“Didi. You once spoke of corrective measures with the human genome.”
“Yes. You remember. Just today I was comparing a line of code with that of a certain predatory bird which is native to this island. This bird has eyes so keen, my friend, that it can see a gray-colored mouse scurrying among stones from as far away as one half of a mile. Can you imagine, Childriss, what it would be like if we could employ such lines of code within our own genetic makeup?”
Childriss leaned against the window, nodding thoughtfully.
“Or,” continued Didi, “there is also the saliva of a dog. A dog literally ‘licks its wounds’ because of the astringent qualities of its saliva. Imagine if Guardians in the field, or anyone far from medical treatment, could count on the anti-bacterial qualities of their own saliva, and what that could do in terms of staving off infection.”
“I see...”
“And there is the considerable strength of the red-striped badger. Have you heard the assistant researchers complain about handling those animals? They are no bigger than a cat, and yet they fight with such strength that it takes many strong men in protective suits to handle them. It would be interesting to look into the cell structure of their muscles even without an inquiry into their genetic makeup, to see if perhaps the cellular fibers are threaded together differently from a human’s. I admit I have not looked into the matter just yet.”
“Alright, yes, I understand. And I agree with you, Didi. The benefits could be enormous. Could be. But what I am interested in now, Didi, is your ideas on the use of that kind of technology.”
“How do you mean?”
“What I mean is, if we had the means to modify a human being, if we could give people enhancements... how would we decide to distribute such a thing?”
“Ah. Well, really, I am assuming that anyone who could afford such a procedure should be allowed to go through with it.”
“Hah!” With that, Childriss began to pace energetically. “But, Didi, are you really so incapable of seeing the mental state of your inferiors? Look at the common man, Didi. Really, he is little more than a bundle of nervous psychological twitches, a set of needs barely different from any common animal - and even some of his needs that are distinctly human are disgusting in their own unique way. Most men are pack animals, Didi, and shake your head all you want, but most of them exist only to support our kind. They pray to gods that were invented by men like us because, most likely, we were sick and tired of being prayed to ourselves. Of being revered and despised in tandem.”
“You oversimplify things, Childriss.”
“Then let me be specific! If we unleash a technology that modifies nature’s genetic makeup of the human animal, just imagine what it could do in the hands of idiots. Didi, you oversimplify the matter by thinking that the technology could be used only to enhance a set of code. But even where it enhances, then that, too, could be folly. What I mean is that you could have idiots strengthening those attributes which make them idiots in the first place. Imagine, Didi, if religious fanatics wanted the genes of their children to be changed such that those attributes which make it easy to believe in the supernatural were “enhanced” so that a doubting humanity was forced to live alongside a sub-race of people who enjoyed equal rights to themselves, but the new religious elite were trapped in prisons of illusion to the extent that their minds were no longer capable of doubting. Imagine if the cultural elite - that is, a bunch of idiotic movie stars made popular by the whims of dullards - wanted their bodies modified so that they could be unnaturally thin. Imagine, Didi, the horror of seeing people who were mockeries of the human form - and imagine their anger at us, for allowing them to follow through with their own inclinations! And imagine if a corporation had sway over its employees to the extent that they could pressure them into having certain enhancements done - even the hint of a promotion, Didi, can already cause men to destroy themselves. What sort of enhancements would any corporation welcome, Didi? Increased intellect? Ambition unbounded by restraint? Hah! Any business would make any moral concession if they thought they could find employees who were modified to enjoy mindlessly repetitive tasks, or if they were better able to obey anyone deemed their superior, or if they were simply psychologically unable to “walk away” from a given job or task, despite its inherent idiocy.”
“I understand what you mean. But consider this, Childriss. Such fears of a future humanity outside of your control are no different from your current fear of humanity without control. You cannot abide certain types of people. Actually, you cannot abide most people. You have a very keen mind and a moral sense all your own. So be it; the rest of humanity does not. You must face the fact that there simply is no way for you to force others to conform to your ideals. All the intellectual planning and emotional raging in the world cannot do that. If we developed such a technology, I have little or no interest in controlling its use. In fact, the wider spread is its use - or perceived abuse - the greater will be the full flowering of the species. We will end up with a majority of the population who abuses itself and shuffles through life, and a minority whose enhanced intellectual and physical capabilities will bring them to a position of mastery over the majority. And so – there would be no great difference from the humanity of today. Keep in mind, my friend, that the universe works based on laws that neither you nor I nor anyone else can ever change. These laws guarantee that the best will always win out.”
“No, Didi, they most certainly do not guarantee that the best will win. Look at the men that you call ‘sir’ and then compare them to the men that we meet with in our off-hours. The difference is disgustingly apparent. Intolerably apparent. To walk the avenues of Haven is even worse, for we do not even have the pretense of respectability there. All is fashion, loudness, crass vulgarity...”
“What do you want, Childriss? Do you want them to physically bow down to us and to consult us on the affairs of their life?”
“The opposite, Didi! I want them to not need me! To not need my guidance and to not threaten me with their constant sense of imminent self-destruction!”
