The Books of the Wars (55 page)

It was a Special Office ship. It carried time with it because it believed that time could stand against magic and against the final desires of its own world.

Aden moved his head in a quickening arc as the plane flew over him and down into the valley. He found himself walking after it, past the pavilion, still looking at Gedwyn, but no longer held by her.

As he looked, a vaporous dust drifted off the flowers and the framework of the pavilion. At first he thought that it had just been the wind from the aircraft blowing free the summer's accumulated pollen. But the usual mountain wind had dislodged nothing when he approached the garden.

The haze thickened until it appeared the garden was made entirely from damp, smoldering wood.

It was the time the Office ship had brought with it, infecting the garden, gradually and unintentionally reducing its subtleties to known factors, opening up the closed surfaces that kept the air and sunlight out and Gedwyn's own life inside.

There was another sound, muffled like a hand falling on a quilt. The book had fallen from Gedwyn's lap. She in turn, had bent slightly forward, her right hand slipping up from her chin to her mouth, shielding her hurt and sorrow. The time-mist rose from her too. The shadows over her eyes lightened as their captive darkness vaporized.

Aden started running, and his movements were sluggish and painful. Enough of his heartbeat returned to remind him of the necessity for fear. This helped. He ran through low hedges of ground orchids, kicking them into granulated diamonds.

The edge of the garden was fifteen hundred meters from the pavilion. Aden ran on for another hundred meters, feeling the freedom coming back to his legs and arms, feeling the wind again and the rough meadow grass.

He fell down next to a clump of bayonet grass, the product of the valley's first peacetime spring. The cuts it put in his right hand were shallow, and for a moment he enjoyed the certainty of their pain. Then he reached into his tunic and unclipped the gunsight from his holster. He looked back to the garden and found that the haze was gone. Everything appeared to be unitary and whole again, immune to the further progress of time.

The spell had been displaced. The book was still face down at Gedwyn's feet, and she remained bent slightly forward; her eyes were still shut but the shadows around them were qualified by an equivocal light. Every blossom that he could see had lost at least one petal.

Gedwyn still held a moment, but the ship had loosened it enough for Aden to escape. The fact that he knew the Office to have been closed over a year ago did not bother him; he had worked for it for years, firmly convinced that it did not exist in the first place. Surely, if he had lived and worked at addresses that did not exist, called telephone numbers that were not listed in any directory, talked to people whose names had been erased from all the world's records, the presence of one fugitive aircraft was hardly worth puzzling over.

But it was an Office ship. If it had been piloted by any of the services, it would have been pursuing absolute knowledges and the garden would have burst apart as the power of its spell was set free in a hostile vacuum of inflexible understanding.

In its way, this was crueler. Gedwyn persisted, but no longer in a time fully of her own choosing. Aden guessed that if any conscious thought was left to her, she would soon go mad, locked into a prison of her own building, unable to escape and correct it or choose another. The book with which she had chosen to spread her personal eternity, the particular word, faced away from her and the symmetries it had formed with the pavilion and alignments of the stars were now flawed.

He held this thought within his mind, equally with the memory of what he had felt for her. The gunsight and the aircraft stood between the two, mediating, translating, allowing him to exist with their equal truths. Aden knew that they could be removed easily and he could submit himself to the dominion of one or the other, and thus become like the Border Command or like Donchak. Such choices were not the manner of the Office; choice itself was not.

Closely packed columns of figures and symbols lined the gunsight's reticle; internal gyroscopes stabilized it against the trembling of his shoulders and hand. The gun understood the magic that remained, but Aden could not believe that it knew or understood Gedwyn, or if it did, that it could communicate its understanding to him in terms he could grasp. But the doctor had told him that the bomb had known, after the Office told it.

He dropped the gun to his side. She was again remote; her features were blurred at the distance and partially screened by the pavilion's latticework sides. She became as he was, a thing mostly of the Office's creation, and he could no longer be sure whether there was enough of the thing he had loved or of the enemy magician left in the garden to compel her destruction.

