Trapped lop-6

by James Alan Gardner

  "I've been thinking of other ways you and I could do that. Besides dying."

  She looked up at me, eyes white in her dark face. I could see she wanted to kiss me; and I wanted to kiss her. Strange that neither of us made a move.

  "I've been thinking of such things too," I said. "But if we just ran off and found a honeymoon suite instead of sticking with our friends…"

  She nodded. "I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov'd I not honor more."

  "All these years," I said, "and I never knew you liked quoting poetry."

  "I don't, really." She laughed. "I suppose it's because we're on a quest. Poetry just springs to the lips."

  The word "lips" made me want to kiss her again. But I didn't. "This isn't a quest," I said. "It's real."

  "The best quests are real. Isn't that the point? Myths are everyday life in disguise. Slaying the Jabberwock means facing your own monsters; searching for the Holy Grail means pursuing some goal you've previously shied away from. But it would be sappy to say that in so many words. That's why poets sing about battling gigantic beasts instead of fending off boredom. And why they sing about finding the Holy Grail rather than… oh, the things you can get only when you give up the nonsense that holds you back."

  "What kind of nonsense?" I asked.

  "Habits. Inhibitions. A flawed self-image." Annah's eyes glistened. "You know what I'm talking about, Phil."

  "I do indeed." I still didn't kiss her. "When I get rid of those, that's when I find the Holy Grail?"

  "When you get rid of those, the Holy Grail finds you." She let out her breath, as if she'd been holding it. "Or so the poets say. Grails can be awfully damned slow in getting the message."

  She took my face in her hands and pulled me down to her mouth.

  When Bing arrived with the coach, everyone piled inside without a word — even Pelinor, who'd decided to forego the driver's seat. Supposedly, he was sitting with us so we could talk "strategy"… but I couldn't help noticing how close he tucked himself against the Caryatid. Not just due to the narrowness of the bench. Annah had obviously been right about the Caryatid and Pelinor; with danger soon approaching, they didn't want to be apart.

  But they didn't indulge in any last-minute whispering. No one did. Nor any talk of strategy. We all gazed wordlessly out the windows into the dark, like soldiers withdrawing into themselves before the call to arms.

  Five minutes after we left The Captured Peacock, we reached the first of the city streetlights: a garish silver-blue bulb on an OldTech lamp standard that tilted fifteen degrees to the right. The pole's concrete support had tipped sideways over the past four centuries, and no one had bothered to correct the slippage. As the horses clopped past, I thought the slanted pole was a perfect symbol of our modern age. Some Keeper of Holy Lightning had worked long hours to construct the lightbulb by hand, yet had ignored the less complicated job of straightening the pole. Why? Perhaps because making the bulb seemed important and special, while straightening a pole wouldn't impress anyone. Or perhaps because the Keeper thought making lightbulbs was his job and straightening poles wasn't.

  There were other lamp standards on the road into town — all tilted, some badly — but only one in four was actually lit. I wondered if the Keepers couldn't make enough bulbs or if they'd decided our modern eyes didn't need as much illumination as the OldTechs had. We're far more accustomed to darkness than our spoiled ancestors; they were obsessed with expelling shadows. If they had to live by candlelight the way we do, they'd soon fall to pieces: trembling at the dark beyond the door. They'd probably see this roadway as poorly lit and creepy… whereas the truth was we had ample illumination to keep our horses on the straight and narrow, so why did we need more?

  Even so, we got more. Five minutes later, we reached a stretch of road where every third streetlamp was lit instead of every fourth. The poles were straighter too. Most houses on the block showed nothing but the flicker of candles or the glow of an open hearth, but one or two displayed a single electric bulb burning with conspicuous wattage: in an uncurtained window or as a bright glow behind a vividly colored blind. I suspected these families owned only one lightbulb which they carried from room to room as needed… but at least they had the bulb, and they wanted their neighbors to know.

  Another five minutes closer to downtown, and the true gaudy-show began. There were bulbs in every streetlamp now… and ahead of us, giant hotel towers with artificial light shining from every aperture. A dazzling electrical showcase.

