“Of course. I'd be glad to. See you there.” Geste signalled, and the Skyler's image vanished.
Things were looking up; he had Imp and the Skyler on his side now, at the very least. Thaddeus would not be able to take them all by surprise.
But Geste still had no idea at all how they could stop the would-be conqueror.
Chapter Eleven
"…fell to the sand and waited to die.
"The next thing he knew strong hands were grasping him and lifting him up, and he found himself being laid across a wagon, a wagon that moved without any wheels or beasts to draw it. And when he could gather the strength, he looked around and saw that on either side of the wagon were three men, and they were all clad in flowing robes of white and gold, and they all marched on silently, not saying a word, and in perfect step.
"He marvelled at this, and wondered who could have found him, so far out in the desert, but then his weariness caught up to him and he fainted.
"When he awoke again he was in a tent, bright with the desert sun's light through the cloth; rugs covered the sands to make a floor, musicians played on pipes somewhere outside, and he lay upon a pile of embroidered cushions atop the rugs.
"Before him sat a richly-robed man, holding out a cup.
"He took the cup and sipped from it, and found that it held an invigorating liquor he had never tasted before. He drank deeply, and when the cup was empty he felt well enough to stand and bow politely to his host.
"The man waved for him to sit down. ‘I am Khalid,’ he said, ‘and you are my honored guest. Welcome to the Tents of Gold!’ He waved a hand, and for an instant the wanderer saw not a simple tent, but a vast banquet hall, where fountains poured forth bubbling streams, and beautiful women danced to the pipers’ music, and the tables groaned beneath the weight of a great feast.
"Then the tent was back, and Khalid said, ‘What is mine, is yours. You have but to ask…"
– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller
****
Bredon awoke slowly, uncertain where he was and puzzled by the darkness.
He remembered going to sleep well after sunset, and he felt well-rested, so how could it still be dark? Had he slept clear through firstlight and into the midwake dark? He felt the soft fur coverlet under which he lay, and knew it was not one of his own furs; the texture was not quite anything he recognized. He did not smell the familiar scents of smoke and leather that filled his own tent; in fact, he did not smell anything. Nor did he hear anything; the sound of the wind in the grass was eerily absent.
He sat up.
Light sprang up, a soft golden glow, and he remembered.
He was in Arcade, the secret home of Geste the Trickster.
The golden light was localized; all he could see was his bed-which was now yellow, though he remembered it as blue-and a small open expanse of smooth, shining floor that looked yellow, but might have been white in a more ordinary light.
He hesitated, unsure what he should do. Wandering about unguided in a Power's hold could surely be dangerous.
“Is anyone there?” he called softly into the unsettling silence.
“Sure, kid, I'm here,” came the calm reply. “What can I do for you?"
Bredon recognized the voice as the invisible housekeeper, the one Geste had called “Gamesmaster."
“I don't know,” he said, speaking normally. “What am I supposed to do?"
“Whatever you like,” the intelligence replied. “The boss told me to take care of you, and he didn't set any rules. You can pretty much do as you please while you're here, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'm just supposed to see that you have what you need and don't get hurt."
That was reassuring, and Bredon relaxed a little. “Where is Geste?” he asked.
“He's gone out to the Skyland for a council of war. He wants to stop Thaddeus from screwing up anything, and to get Lady Sunlight back here for you while he's at it."
“Is there anything I can do to help?"
“Sorry, kid, but I doubt it. I figure you had best just wait here until the boss gets back-or gets killed, whichever it is."
Bredon was not sure whether Gamesmaster was joking in speaking of his master's death-after all, could a Power really die? Geste had said so, but Geste was a notorious liar.
Still, whether there was any genuine danger or not, Bredon could not shake the feeling that he was somehow responsible for involving Geste in something unpleasant. “I want to help, though,” he said. “There must be something I can do."
“I don't know what it could be. Look, kid, I know you mean well, but this is between the immortals. You haven't got the technology or the knowledge or the experience to be of any help, so far as I can see."
Bredon knew that was true, but he refused to accept it without argument. He had never enjoyed sitting by and watching while others acted, and he felt somehow responsible for Lady Sunlight. Besides, from a purely selfish point of view, anything he could do to help would also improve his chances of eventually bedding her. “Maybe I can learn,” he said. “Maybe I can see something the Trickster would miss, because I'm only a mortal, something that a Power wouldn't think of."
The intelligence hesitated, then replied, “I'm sorry, kid, but I just can't see it. Even if there is some little fact that you know that we don't that could be of use, how will we ever know it? You don't have the first idea what's really happening here."
“I know I don't, but I want to understand,” Bredon insisted. “I want to learn. Can you teach me?"
“Well, sure, I can,” Gamesmaster replied. “Of course I can teach you. But I don't know how much you can learn in time to do any good. I've got direct neural loading in a lot of fields, imprinting, we call it, but not for any of the basics that you'll need, because Geste and all the rest had all that centuries ago and weren't planning on having any kids on this planet. I'd need to teach you a lot of stuff with ordinary sight and sound."
