Sartov arrived to find the scratched, sunburned, and emaciated Samondel alive, with the wingfield adjunct kneeling beside her. Some yards offshore, the smashed body of the Dove was slowly drifting in with the waves. Sartov dropped to his knees beside Samondel.
"Is she all right?" he asked the adjunct.
"Apart from exhaustion and dehydration, yes. I've sent for a stretcher and water gourd."
"How in all names of hell and—I mean, what? . . ."
"Samondel, House of Leover," croaked Samondel. "Pleased to report. . . Samoa Wingfield . . . ready."
Over the following three weeks Samondel slowly recovered her strength, but only six days after her return the first super-regal flew out for what had officially been renamed Samondel Wingfield on
Samoa's main island. She had brought the Dove down on firm, wet sand at low tide. With a cleaver she and the two gangers had cut handles for the axhead and shovel, then set the brush and trees afire at her chosen wingfield site. The site actually turned out to be a two-thousand-year-old wingfield, and most of their time had just been spent grubbing out bushes, raking away sand on the ascent strip, and chopping down trees to give the wings clearance. They had lived on crabs and shellfish, foraged at low tide.
"What compelled you to do it?" demanded Sartov, visiting her the day after she had returned. "The Dove has been salvaged, but repairs will take weeks."
"My schedule was slipping. I saved us at least five super-regal flights."
"But why? The Council of Airlords is not unreasonably impatient with your progress, in fact they are quite sympathetic."
"Even the Council is hanging by a thread, Saireme Sartov, and support depends on results. We are now over halfway to Australica. In theory the Yarron Star could reach the Australican coast from here on a one-way flight."
The figures were true, but Sartov was not impressed.
"Then what? Are you going to leave the super-regal parked on some Australican farm road while you walk into the nearest town and try to teach them to distill compression spirit—provided that they speak Austraic on the northeastern coast. Semme Darien says that Austaric is only the common language of the southeast, by the way. When you arrive in Australica, you are to be an airlord representing the entire North American continent, not a wretched refugee crawling out of a crash-landed wreck. We shall continue with the original plan to establish a third wingfield at New Zealand, Air-lord Samondel, then fly on to Rochester."
"The cost of the compression spirit burned in our engines alone has already exceeded my original estimate," insisted Samondel. "I have spies, I know there is disquiet in the Council."
"There is always disquiet in the Council. More money is sure to be found."
"Today. A week is a long time among accountants, and I have saved four weeks!"
"And practically wrecked one sailwing. Still, I thank you on behalf of the Council of Mounthaven Airlords, yet on behalf of that Council I now order you to lie there, shut up, and recover your strength for the next fortnight. All two dozen souls now in the Hawaii settlement have been ordered to take no more orders from you for that period."
Rochester, the Rochestrian Commonwealth
Although the clocktowers of Rochester were clanging out two hours past midnight, a history class was being held in a deep, soundproofed basement. The edutor was younger than many of those who were listening to her. These were adult aviads, those who had been recruited to the Airfoxes recently. Recruits tended to have a muddled grasp of their people's history.
"Until the day in last September that we call Black Thirteenth, humanity ruled most of the land, although we Homo avianis were gaining in strength. The oceans are forbidden to both humans and aviads, and are ruled by intelligent cetecians that also owe their existence to the technology of two thousand years ago. The great aviad leader Zarvora Cybeline managed to get in contact with that machine we see in the sky and call Mirrorsun, that huge band that circles the earth inside the orbit of the moon. She used primitive electrical essence machines, and discovered that Mirrorsun was a machine with intelligence. She persuaded it to send devices such as improved electrical communicators down to Earth for the use of we aviads. It was the greatest advance in our history; it had the potential to tip the balance between aviads and humans in our favor forever.
"For some there is no boon that cannot be improved upon, however. Frelle Overmayor and Highliber Cybeline was murdered by a faction of fellow aviads. She died sitting in her great reclining chair
with an electrical essence machine encircling her neck and penetrating her spine with long, flaccid tendrils. The conspirators were exhilarated at first. Frelle Cybeline's electrical machine was removed from her neck and her body dragged away and cast into a stable. The leaders argued for many days about who should wear Frelle Cybeline's collar of electrical essence, and through it rule Mirrorsun and control its bounties. Finally Fras Dariar of the Radical faction prevailed. He lay back in Zarvora's chair and wrapped the collar about his neck, while all the leaders of the other factions stood in a circle with their guards flanking them and their flintlocks drawn. Not one of them left the room alive.
"From what was later deduced amid the carnage, the collar exploded with the force of roughly a fifty-pound barrel of gunpowder. Dariar's body was pulverized, and the others were smashed back against the stone walls of the room. All bounties from Mirrorsun stopped thereafter, and it would not respond to entreaties using old-style spark-flash radio machines. The goose that laid golden eggs had been killed.
