Another month passed. Limpkin had just returned from a victory parade and was going over arrangements for the opening of the Black Libraries. A man in Toriman's personal livery arrived and handed him a note. The General had died last night. In pursuance of his will, the body was immediately given the last rites and cremated.
Limpkin was shocked, first by the fact of the great man's death, and then by the almost fumbling haste with which the burial had been carried out. Had anyone been at the General's side when he expired? The man answered that there had been only his personal physician, a priest, and the commander of the household guard. It was they who interred the body and gave the sealed coffin over to be incinerated. Caltroon's guard had been disbanded that morning and many of them had already left for their old homes. The castle itself was closed and sealed.
Limpkin's first impulse was, of course, to go to Caltroon to try to divine some purpose in the shameful speed with which the General had been disposed of. He voiced his intentions to the messenger.
"Little point in that, sir." The man answered politely.
"Why? Has Caltroon been picked so clean that there is nothing of Toriman's left?"
"Yes, sir. It was all in the General's will; he said that we were to remove anything that was his and either destroy it or send it back to his family's house in Mourne." The man paused, looking embarrassed. "And now, if you'll excuse me, sir, I must be going, for my family's house is even more distant than the General's."
Limpkin dismissed him. He felt a sudden weight of responsibility crushing down upon him.
Despite the General's sudden withdrawal as the guiding force behind the ship, Limpkin found his notes, the contents of the Libraries, and the new spirit of his colleagues most helpful. After the eventual success of the Yuma war, and the sending of a secret expedition to the Yards, Limpkin found that the next logical step would be to begin leaking word of the Myth of the Ship, as it has since been called, to the people. In this cause, Lady Limpkin held a ball at which certain "highly secret" bits of information were imparted to certain carefully selected gossips.
Within the week the story had penetrated the upper echelons of Caroline society. Within another week enough had filtered down to the lower classes to set the markets and bars abuzz with speculation. The ship became a bomber (curse her!); a missile to rid the supposedly fertile west of the Dark Powers; not a starship at all, but a boat to sail to the lost continent of Balbec; a pointless project that showed that George XXVIII had finally gone completely off his nut.
Limpkin followed his instructions and allowed the people to whip themselves into a frenzy of wild guessing. Matters were helped along, as per one of Toriman's directives, when Limpkin sent wagons through the streets, their towering loads tantalizingly draped with thin canvas. Then, as a final touch, Limpkin had a motor truck exhumed from Caltroon's vaults, set up with the help of some Black Library volumes, and run through the city in the dead of night. Of course the implied secrecy of the operation was belied by the fact that the vehicle's muffler had been removed and it took a most tortuous route from the Office of Reconstruction to the walls. On the flatbed trailer that the truck pulled sat an immense transformer, dating from the First World; its insides were rusted out, but a fresh coat of paint made the colossal mechanism appear quite impressive. This weird machine, coupled with the fact that there had not been a single self-propelled vehicle operating in those lands for two hundred years, sent the populace into a spasm of wonderment. Limpkin also sent the truck, this time with a chasseur escort, rumbling down many of the Caroline's main highways at appropriately odd hours.
Messengers were sent dashing about the nation bearing dispatch cases filled with blank paper. From centuries of torpor, even in war time, the Caroline responded to this synthetic atmosphere of crisis; only a very small elite knew of the hoax, but for the other 98% of the nation, the ship, the Second Coming, the new day, the world called Home were all at hand.
In the early spring, heralds came into every town of the Caroline and into the new Protectorate of Yuma. They carried notices of an assembly to be held in the capital three weeks hence, for George XXVIII had a message of paramount importance to convey to his people.
Never before in the history of the World, or so the Caroline's publicists said, had such a multitude been gathered together in any one place for any purpose save war. Thousands upon thousands crowded into the city and camped out on the surrounding slopes. From every village in the land and from many of the Caroline's sister nations they came to hear what some said would be a hoax but what most believed would signal the beginning of the Third World.
