaching ship without moving his head. It was flying approximately level with the ridgeline, weaving slightly from side to side to give its cameras a better look at the terrain.

Twin-engined, propeller-driven, cautiously made of wood, though the men of power would have never condescended to look for magnetic anomalies in their routine observations; only Aden's world would have searched for intruders in such a way. Its sound deepened against the quiet of the garden and he could hear the rush of air over its wings. It traveled with a graceful deliberation that was separately visible as it diagramed its own passage through the valley; there was its awareness of itself, that included the minor ionizations and subatomic reactions triggered by its presence and by the pressures and vacuums its motion induced.

Aden felt himself moving to face it, rotating on one knee so that it seemed he might be kneeling, as he had in the temple before the unicorn. He felt the garden's power eroding in proportion to the aircraft's approach. He imagined he could feel the wide-bank cameras perceiving him, separating his being from the timelessness of the garden and only incidentally from himself.

The cold, camouflaged image of the ship, motion, and wisping oil smoke from its port engine filled his eye. Without depth perception, it came upon him suddenly, as if it moved freely through a space of its own creation; beside this idea Gedwyn's feat of stopping a single instant paled and shrank.

He saw where it had been patched from the wizards striking at it during other nights, where fins had been added or removed to perfect its movement through the air, saw the blankness of its radiation-proofed windscreen and ball turret dome.