He walked away from her as he had the first time, slowly and uncertainly, scarcely daring to breathe lest the noise of the air in his lungs disturb the balance the Office had commanded and plunge him irrevocably into one side of the war or the other.

Etridge picked up the notebook Stamp had placed before him. "I didn't give you much time."

"Quite enough."

"I forgot how much things have improved now that we have fewer distractions."

"Just simple psychometric monitoring and evaluation. Interpret that with post-Heisner theorems and Llwyellan Functions."

Etridge held up his hand. "What will he do?"

"We're not that far along yet." Stamp permitted himself a smile. "But based upon what we understand about him now, he will report nothing to Lake Gilbert. The man was subjected to too many conflicting allegiances in too short a time for him to evolve a rational course of action."

"Or even an irrational course?"

"No course at all. Given his personality and the way in which he perceived things, he'll abdicate to stasis. That is safe. It's served the world fairly well for years now."

Etridge ignored the implied reference to Thorn River. "He'll abdicate to stasis and to the victory we've given him."

Stamp smiled again, but less surely than before. Now they were talking about something besides the man from Lake Gilbert. That had been a single person, like any other that had lived and like the millions the antennas had listened to, examined and probed. His background had been known and, as he told Etridge, when the understanding of his psychology and history were applied to his current experiences, his future conduct would be accurately predicted. But Etridge had placed the man, and therefore, Stamp could not help but think, those who had watched him, within the context of the ended war.

The war: simple, absolute, present in the sense of distant oceans or winds that seldom intruded into one's immediate life. Stamp often conceived of Joust Mountain as a university and its antennas as laboratory tools vastly removed from the phenomena they studied.

A victory would have to be claimed; positions would have to be consolidated, lingering traces of magic crushed, isolated covens rooted out, understood and ended, the lands divided and scoured clean of legend. Was that not the imperative of victories?

That it could happen this way, so quietly yet so absolutely, terrified him.

"Anything else?"

Stamp guessed that his distraction showed. "As before," he responded, shuffling the other notebooks in his hands. "Incoming bands remain almost uniformly blank. All the systems here and at Kells, Dance and other installations for two thousand kilometers report the same thing. Some traces remain in spots, and we're trying to see if they don't conceal some sort of pattern that we should be picking up on. Aside from that, it seems that organized hostile activity within the enemy's lands has stopped."

"No life?" Etridge questioned with his pale hand. He was dressed in finely tailored gray which emphasized the elegance of his frame.

"Yes. A great deal, but all conventional. There'sno power coming out of the kingdoms."

There were aerial holograms of crumbling, deserted cities, squares filled with hungry mobs cowering at the sight and sound of the aircraft, unplanted fields, canals dried up or flooding out into new swamps, the carcasses of pegasuses and leviathans bleaching like those in front of Joust Mountain except that there were no wrecked machines nearby to explain their deaths. Against this, balancing the ruin, was the life that had been suppressed by the reign of magic: trees and flowers and things that lived by themselves, rather than by the whim and fancy of men of power.

"Have you gotten anything from that eye or whatever, in the unicorn?" Etridge asked offhandedly as he organized some files on his desk, almost catching Stamp unguarded.

"I really think they tried to design too many functions into it. Internal power, transmission, analytic functions." Stamp tried to shrug off the overreaching of Special Office technology. "No wonder its signals got screwed up so quickly. Only the Office would waste their time with such gibberish."

"We had to watch it and listen to it through their eyes and ears, not our own."

Stamp shifted his weight, betraying his unease. "But it was still garbled nonsense."

"But are the signals still coming in?"