“I admit, I don’t quite understand this. My friend, why would you even take note of common behavior?”
“Because it is everywhere, Didi. Such smallness of being infects everything, and I cannot disappear inside myself as you do. I feel the sense of my own place in the hierarchy - and this sense of it... is unmerciful!”
“I see. I think I understand.” Didi pulled away from the window and hobbled to the center of the room. He seemed the small and dark center of the circular room, and said, “You want to live in a world that is worth having you in it. A world that is worth ruling.”
Instead of answering, Childriss tapped his fist against the window, opened his fist slowly, and then clawed his fingers across the view until his fist was closed once more.
“Then let us cooperate a little, my friend,” said Didi, his voice croaking sharply against the steel and glass walls of the sanctuary. “You will teach me of your knowledge of sociology - for I see now that that is the science that is your gift and your curse, and in return, you may come into my world. And we will see what we may develop.”
“Your world?” Childriss said quietly. “What... we may develop?”
“Yes, my world. Where it is dark and without distraction. Where there is nothing but four walls between you and your self. And we will explore the idea of what we may develop. Specifically: a nobler sort of humanity. One that we would not mind being rulers of.”
Childriss placed his face against the window. He was exhausted, and felt the cold bite from the air outside as he stared at empty gray hills far away.
Chapter Five
Jagged Mountains
Wodan stood alone on the mountainside and stared up at the cold blue sky. Slanting, sharp peaks stood far above him, the jawbone of a god left on the earth. Here, where the air was thin, where he was free from the press of hungry bodies, he felt alone and free.
Wodan ascended a sharp rise
of stone, caught a glint of sunlight in his eyes, then sidestepped along a narrow ledge until bitter-cold shadow covered him again. From his high ledge he could see the tribes moving through one of several narrow passes. He could see wagons and animals loaded down with supplies and carrying the few remaining chieftains. He could see people walking in clustered groups, bearing their own burdens, sequestering themselves from the dogmen. As the horde made its way along a gravelly, dry water course, the echo of their footsteps sounded like a rushing river. Wodan watched them. He tried to tell himself that this was what he had fought for. Instead, he felt a great burden, the looming shadow of a grave miscalculation.
He saw a false peak further up the rise. He gripped the ice-cold rock and climbed. He made his way up easily. The wolfskin cloak whipped about in a fierce wind. Drawing nearer to the spine of rock, he saw several immobile figures, black against the flat blue sky. Wodan had no weapons, but he changed course to intercept them anyway.
“Not so easy to find privacy when you travel by day, is it?”
Wodan whirled and saw Zach crouched on a narrow stone. He was red-faced and winded, and a brown cloak of Hargis whipped about him. He had a hard expression. Wodan glanced down and saw an arrow notched to a longbow.
“You once told me that Hargis meant Archer in an ancient tongue,” said Wodan.
“So it does,” said Zach.
They watched one another. Wodan knew that Zach would not kill him out of ambition; he had no wish to become leader of a horde of dimwits. Wodan trusted his friend, but he also trusted that Zach was strange. He wouldn’t put it past Zach to put an arrow through his heart, then stand over him and explain that he was too good for the world, that the world did not deserve him.
“Watch this,” said Zach, nodding to the side.
Wodan turned his back to him and saw a skinny, black tree jutting out in a corkscrew formation from underneath a broad boulder. A violent wind kicked up and ran its cold fingers through the branches – then the bowstring hissed, the little tree shivered – and the arrow stood embedded in the trunk.
“Hot damn!” said Wodan. “Not an easy shot to make, in this wind!”
Smiling, Zach climbed down from the stone and approached. Wodan noted that the bow was taller than his friend. A jumble of long arrows bounced at his side. “My men and I have been carving these things out of the skinny trees down in the pass. It’s good wood, very supple, easy to whittle. Only wish I knew what they were called. The arrows, though, I’d like to carve them out of harder wood, eventually.”
Wodan gave Zach a hand to help him along, then the two continued up the side. “Bows and arrows...” Wodan mused quietly.
“The dogmen blew most of their ammunition when they attacked Pontius. Besides the big guns and small arms the Reavers brought, there’s not much left to go around. This is the way it’s going to be for a while.”
“When we take the old mines in the valley, we might end up making swords and spears before we can make guns again.”
“Are you sick of the tribes yet?” Zach said suddenly.
“It was a mistake to bring them.” Zach was shocked, but before he could reply, Wodan said, “I saw some figures on the horizon. Let’s go see them.”
They traveled along the face of the mountain for a long time together. “There’s an old story,” said Zach. “Even older than the Ancients. It’s about a leader who led a bunch of foreigners out of a land where they were slaves. This leader had killed his own brother, you see, so he was no longer welcome in his homeland. He took advantage of the rebellious nature of the slaves, and pretended like he was one of them. He led them out of civilization and into the wilderness.”
“What was his name?”
“In Hargis, we just called him Tyrant. Jarl would tell you differently, but this is how it’s told in my land. So this Tyrant led his people into the wilderness, and of course he became sick of them. They were not just slaves to civilization, they were slaves by their nature. So Tyrant went alone onto a mountain. At the mountaintop, he set about drafting the laws that would hold together the new civilization that he wanted to build.”
