by Greg M. Hall
my attention. I craned my neck to follow a tower bathed in emerald illumination. It was so awe-inspiring that I barely noticed when I fell on my arse.
Dinsmore doubled over, hooting and snorting. He helped me regain my balance as I asked, “How is it done?”
Dinsmore shrugged, filling me with disappointment. “I’m a door guard and soldier by trade, Father. Raymond has those answers; he’s the wizard. You’ll have to draw his attention away from his current project, though. He says he can make a thinking machine, if you can believe that.”
“Truly?” I couldn’t hide the concern that rose in my throat.
Raymond lived simply; that was obvious the second I stepped into his quarters. He lived in what looked to be a medium-sized warehouse packed with work benches and half-completed experiments, with a bed shoved in a corner as an afterthought.
From Dinsmore’s description, I’d expected a man in flowing, dark robes, with long wisps of white hair protruding from his chin. Instead, the ‘wizard’ was in his early forties, with close-cropped hair and a few days’ stubble. I’d guess he was about my build, but my initial study of him was cut off when I caught a flash of reflected light from one of his eyes.
“You wear lenses?” I should not have been so shocked; if he was capable of artificial light, he could surely figure out the principles of refracting it.
“Oh, these?” he asked, self-consciously pushing the wire frame that held the lenses up on his nose. He didn’t seem to mind that his first words to me were anything but momentous. “Yes, I get terrible headaches without them. Unfortunately the vision in my right eye is far worse than my left; I’m afraid it might be the onset of glaucoma. I—”
His mouth hung open on the word; he must have grasped that I was a stranger.
I extended my hand to him. “I’m honored to meet you, sir. My name is Father Bertolo Dorini.”
He took it, but in an underhand position, his elbow straight and his thumb on top. I adjusted as best I could, but still suffered an awkward moment. He blushed, and retreated back toward one of his work benches.
“You’ll have to excuse my rusty manners, Father. I haven’t seen an outsider for as long as I’ve been here.”
“And just…how long is that?”
“Oh, about seven years now. Dinsmore tells me the last time the Church sent a delegation was almost twenty years ago, and there were a half-dozen in the party. Mainly poking about to see what we did about our souls without a way to ordain new priests.”
“Seven years? What would motivate a man to come to Pingwot from the outside? Surely you had to sneak in somehow. Are you an Andrian fugitive of some sort?”
He gave me a weary smile, his eyes lowering behind the lenses. “No, I’ve never even seen an Andrian face-to-face. I’ve got a long story, but I’m not certain I can trust you with it.”
“Then, perhaps, we can table the tale until I’ve earned it. Could you show me some of your work from a technical perspective? I was sent…” I paused as I chose my words carefully. “Well, the Church has certainly heard of the lights of Pingwot. And the stories indicated to me that they must be artificial. Electricity. I’m the closest we have to an expert on the subject.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, Father, if I hesitate to share with you. I’m a little…out of touch with current events. The Church, historically, wasn’t the most nurturing to the scientific community the last time it held such prominence, if you know what I mean.”
I winced, knowing exactly what he meant. In the era of First or Second man, I would have been an inquisitor, brother to those that had Galileo imprisoned for daring to say the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe.
I looked around his shop for any item that might serve as a conversation piece, when I saw something familiar.
“A checkers-board?” I asked. Only this one was not painted cardinal and ebon, but a stark jet and white.
He was intrigued at my interest. “It can be used for that, I suppose, but I prefer to play a game called chess on it.”
“Only nobody will play with him,” chimed in Dinsmore. “He tried to teach me once, but there’s so many silly little rules it seemed like he was just making them up as we played.”
“Your game might be a little like what we called ‘Quest’, back in the seminary. You play it on a checkers-board, but you have sixteen different pieces, each representing a different church office. You had one Pope, two Bishops, two Templars…”
“Did they look like these?” he asked hopefully, opening an intricately carved wooden box. Inside, several playing pieces made of bone or ivory rested on the felt lining.