"Still, Mirrorsun had already been sending its riches to a mainland aviad may orate, Macedon, for eighteen years. There were goggles that allowed one to see in the dark, radio machines that would fit within your hand, small flying machines nourished by sunlight that could lift two heavy men from the ground, and huge flying machines that were a half mile in span and flew constantly. With these we began to lift pioneers to a colony on Tasmania Island, but our surviving leaders still had a hunger for very advanced machines that would magnify the strength of a few aviads against many humans. The huge wings that were powered by sunlight carried aviad explorers all around the world. On the North American continent they found a human civilization which had developed small, primitive, but effective flying machines and very advanced guns.
"Aviad agents were dropped to learn the Americans' secrets and steal their flying wings, reaction guns, and master artisans. The Americans guarded their secrets closely, however, and many lives were lost for every flying machine, artisan, and reaction gun smuggled the seven thousand miles back to the Launceston Technical Institute on Tasmania Island. Then Black Thirteenth happened, and we
were cut off from North America once more. Ah, a question—and please state your camo name."
"Fras Shadowmouse. If you please, can the American flying wings not be used to cross the oceans as well?"
"Alas, they are small, heavy, clumsy and very limited in range compared to those from Mirrorsun. They also burn a mixture of alcohol and vegetable oil that is expensive to grow, harvest, and process, and each compression engine is the product of thousands of hours of work by countless artisans. Some are two, even three centuries old, and have been rebuilt dozens of times. For the Americans to build a flying wing to cross seven thousand miles of ocean would be impossible, our own engineers have calculated that. Another question?"
"Frelle Foxtread. What was the cause of the Black Thirteenth? Why would anyone want to destroy all electrical essence machines? Surely they benefit humans and aviads alike."
"There are as many theories as there are experts, Frelle. The one that I favor most strongly is that Mirrorsun, which is an intelligent machine of electrical essence itself, mistook the warlike uses to which our electrical essence machines were being put as preparations for an attack on itself."
"You mean to say all that was a terrible mistake?" asked Shadowmouse.
"That is my theory, young Fras, yes. The reason that you are here tonight is that for some reason the Call also cea
sed to act over land on Black Thirteenth. Our engineers and academicians think that the weapon that destroyed all electrical essence machines also damaged the mechanisms that the creatures of the oceans used to generate the Call. They are still formidable to deal with, of course. Avianese attempts to sail boats of even forty or fifty tons on the salt waters had been made, but all have been destroyed by shoals of sea creatures that boil up out of the depths and overwhelm them. Being immune to the Call, we aviads could live in Calldeath lands where the Call never ceased and humans could not go. With the Call gone, all we can do is retreat to islands beyond the reach of humans. For this we now use the few American flying machines that we towed over with the sunwings, and with some tiny kitewings that our own engineers have developed.
"All of you are part of a new, invisible paraline, one that moves aviads to the wingfields where they are ferried to safety on Tasmania Island. Babies, children, and those of small stature are given preference, because our wings are small and fuel is expensive. None of you will ever go to Avian, but you will ensure its future by giving it a population. Your work is dangerous, for most humans would gladly lynch us, but you have been selected as the cream of aviad warriors. Each of you is worth ten humans, but believe me, you will often be up against odds of greater than that."
Although the great reading room in Libris never closed, members of the public were compelled to leave at midnight, after which the staff moved in to clean, return books to their shelves, and then do their own studies if they wished. Few stayed more than an hour, but Velesti was one of those few.
The lower-ranking Dragon Librarians who patrolled the vast floor of the reading room knew that a ghost attended Velesti, a ghost in the image of the great and legendary Highliber Zarvora Cybeline. It hovered just behind Velesti as she sat turning the pages of some of the oldest and rarest texts, and they noticed that Velesti turned the pages about as fast as one could without damaging them. A few of the Dragon Yellows and Oranges had challenged the apparition, but it had either ignored them or vanished. Velesti denied all knowledge of it. By Velesti's second week in Libris the patrol librarians not only left her in peace, they actively avoided her.
"Derek Riplen, The Principles of Plasma Magnetodynamics for Engineers," said Velesti as she closed a slim volume bound in crumbly brown leather. "Eighty-two pages surviving out of five hundred twenty."
"What there was of it was very informative," replied Zarvora.
"I believe that it is my turn to read a book, Frelle Zarvora."
"We have scanned nineteen books, so the twentieth is yours," agreed Zarvora.
Velesti opened a large and heavy hardcover book and began to turn the pages. "Are you finding this interesting?" she asked.
"Why is it that so many hundreds of advanced scientific and engineering books have survived only as fragments, while Arnold Schwarzenegger's New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding has survived two thousand years without so much as losing a page?"
"I think I shall add these one-arm triceps extensions to my training scheme," declared Velesti.
"Why would you want to look like that!" asked Zarvora, bending down through Velesti's shoulder and peering at the photographs illustrating the exercise.
"Sheer vanity," replied Velesti.
"Keep turning, I have scanned that page for you."
"Anyway, it is a matter of impression and impressiveness. If people are impressed by you, they leave you alone."
"Are you trying to tell me that people do not already leave you alone?"
"Well, yes. Only last week a galley train navvy pinched my bottom. I do not want it to happen again."
"You cut off his hand, Frelle Velesti. It is extremely unlikely that it will happen again."