“Sounds like an awful way to spend his free time.”
“That isn’t all he did. Something happened to him, something unexpected. Something changed him on that mountaintop, and the people told stories to try to make sense out of it. In one version, he summoned the Ghost of the Deep from out of the heavens... a fiery being with a lion’s head that claimed to be the end of all striving.”
“Like a spirit?”
“Or just a ghost. In fact, the people of Srila, even a lot of the dogmen with us now, worship whatever it was that came down to that mountain. The Entertainers claim it’s one of the four gods of the wasteland. You’ll have to ask Jarl about other versions of the story; that’s the only one I know. The point is that the Tyrant went off by himself and, in being by himself, met something godlike. Something that gave him the strength to claim I AM, and to be the monster that his people needed him to be.”
“That’s not what they need,” said Wodan, pushing ahead of Zach.
“Stories aren’t meant to be comforting, Wodan. You can ask Jarl about that, too, and he’ll tell you the same.”
On top of the spine of stone, they saw the silhouettes of figures. Hunched over, blocky, only vaguely humanoid. Zach fingered his arrows and Wodan clenched his fists at his side. They climbed the steep incline and stood on the false peak with the things. Statues, all in a row. Once they were the forms of great titans; now, worn down by wind and time, they were only mounds that suggested form. Most were headless. Wodan looked about and saw the dark mountain falling away on all sides save one, where the spine of the statue-field stretched upward to a distant, black peak. The air whipped about with a hollow murmur, a thousand-mile hiss that circled the land of stone. All was serene and empty.
“Long ago, in a different age,” said Zach, “there must have been Entertainers here. Men and women strong enough to say I AM, even in this lonely place.”
“They’re only ghosts now,” said Wodan, placing his hand on a cold, blank face of stone. “We’ll have to find our own answers.”
* * *
Wodan pointed into the distance. Yarek peered through his binoculars, then said, “What are those things?”
“I don’t know. When we’re in the valley, I want you and your Reavers to find out.”
Yarek nodded curtly, then read off a list of measurements of distance to a Reaver who crouched over various tools of cartography. The Khan and his Reavers stood on a high ridge far above the travelling tribes. In the distance there was a sea of mist, separate from the firmament of sharp blue, and below the mist, a haze of green, wet and alive. In the east of the valley, sunlight glinted off a series of spires, like twisted towers of pink glass.
“My first time in the valley,” said Wodan, “I only saw them from a distance. I don’t have a good feeling about them.”
“Yeah,” said Yarek, lowering his binoculars. “They’re not man-made, and I doubt Mother Nature had shit to do with them. We should probably blow them up.”
* * *
The slave-bride Nilem walked about the camp at nightfall, aware of the hundred dog-eyes following her breasts, her ass, her legs. Tonight she refused to wear the warm and shapeless clothes given to her by the Khan, even though it was very cold in the mountain pass. She moved about the wagons, arranged food, moved about various articles, moved a bucket into its new and proper place, then shook out a blanket that was filthy and cursed Freyja for not being around to clean it. She stayed busy and the dog warriors craned their necks as she moved about, breaking their deathly silence with an occasional high-pitched whine.
The dogman Jago watched her. Jago was a wiry-haired dog with a scrawny neck and bulbous eyes. Jago was young by human standards; he might be in his mid-teens, if he’d kept count. He was muscular, but had come into adult strength later than his clansmen, and so he still held many of the insecurities of the weak and feeble. Man
y of his brothers remembered the weakness of his youth, and so his deeds in battle were usually overlooked. He was often teased for mutilating bodies after a battle. In the games of insult played among dogmen, he showed a keen mind and could belittle others with ease. But no one ever confronted him, even if he insulted them, and it seemed to him that this was because his clan-brothers assumed that he was a weak, harmless pup. He desperately wanted to prove himself.
Jago crept along a ledge and crouched above the huddled mass of dogmen, who were too busy murmuring prayers and tossing dice and bragging to notice him. He settled into a spot where he could watch the beautiful slave-bride. It was a wonder to him that the others claimed the Khan did not touch his own women! Surely the great Khan would chase her down at any moment and throw her in a tent?
Nilem saw the dogman Jago creeping about and eyeing her once again. Partly through reluctance over the inevitable, she set about tidying up the area around Chris Kenny. He sat leaning against a pile of stones with one leg propped up. The massive Hargis sniper rifle sat perched near his crotch, and a bag full of bullets hung around his neck. He watched her with his dead eyes. Not long ago, she’d thought that he would be of some use to her; it was obvious that he hated something about the world. But that darkness in him was tied up with a sort of morbid, psychotic nature that she only picked up on lately. He was one of those quiet, dangerous men who kept his own counsel, and so he was of no use to her. She turned away from him to move one small box on top of another, and when she turned back she saw him stroking the rifle with a greasy rag.
“Got my eye on you, beautiful,” he said, smiling with uneven teeth. Disgusted, she turned away.
Demonworld Book 5: Lords of the Black Valley (Demonworld series) Page 5