  Newlyweds would surely talk about the spectacle for months when they returned to whatever village they called home. Flashing marquees. Bulbs in yellow and crimson. Casinos always bright as the sun, even at midnight. And when a bulb burned out, it was sent to the nearest souvenir shop and sold to some goober who'd take it home to tell his friends, "You should have seen this when it was alive."

  At every hotel, music played from electric speakers mounted over the sidewalk — sometimes amplifications of live performances, sometimes recordings from OldTech times. The OldTech music was always unpleasant, discordant noise… not because the OldTechs had wretched musical taste, but because the truly good selections had disintegrated long ago: tapes and disks and platters got played so often they literally fell apart. The only usable records left were the ones so bad nobody had played them while palatable music still worked — tuneless, rhythmless crap with self-important lyrics, just plain embarrassing four centuries after the fact.

  It didn't matter. Hotels had to play the ugly noise to prove they had electricity. And they'd play it long and loud, till the tapes tore, the disks cracked, and the ridges on the platters wore down flat as glass. People congregating on the sidewalks would listen to this garbage as attentively as they once listened to much better — marveling at these sounds from the past, and believing they were hearing the heartbeat of OldTech spirit — when in fact, they were wasting their time with drab dingy ditties that had survived only because they were unlikable.

  The horses snorted and shuddered as they clopped past. Animals are always good critics.

  The ruckus didn't fade — the clamor of bad music, plus people walking and talking, carriages rattling, the evening more busy than daylight — but all lesser noises gradually submerged beneath a greater thunder: hundreds of tons of water plunging every second into a deep echoing gorge. A roaring rumble that put the pathetic music to shame.

  The Falls.

  There were two separate cataracts, but the largest by far was the one coming into sight outside the coach's windows: Horseshoe Falls, a great pouring arc whose sheets of water were illuminated by searchlights mounted along the walls of the gorge. The lights were tinted (green, gold, blue), projecting through the perpetual mist to shine on the Falls themselves. Despite the chill of the evening, dozens of couples lined the rail along the gorge, gaping at the display as their clothes grew wet from spray.

  I glanced at my companions and was glad to see them staring in wonder too — even Impervia, who tried to remain unmoved by anything others found impressive. The water, the light, the roar: it's easy to be cynical from a distance, but not when you're right there, peering through darkness at one of the marvels of our planet. There are taller falls in the world and wider ones, cascades that pour more water per second or glisten more brightly in the sunlight… but there's no other place where natural grandeur presents such a perfect view.

  We passed in silence, craning our necks to keep the panorama in sight as long as possible — all along the road that rimmed the gorge, until we finally came level with the edge of the Falls and lost sight of the cataract at the point of maximum thunder and spray.

  When we turned our heads back to the road, the generating station lay in front of us.

  The station was old: covered with so many snarls of vines the concrete beneath was barely visible, even in leafless winter. Perhaps the vines held the building together; four hundred years of wind and snow had been shut out by tendrils that bulged like varicose veins. The Keepers of H
oly Lightning made no effort to cut back the growth — crisscrossing strands of vegetation even covered the stone steps leading up to the front entrance. The only break was a bare patch down the middle. During my last visit to the Falls, I'd been told that the path was worn clear by the feet of the single acolyte who went out daily to deliver lightbulbs and other electrical goods to the citizens of Niagara.

  I could see no other entrance… which was strange, given that OldTech safety regulations had demanded multiple exits in case of fire. Somewhere under all those vines, there'd be enough emergency doors to evacuate an immense building like this — three stories tall, a hundred meters long — but everything was roped shut by the wiry green strands woven tight through the centuries.

  One way in, one way out: like a fortress. Which it was.