Limpkin stood in his office on George Street, looking out upon the vast crowd; the mob started five or six blocks north, in Palace Park, and backed up past the Office of Reconstruction, finally thinning out by the War Office. The throng filled the five other streets that radiated in a semicircle away from Palace Park to a similar degree.
Townsmen and merchants on top of their carriages, cavalry officers, bright in their red and gold uniforms, rough teamsters in what passed for formal dress in that level of society, illiterate shepherds from the Randau Basin and befurred mountain folk from the north, sweating in their heavy cloaks. Prostitutes wiggling through the masses, doing a land office business; drunken brawls causing swirls of color in the ocean of heads and shoulders; the raucous yell of hawkers selling bad water and cut gin. A pity Toriman was not there to see it all.
Limpkin turned from the window and sat down at his desk; he picked up the model of the
Victory.
He did not go to the Park to hear His Majesty, for he already knew what he would say; Toriman had written the speech.
George would tell the Myth of the Ship with an eloquence that the General's psychologist had figured would not tax the meaner minds present, yet would lift the knowledgeable.
The wild cheering told him that George had appeared; the ghostly silence told him that the ship had been born.
The acceptance of the
Victory
project was successful beyond Limpkin's wildest expectations. The papers, even the non-official ones, caught on to the idea with a passion; the
Victory,
the
Victory
was all that one could hear in the streets.
A small silver star was added to the flag of the Caroline:
Home.
A few days after the announcement, Limpkin picked up Directive #975 from his desk and read the instructions of the dead General. "The physical position of the Yards presents something of a problem: the people could easily become estranged from the ship by the great distances involved, not only in miles but in tradition and feeling also. Interest could wane and fail.
"It is clear that an emotional, halfway station must be established until the ship itself acquires enough physical majesty to obviate its need. Somewhere in the wilderness between here and the Yards the flag of the Caroline must be raised in great and glorious conflict, for only an act of violence can be accomplished out there—such is the nature of the land. Our banner must be liberally smeared with the blood of heroes and enemies, the greater the heroes and the lower the villains the better. The more violent, the more vicious the fight, the greater the size of the monuments that will be raised. The more families cruelly broken, the longer will the bitter memories remain.
"So it appears that our only problem is finding a suitable location with suitable opponents. Allow me to suggest the Imperial Vale; it offers really detestable inhabitants who can be counted upon for a good fight, a beautifully hostile landscape and historical setting in which the heroics may find an appropriate backdrop; at any rate, the Tyne runs right through it and it must be cleaned out eventually, so why not now?"
There followed a short list calling for a moderately strong force of galleys to be sent, ostensibly to the Yards to begin preliminary work there; this expedition, in contrast to earlier ones, was to be made fully public.
At the end of the directive there was an assurance from the General to Limpkin that he and his men would make sure that a battle of the proper character would take place; Limpkin put it down, awed at the General's incredible foresight and praying that this admiration would not be ruined by the outcome of this adventure.
Philip Rome was as close to a civil engineer as any nation could have been expected to produce in those days.
In his youth he had dreamed of building a new and greater World, full of shining machines and great cities. But when he set out upon his career, he found that one may design the most wondrous and perfect machine imaginable, but that to build it properly was impossible. People just did not care if a gun exploded after five shots or after five thousand; the most inspired plan for a bridge was useless when it was hardly looked at during the building. The World abounded, more or less, in pure knowledge, but to effectively apply this knowledge in even the simplest manner was just beyond human capabilities.
So Rome's work decayed until he reached a state of slipshod quality in keeping with the rest of the World; a battle-ax design, but not too improved, had been his crowning achievement for the past five years.
But some of his early doodlings had come to the attention of the Office of Reconstruction; the man had some imagination, thus the Myth of the Ship would doubtlessly be enough to lure him into any sort of venture. Also, the man had lost virtually every shred of talent that he once had and was therefore expendable. Finally, he had a monstrous family that would recall his gallant sacrifice, should he be lost.