"He earns his living pushing pedals with his legs, it's not as if he was a watchmaker. Besides, if I had had better upper chest and shoulder development he would not have pinched me in the first place."
Within minutes they had leafed through the book.
"All right, all right, I have stored your stupid book and processed it for keyword search. Can we go on to my next book?"
"Brown and Kipple, Basic Principles of Numerical Meteorological Modeling on Supercomputers for Global Systems."
"For a change, it looks comparatively intact."
"It looks obscenely difficult," observed Velesti, flicking through it. "Why do the most demanding of books have words like basic, introductory, and elementary in their titles? Why not have a title like Exceedingly Difficult Ways to Forecast Weather Using Giant, Complicated, and Stunningly Expensive Machines!"
"So you did understand the title."
"Mostly. What is a supercomputer?"
"A very big and powerful calculor. Would you mind turning the pages?"
Velesti leafed through the ancient text while Zarvora scanned and stored the pages. Frightened Dragon Librarian guards watched in the distance.
"You know, I have reached a conclusion about you," said Velesti as she turned the pages. "You are no more intelligent than Zarvora."
"But I am Zarvora."
"You are Zarvora's image, stored in the structure of Mirrorsun. You now have a huge and perfect memory, you command powers that would frighten even the ancient gods of legend, and you can learn fantastically fast, but you do not come up with new ideas any faster than the rest of us."
"Should I be ashamed?"
"Not ashamed, but I know you are frightened."
"Frightened?"
"Frightened of your ignorance, and frightened that humanity could catch up with you. That's why you burned all electrical essence machines from the face of the earth, is it not? People were advancing too fast; in a hundred years they would have had spacewings flying to you, controlling you, threatening you."
"People are free to have electrical machines in shielded cages or deep underground."
"Unless machines are in common use and convenient to access they will develop infinitely more slowly."
"If they developed infinitely more slowly they would never develop at all," replied Zarvora smugly.
"Correct!" said a triumphant Velesti. "Relative to you, humans and aviads will never advance."
"Why is this bad?" asked Zarvora without a trace of guilt. "The world had access to electrical essence for a mere three decades after I destroyed the automated orbital battlestations and their EMP bombards, yet humanity merely spent those decades building better weapons, spreading lies and deceit by sparkflash and radio transmitters, and developing long-term plans to destroy me. I just struck first."
"Yet you need us, you need our knowledge."
"I need to stay ahead of you humans and aviads, Frelle Velesti. Were none of you here, I could easily live on forever, learning about the universe at my own pace. This is merely self-defense. Were I to wage war on creatures such as you I could be very bad company."
"Until six years ago you were one of us."
"We are all stuck with our relatives."
Bickering all the way, they scanned the pile of books and finally came to Velesti's next selection.
"Australian Muscle, September 2015," said Zarvora's hologram with a sneer of contempt.
"Yes, it is the special Ms. Olympia issue," said Velesti, eagerly, slowly leafing through the 1,946-year-old magazine. "Look at this! A free sports bra designed by Ms. Olympia 2014 with every dozen ten-pound packs of Hyper-Gro Concentrate . . . which has added ion exchange whey protein hydrolysate—"
"I think the offer has expired," Zarvora pointed out.
"A sports bra," said Velesti thoughtfully.
"They hold your breasts securely during training—"
"I know, it's obvious from the picture. I want one."
"If I help, will you promise to scan those other five piles of books tonight?"
"How can you help? You have no substance."
Without another word Zarvora sat down into Velesti, merging with her completely. A moment later she stood up, her body a green wire-frame mockup of Velesti from the neck down.
"Are we agreed that this is you?" asked Zarvora.
"Are my biceps really so small?"
Zarvora doubled the size of the wire-frame biceps.
"Happy?"
"Stop it!"
A white sports bra mockup materialized over the breasts and shoulders of the holographic figure.
"Is this what you want?" asked Zarvora.
"Well. . . yes."
"Then just relax, I am going to take over your motor functions."
Velesti's movements suddenly became precise and mechanical as
she took a charblack stylus and began to draw precise lines and curves on a large sheet of poorpaper. After several minutes Velesti was free again, and a design pattern lay on the reading desk in front of her.
"In the morning, get a tailor to make up one of those," said Zarvora, morphing her wire-frame image into the Libris uniform of thirty years earlier. "In the meantime, get to work on leafing through my piles of books."
Velesti returned to her work, and the piles quickly shrank. By the time another hour had passed she had finished.
"I shall need some days to make sense of what I have scanned tonight," Zarvora admitted.
"Perhaps a week?" asked Velesti.
"Perhaps. I shall contact you, but for now, good-bye."
"Wait! I have questions."
"Questions? But I might not have answers."
"When you destroyed the electrical machines you caused deaths."
"True, but not many."
"Yet this thing around my neck is an electrical machine."
"Yes. I can spare areas as small as a circle ten feet in diameter. There were several of my own devices on Earth, devices that I cannot reproduce and which are of immense value to me. There were two collars such as yours in Australia and one in America, and there was a small sunwing ferry circling empty over the Pacific Ocean. These I spared, and for my own good reasons."
Eyes of the Calculor Page 20