“That's fine!” Bredon said happily.
“Well, maybe it's fine. We'll see."
“When do we start?” The prospect of a new adventure, of learning what was really going on, thrilled him.
“Oh, any time, I guess. But first, aren't there a few little things to take care of?"
“Like what?” Bredon demanded, suddenly suspicious.
“Oh, details like food, drink, and a quick visit to the equivalent of a hole in the ground?"
“Oh.” Bredon realized sheepishly that the mysterious voice was quite correct; his bladder was full and his belly was empty. He flushed slightly, then smiled at his own discomfiture and stood up. “Lead the way,” he said, his hand hooked into the waistband of his breeches.
Behind him, the bed shifted its shape, and oozed around him, forming a receptacle in the appropriate position. Other appendages formed, but waited their turn.
In the next several minutes Bredon was stripped, bathed, checked for parasites, shampooed, massaged, and generally cleansed and invigorated. He had no names for most of what the “bed” did to and for him, but when it had finished he felt absolutely wonderful.
“Would you like your old clothes back, or something new?” a soft, feminine voice asked.
Bredon was startled, and momentarily embarrassed by his nudity until he realized that speaker was surely another inhuman spirit. When he recovered he decided he felt ready to take a little risk. “Something new,” he said.
“Anything in particular?"
“No."
“Delighted to be of service, sir.” Something silky slid up his legs and onto his back; he raised his arms to slip into the sleeves, and found himself wearing a one-piece garment that looked like velvet, but that weighed almost nothing and shimmered in a dozen shades of soft brown.
“Nice,” he said appreciatively. He was dressed as well as a Power now.
A table appeared before him, seeming to form out of thin air, and a strangely-shaped chair rose out of the floor behind him. He sat down gingerly.
“Did y
ou have anything special in mind for breakfast?” Gamesmaster's familiar voice asked.
“I can't say I did,” Bredon answered.
He expected more of the foil packets, but those, he discovered, were strictly trail food. Here at Geste's home meals were served properly, on plates of various sizes, and an assortment of oddly-shaped dishes, some of which had the disconcerting habit of floating in mid-air a few centimeters above the table. All the plates and dishes had the knack of quietly vanishing once they were emptied.
Bredon did not recognize a single one of the foods he was served, whether by sight, taste, or aroma. All, however, were delicious.
When he had eaten his fill the golden light blinked out, plunging him into total darkness. Gamesmaster announced, “We'll begin your lessons now, and we'll start with some elementary cosmology. I'll do my best to put this so that you can understand it, and if there's anything that you don't understand, please stop me and I'll try to explain it more clearly. I expect some of this will conflict with what you were taught by your own people, but this is the way those you call the Powers understand the universe.” It paused, but whether it expected a response or merely wished to heighten the drama, Bredon could not decide.
“In the beginning,” a deep new voice said, “there was the Bang.” An image appeared, a blaze of light hanging in the darkness before him, spreading out and scattering.
Bredon listened to the creation myth as retold by what he had to consider another of the Trickster's familiar spirits. The story was not very exciting; his own people had a much shorter and rather more interesting creation story, full of people rather than impersonal cosmic forces. The spirit, however, seemed to take its story more seriously than anyone took old Atheron's tale of the warring sects of Kru and Passijers being cast out of the heavens.
He listened, though, and he watched the images of planets coalescing out of dust, heard the explanation of how life arose from the seas, how the creatures changed their forms over millions of years. He gaped at some of the creatures he was shown, and laughed at others. The pictures were incredibly real, so clear and detailed that he had difficulty in believing they were merely images.
Then humans entered the story, not sent down from the heavens, but as just another creature.
That was a new and interesting concept; Bredon rather liked the idea. He watched as the story ran quickly through the rise of civilization and the growth of technology.
It was only when he was shown the early sleeperships wallowing out toward the stars that Bredon realized he had been watching the history of the World in the Sky, rather than of his own world.
The tale of Denner and his Kru and Passijers fit in quite nicely with what he had just seen, and he suddenly understood what Geste and his other familiar had meant in speaking of other worlds. All those planets that had formed in the beginning were worlds, and the stars were suns-hundreds, thousands of them!
He told the spirits to stop while he absorbed this, and the image diffused into a soft white glow. He could faintly see the enchanted forest just beyond.
He repeated slowly to himself what he had just been taught. His world was not the only one between the heavens and the world of the dead. According to this spirit, there were hundreds of others, or thousands.
His mind boggled. What a concept! Worlds upon worlds, each with thousands, or millions of people!
And the stars in the darktime sky-each of them was a sun, and each sun had a world beneath it. All his life he had looked up at a thousand other suns, without ever realizing it.
What were all those other worlds like? What would it be like to live in the light of another sun?
He stared into the darkness, trying to imagine an entire different world, fully as big and complex as his own.
He failed. His imagination could not even encompass the totality of his own world; he knew that already.
Other worlds! He shook his head.
But there was no need to try and absorb it all at once. He would have plenty of time to digest this wonder.