  The OldTechs had built the station into the side of a hill overlooking the gorge. With its back underground and its front facing the Niagara River, the station could be approached only along the narrow strip of road running between the hill and the edge of the gorge. Even the OldTechs didn't want the plant easy to attack; this was, after all, the power source for millions of people, and it demanded appropriate security. When the Keepers took over, protective measures must have become even more important: the station would be an inviting target for thieves (trying to snatch expensive electric merchandise), extortionists (threatening to wreck the generators unless a ransom was paid), religious fanatics (raging that the last vestiges of OldTech society had to be destroyed or else God would never allow Earth to become a new Eden), and enemy saboteurs (looking to hit Feliss in the pocketbook by disrupting the profitable Niagara tourist trade).

  For all these reasons, the Holy Lightning stayed locked behind fortified doors. The Keepers lived inside and seldom came out. I had no idea how they recruited new members; but I'd met numerous antisocial gadget-lovers at university who wouldn't mind a life of seclusion if they got to play with high-tech toys. Even now, as doom hovered over the station, the Keepers were probably fiddling with electric contraptions, following OldTech schematics or perhaps designing devices of their own…

  Except: there were no lights on inside.

  The building had plenty of windows, all partly covered by vines… but the tendrils couldn't encroach on slick glass the way they grew across rough concrete walls. If there'd been lights on anywhere within, some glimmer would have worked its way out. Yet the place was completely dark. Behind us, the streetlights still beamed their mercury blue and the garish hotels denied the night; but the power station didn't show so much as a candle.

  The coach stopped and Bing leapt down from the driver's seat. "That's the place," he called. "But if you ask me, it's closed till morning."

  "Looks that way," the Caryatid agreed. She opened the coach door and accepted Bing's hand for help getting out. "Then again, there may be plenty of people inside — just not on the main floors. Phil, aren't the generators underground?"

  I nodded. If I understood the set-up, water was diverted above the Falls and sent through large sluice-pipes, tunneled down to rotate turbines in the guts of the station. After the water had given up its energy, it was released back into the river some distance below the Falls. For maximum power generation, the turbines had to sit at the bottom of the drop, where the plunging water had built up the most energy… so even though the entrance to the building was level with the top of the gorge, the machine-works were far below us.

  Still, there should be somebody on watch up here. Even if the majority of the Keepers spent their time in the subterranean generator area, they'd post guards on the door.

  Yet the entrance was pitch-dark.

  "This has the whiff of an ambush," said Pelinor. "Lights off, nobody home, one door with a single obvious path leading to it… if this isn't a trap, I'll be disappointed."

  "Meanwhile," the Caryatid muttered, "we're standing backlit by streetlamps on a narrow road with the gorge behind us. A golden opportunity for someone to start shooting."

  "Shooting?" Bing said. "With guns? But that would scare the horses."

  "Then you'd better go," Impervia said immediately. "Thanks for your help, but it's time you went home."

  "You don't need a ride back to Crystal Bay?" He looked at Impervia with hurt in his eyes — as if he didn't want to be sent away just yet. "I mean… you'll have to head for the bay eventually. Your ship's still there."

  Impervia dropped her gaze for an instant, then forced herself to look Bing in the eye. "Getting back to our ship is the least of our worries. Now you'd better leave before things turn dangerous. Otherwise…" She paused. "Otherwise, the horses might get hurt."

  She'd found the right argument to get Bing to leave. He gave her a regretful look, then swung himself up to the driver's seat.

  "I'll be spending the night at the Peacock," he said. "Tisn't good to drive country roads in the dark this time of year. If you're in need of transport, I'll still be around come morning."

  "Let's hope we will be too," Impervia told him. "On your way now."

  She reached up, and for a moment I thought she would pat Bing on the thigh… but she shifted her hand at the last moment and touched the seat instead: resting her fingertips lightly on the padded bench, letting them linger for a moment before drawing back. "Go," she said. "Thanks again."

  "No trouble," Bing answered. "You have a good night."

  "You too."

  Bing gave the reins a flick and the horses started forward. Impervia stared after the coach until it disappeared around a bend in the road.

  "At least it's quiet," the Caryatid said. "No sign that there's been a battle. I think we've got here before Sebastian."

  The Caryatid's voice sounded unnaturally loud — as if she were shouting, though she was only speaking normally. Impervia must have sensed the same odd loudness because she answered in almost a whisper. "It's a pity we don't have Myoko. She could have given the door a telekinetic nudge, just to see what happens."