"Your Nation and the
Victory
have need of your abilities, Mr. Rome . . . " read the form letter.
Thus it happened that Rome found himself on a river boat convoy heading down the Tyne to the Yards. There were thirty galleys ranging in length from forty to a hundred and fifty feet long; they were following the buoys laid out by an advanced party that had preceded them by two days.
They had left the gaping hole in the Yuma mountains where the front of the Armories had been several days ago, had crossed through the Battle Plain west of Yuma and were now penetrating into the Imperial Vale. This canyon, hundreds of miles in length, was hot, sterile and dark. The vertical cliffs that rose almost a thousand feet from the floor of the canyon gave one a maddening feeling of imprisonment or even burial. If the World was a prison, then the Imperial Vale must surely have been its dungeons.
The stifling, fetid atmosphere, the large mud flats and numerous caves offered refuge for some of the most noxious life forms then existent. Mud snakes fifteen feet long and seven inches in diameter made water sports a decided rarity, and monitor lizards kept short expeditions to a minimum. Then there were the half-men. Despite the numerous ways of warping body and mind out of its proper shape that a thousand years of war-oriented science had produced, and despite the liberality with which these weapons were used, mutants were fairly rare in the World. If their own body did not hide some mechanism of self-destruction, then one could be fairly sure that the local populace would either kill or exile them, usually to the Imperial Vale. Of course, this applied only to those with aberrations of the body, all too often the mind mutants escaped the attentions of the municipal vigilance committees, contributing to the downfall of quite a few states. (Witness the nation of Arnheim, which in its final days based its political appointment system on the applicant's ability to murder the current office holder. The entire state went up in smoke when sixty percent of the population decided to run for the presidency.)
As the decades died, the sophisticated efficiency of gene-radiation bombs and mind gases gave way to the simplicity of the club and sword; a bit more messy, but you only killed individuals instead of the future. So the body mutants were driven off, mostly to the Imperial Vale, and the mind mutants pretty well took care of themselves.
At one time, now mercifully forgotten, the Vale teemed with those grotesque refugees, their frightful powers governed after a fashion by the few mind mutants that had also escaped there. There, it was whispered, you could find neo-humans worshiping everything from their own excrement to the mummified bodies of normal men. Some could fly, others could swim, many could do nothing but crawl. And out of the all of this, the most horrible thought was that every single one of those abominations had descended from people like yourself; the fact that humankind was capable of producing things like them drove many into a madness of their own.
Then the Vale was a more hospitable place; a jungle-like mat of vegetation hid the vile bodies from prying eyes on the cliffs above.
Eventually, though, the festering sore of the Vale grew too hideous and dangerous to ignore and, in a rare instance of cooperation, a coalition of nations under Miolnor IV of Mourne undertook to cleanse it. Two hundred years ago that shining horde, mounted on everything from killer-tanks from the First World to the great draft horses of Svald, marched into the valley. With lance, bow, cannon and flamethrower to cauterize the Vale, a hundred thousand men roared into the canyon and were met by a million of the damned. Only a company of two thousand emerged at the other end.
So the Vale had been cleaned, although not quite as thoroughly as Miolnor would have liked. In the following two centuries the few creatures that had escaped the battle crept back into the light of day. But now the Vale was a harsh and hellish place of scorched dirt and starving herbage, bearing little resemblance to the green hothouse it had once been. Fortunately, the survivors lacked the power to ever break out of it into friendlier lands, and in the Vale they remained, secluded, hostile, and still dangerous.
Rome thought of all these things as he sat staring at the barren river banks. The ruins of the great battle could still be seen here and there: a rusting helmet, a burnt-out tank, the rib cage of its long dead gunner still struggling to escape the turret. Here a dark movement of mud suggested something a bit more deadly than the normal shiftings of the earth; dark things flickered among the shadows of the bordering cliffs. Sun glinted off the wind-polished remains of a great battle machine or, perhaps, off a primitive heliograph.