"We accidentally caught part of one three months ago. As I said, it was static and nonsense." Stamp's voice was sagging against Etridge's pressure. He had not wanted to look closely at what the transmission might have shown. It had come from inside the new silence of the enemy's world and its content had initially been determined by a fabulous beast whose existence persisted in the empty kingdoms, drawing their minds outward from the walled safety of Joust Mountain to meet it. "Why can't we just ask the Office, or whoever's running its operations now, how to listen for the eye if it's so desperately important?"

Etridge laughed behind his nobleman's hand. "That's the simplest question of all. The Office does not exist now. It's never existed. Haven't you ever asked one of its people if it did or didn't?"

Etridge's face snapped into a new alignment, slitting his eyes but failing to mask their madness. "Listen again, Stamp. I want the channels unlocked and I want the information captured and understood. I ordered that done when we discovered that it had not been shut down by the Office. I appreciate the technical difficulties involved, as well as I know how you all must regard those signals. They come from the enemy, just like all his goddamned spells and curses and bolts used to, and you're scared that you're going to get your precious hearts singed by it." Etridge read the man's thought. "Or discover that there's nothing left and it's just the call of a poor, dumb, lonely beast who hasn't been fed because we nailed its masters. I want every available scrap of information for when we go in."

"Sir?" Stamp paled noticeably under the room's fluorescent lights. "Offensive action can only be authorized by Lake Gilbert."

"Lake Gilbert has made no such authorization for one hundred years. They've forgotten how. At any rate, this will only be a reconnaissance."

Stamp had evaluated the man from Lake Gilbert correctly, for he reported nothing more than what he had been told. That alone was sufficient to freeze his superiors into a similar paralysis.

The regular services had withdrawn from the frontiers, as if they feared the silence of the enemy more than the threat of his power. Various reasons were used to justify the retreat: money was needed to rebuild the battlefields within the world (there was a circle at Thorn River where nothing had grown through the crystallized soil since the battle); policy decisions had been made to shift from active ranging to more subtle, passive methods; the battle was over, but the enemy had spitefully devastated and booby-trapped his own land so that nothing but time could make it safe again.

Aside from the budget cuts, which were real, Etridge and the other frontier commanders were delighted with this course. One spent less time looking over one's shoulder for spies from Lake Gilbert, Castle Kent or the General Accounting Office. Long-range offensive vehicles and ships were more easily requisitioned and it was simpler to keep their discoveries secret. Etridge felt that he had more room now, in back as well as in front of him.

At first, Stamp hardly noticed the hangars of Joust Mountain filling up again with hovercraft, heavy-lift helicopters and ground support ships. But some days it did seem that the worst days of the Third Perimeter and Thorn River were back.

The mood was difficult to place. He sensed none of the exhilaration that Etridge showed on progressively more frequent occasions. It was something apart from what the fortress had known before, more alive than any of its years of watching, more anxious and fearful than any of the times it had sent its garrison back to their own homes to strive against the creatures that had materialized there. Perhaps it was Etridge's madness, lying like anodized pigment over the fortress' perfect surfaces, blurring the clarity of the images that had been reflected on them for centuries.

On the upper galleries, the antennas and aerials maintained a twenty-four-hour watch, though the order for it had been rescinded by Lake Gilbert five months before. The strain Joust Mountain was placing on the world's eastern power grids should have signaled its unauthorized activity. But then, Stamp knew, that could be ignored unless the drain was bleeding the cities white.

The evening air glowed fiercely above Joust Mountain, and there were similar fires over the opposite horizons, where Whitebreak and Dance were. Stamp enjoyed that part of it, even if it was the old man's insanity. He felt it tugging at his heart, gradually taking him from the world, away from Lake Gilbert, Castle Kent and the cities where he believed he had left so much, and turning it obsessively to the east, beyond the lands the enemy had occupied with his false religions and transparent heresies, out to where the antennas had really been looking from the very first.

Aden squatted beside the beggar. The man's limbs were covered with ulcerous sores. A cataract floated in one eye, giving the illusion of mist and hidden circuitries.