  "We don't want to see what happens," I said. My voice sounded loud too. "We don't want anyone to know we're out here," I whispered. "We just intercept Sebastian and leave before Dreamsinger notices us."

  "Still," said Pelinor, "it would be interesting to scout their defenses, don't you think? We could throw a stone…"

  "No!" shouted the rest of us in unison.

  The word echoed off the power station's cement walls and drifted into the night. It took a long time to fade. The world had gone silent — uncannily so. Some important sound was missing…

  "Merciful God," I breathed. Whirling around, I ran to the edge of the road and looked down into the gorge.

  Bare rock glistened in the spill from the streetlamps. Water languished in dozens of pools, and a small stream ran through a channel down the middle of the river bed… but the roar was gone. The spray had settled. The colored spotlights danced for the tourists across a cliff-face that had never been exposed to open air.

  I realized why our voices all seemed so loud — why the world had gone so quiet.

  Someone had turned off the Falls.

  20: A CATARACT OF SAND

  The others joined me at the railing, everyone looking at where the Falls should have been.

  "Damn," whispered the Caryatid. "There's something you don't see every day."

  Across the gorge, on the Rustland side of the Falls, people were already clambering over the safety barriers and down onto the rocks where the river was supposed to be. Idiotic bravado — I suppose they wanted to be able to tell their friends they'd walked across Niagara Falls. As soon as those people ventured onto the river bed, the natural perversity of the universe should have sent the water sweeping back in a solid wall of crashing froth. But no such torrent appeared… even when a teenage boy reached the weak brook trickling down the middle and sloshed about in the current, laughing to his friends.

  Pelinor said, "Oh, look. Where did the water go?"

  He turned to me for an answer. Pelinor always believed that because I was a scient
ist, I could explain anything. "Umm," I said. "Uhh. Hmm. The only thing I can think of is that the entire river is being diverted into the power station. There are sluices upstream to take in water and pipe it through the generators. I didn't think they had the capacity to siphon up the whole river, but if Dreamsinger really wants to maximize electrical production—"

  "Phil," Annah interrupted, "there's another explanation."

  She was peering upstream, shading her eyes from the nearby streetlamps. The river in that direction was mostly dark: a bridge extended from the Rustland side to an island in the middle of the rapids (or where the rapids should have been), but beyond the shine of the bridge-lights, the river disappeared into blackness. Deep blackness. "I can't see anything," I said.

  "Neither can I," Annah replied. "It's not normal shadow. It looks like a wall."

  "A wall?" I squinted again. Utter blackness covered the river beyond the bridge; but when I looked to the sides of the waterway, I could see vague outlines of buildings, streets, trees: normal things in normal darkness, not utterly swallowed by oblivion.

  I shifted my gaze back to the river and moved my eyes slowly upward. Black, black, black… then suddenly stars. As I watched, a drifting tatter of cloud disappeared out of sight behind the blackness — occluded by that dark impenetrability.

  Someone had lowered a curtain of blackness onto the Niagara River. A wall indeed. Or more precisely, a dam.

  By now the others had seen it too. "What is it?" Pelinor whispered.

  A trillion trillion nanites, I thought. A vast barrier of them, clustered together to clamp off incoming flow. "It's a dam," I said. "Blocking the river. I'll bet you anything it's positioned to cut off the power plant's intake sluices." When Pelinor looked at me blankly, I told him, "The generators need water to make electricity. That dam blocks the water… thereby shutting down the generators."

  Beside Pelinor, the Caryatid's face had turned grave. "So the Sparks can't produce electricity. Whatever they use it for will stop working." Her hands gripped the guard rail tightly, as if she wanted to crush the metal in her fingers. "For some reason, I keep picturing a thousand shapeshifters like Jode held captive in an electric cage. The Sparks lock Lucifers there whenever they catch one… and the Keepers of Holy Lightning maintain the generator turbines to make sure the power never goes out. Is that possible, Phil?"