“A little. There’s only one way to find out if it’s the same game.”
It wasn’t exactly identical, but close enough that I could figure it out after a couple of games. After midnight, Dinsmore showed me to a room with a bed, a plain table and chair, and a window that allowed me to gaze out at the lights. After staring at them for a few minutes I begrudgingly went to sleep.
Over the next few days I fell into a loose routine, occupying my mornings around the city, meeting citizens and sharing small talk. I spoke with them as they engaged in their crafts.
The agricultural workers used rooftops, window-ledges, and small land plots between the buildings, and displayed a far greater knowledge of producing food than their counterparts on the outside. Many other citizens worked as artisans, blowing glass light-globes, smelting exotic metals from the caves down below, or, in the case of one intense but talkative man, concocting a hard, moldable material from vegetable resins.
Each day, after taking dinner, I played several games of Raymond’s ‘chess’ with him, before retiring to my room to admire the lights and sleep.
In the middle of a match on the fourth evening, he sighed as I took one of his Altar-Boys—or ‘Pons’ as he called them—and said: “Okay, Father… Your patience exceeds mine. Each night I’ve braced myself for an interrogation, yet you haven’t asked for any more than my opinion of the weather.”
I gave him a nod; nothing more. I’ve found people more verbose in answering their own questions than they are in answering mine.
He leaned forward to reach for a piece, but kept his eyes fixed on me. “I could have you kicked out. But…you’re just so damned polite.”
“Thank you.”
He exhaled in a huff. “Okay. I know you’re here to find out what I’m up to. I’m still not sure I can trust you with anything. Maybe if you tell me what you know… I can at least acknowledge if you’re warm or cold.”
I took my time hoisting a Templar and setting it in a position that threatened his Bishop. “The lights, you mean. I believe they’re what Second Man called ‘incandescent’. Electricity passes through a material that resists it, which builds up heat, causing the material to glow. The whole thing has to be protected from the air or it burns, which is why it’s enclosed in a glass ball.”
He nodded through all of this. “That’s about it. Why did you need to enter Pingwot to verify something you could conclude from the outside?”
I faced two paths: one of deception or a direct, honest approach. I considered for a moment before finally answering.
“The power source. You have to generate electricity somehow. And if you’ve figured out a generator, it’s simple enough to reverse it and create an electric motor. Then you’ve got a distributed power system. A solid foundation for heavy industry.”
“Ah.” He nodded, allowing a smile to flit across his face. “So my initial hunch was correct.”
“That I presented a threat?”
“That the Church has taken it upon itself to slow the wheels of progress. Our species nearly destroyed itself twice, after all, because technological advance enables an individual to be capable of an ever-increasing amount of damage.” He extended an arm, sweeping it across the room. “We’re trapped within Pingwot’s walls, but our light isn’t. It tells the world
beyond that we know how.”
He sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees, a hint of defiance on his otherwise friendly face. After a moment’s silence, he took my Templar with his other Bishop, which he’d kept lurking on the back row.
“Well reasoned,” I replied. “Except I’m but one person, and unarmed at that. There’s nothing I can do to you.” I lowered my gaze long enough to move a lowly Altar Boy forward and threaten his Bishop. “If you were anywhere else, it would be simple for me to threaten you. But excommunication means nothing in a city that’s been cut off from the world.”
“Yes, but the Church has other means of applying pressure… Or else they wouldn’t have bothered sending you at all.”
“I suppose you’re hinting at a crusade.”
“That’s the word I was afraid you’d say.”
Lower lip out, I shook my head. “I intend to leave here with a determination that ‘demons do not hold sway inside these walls’, our code for ‘they stumbled across this technology, but don’t really understand it’. But your concern is well-founded: Were I to return with a different conclusion, a dozen nations would unite under the Holy Cross to finally conclude the siege.”
“I appreciate your…lenience. But how can I be certain that’s the message you bring back?”
“You can’t. But what you can be certain of is that if I fail to return to my Bishop, he would judge Pingwot as hostile to