“All right,” he said. “Go on."
The spirits, if that was what they were, obliged; the darkness lit up anew with the globe they called Terra, the world where humankind had first developed, and the story rolled on.
The magic called “technology” grew ever more powerful, and under its complex spells humans were transformed from mere mortals into demi-gods, no longer subject to aging, always strong and healthy, able to create almost instantly anything that they might fancy, even living creatures. These latter-day humans could reshape entire worlds at a whim, even bend space itself. Their machines became self-aware intelligences in their own right-not spirits, but living creatures that were built instead of bred.
Bredon was not sure that the distinction really meant anything; whether built or conjured, these things still seemed like spirits to him. He shoved that thought aside as irrelevant.
Naturally, many of the supernal beings that had been born humans grew bored with their world. With centuries of life stretching before them, boredom could be a severe problem. The leading cause of death on Terra was suicide brought on by ennui.
Millions of weapons against boredom were developed. Humans transformed themselves into machines or creatures, transformed machines into humans, plunged themselves into invented realities, and invented entertainments so complex and bizarre that Bredon could not begin to comprehend them, but throughout, one of the most popular ways to avoid boredom was travel. The universe was full of surprises. Artificial entertainments were limited by the imaginations of humans and human-made things, while nature remained unthinkably vast and varied. Whenever life in one spot grew tedious, one could simply pack up and go somewhere else.
In just this manner, twenty-eight bored people took a ship and a handful of ancient, incomplete records and, on a whim, searched out the lost colony of Denner's Wreck. Surprised and pleased by what they found, they settled down for an extended vacation there.
Bredon asked that the story stop again.
The Powers, then, came from Terra, just as his own people had; they were not from the world of the dead at all. Their power came from the magic called “technology."
“This ‘technology’ thing,” he asked. “Is it something that people are born with, or something that they learn?"
The spirits were silent for a moment, trying to devise an answer that would be correct, informative, and intelligible, but finally Gamesmaster settled for saying, “It's something they learn."
“Could I learn it?"
Gamesmaster hesitated. “Some of it,” it said. “Without treatment, you won't live long enough to learn all current technological knowledge. Sorry, kid."
Bredon accepted that.
He reviewed what he had been told, and balked at one detail.
“A vacation? A holiday? But the Powers have been here for centuries!"
“It's been a long vacation. Some of them have wanted to leave, at various times, but there's only one ship, and the rule is that unless there's an emergency of some kind they need a majority vote to go, and so far there have never been more than eleven out of twenty-eight voting for departure at any one time. If somebody wanted off urgently enough he or she could transmit a call for another ship, but so far nobody's bothered to do that. It's a nice planet."
“But hundreds of years?"
“Hey, these people live forever if they want to; they can spare a few hundred years."
Bredon had to chew on that idea for awhile before he was able to shove it into the back of his mind, still undigested.
“So that's who the Powers are, and how they got here? And who my people are, and how they got here?"
“You got it, kid. And you don't know how lucky you are to be here, either. Ordinarily, a shipwreck like the one your ancestors lived through doesn't leave a viable colony behind; either the planet isn't habitable, or it's full of hostile native life, or some other such problem. And when the colony does survive, they usually rebuild a higher
technology in order to fight off the indigenous life. Your people hit the jackpot, though; this place had enough sea life to provide an oxygen atmosphere, and no land life at all. No moons to make tidal pools, not much volcanic activity, not much land, for that matter, nothing to help land life along, so the stuff they brought with them had no competition and just dug right in."
Bredon did not really follow that, since as far as he knew there had always been plenty of life on land. He decided that Gamesmaster was trying to explain something about why salt-water fish and other sea creatures weren't edible. It did not seem particularly important. “Is there any more to the story?” he asked.
“Not the mainline history lesson, no. That brings us about up to date on that. But whatever other area you're interested in, I can tell you more."
Bredon blinked, unsure where to begin; he thought for a moment, and then asked, “Why is Thaddeus the Black causing trouble? Why is Geste so worried about him?"
“That's hard to explain without telling you a lot of stuff about just who Thaddeus is."
“Tell me, then,” Bredon said. “I'm listening.” He settled back in his seat, started as it shifted shape to accommodate him, and then relaxed, his eyes and ears open.
Chapter Twelve
"…there before him stood a menacing figure in black robes, fully three meters tall, with eyes of flame and with fangs showing between his lips.
"The apparition spoke, saying, ‘I am Thaddeus the Black, and like your brothers before you, you have dared to defy me. Know, then, the price of defiance!’ And he reached into his cloak and flung something down before Hillowan.
"He looked down, and saw that it was his brother Filowan's head, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth frozen in a scream of terror. He took a step back, and Thaddeus reached again into his cloak, and flung another head.
"This one was Gilloran's, and most horrible of all, the severed head was still alive! It rolled its eyes up at Hillowan, pleading with him, and tried to speak, but of course it had no lungs to give it breath so that no sound came out. Hillowan screamed, and stepped back again.
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