“Now increase the power one bit at a time. Envision it in your brain, but do not lose control. One step, then another. Feel the energy amplifying—but do not release it. You must maintain your hold.”
Around her in the dimness of the fungoid jungle, Zufa felt the energy crackling, building. She smiled.
Zufa sat back on her log, feeling weak but not daring to show it. Her recent difficult miscarriage, expelling Aurelius Venport’s monstrous child, had left her drained. But there was so much work to do, so much she could not delay or delegate. The League Worlds were depending upon her, especially now.
Everyone had high expectations of the most powerful Sorceress, but Zufa Cenva placed an even greater burden upon herself. At every turn, her plans and dreams had been hamstrung when people refused to expend the effort or take the necessary risks. These eager, talented trainees seemed different, though, and she assured herself that they would perform up to her standards. Too often when she measured other people, she found them wanting.
“Another notch,” she said. “Intensify your power. See how far it can go, but always be careful. An error at this point would wipe us all out—and the human race cannot afford to lose us.”
Psychic energy pulsed higher. The Sorceresses’ pale hair began to drift upward as if gravity had failed. “Good. Good. Keep it going.” Their success delighted her.
Zufa had never been interested in self-aggrandizement. She was a stern and difficult taskmistress, with little patience or sympathy for the failings of others. The chief Sorceress did not need wealth and profit like Aurelius Venport, or accolades like Tio Holtzman, or even a show of attention like Norma seemed to desire by convincing the Savant to take her as his apprentice. If Zufa Cenva was impatient, she had a right to be. This was a time of great crisis.
The underbrush stirred as native insects and rodents scampered away from the pounding psychic waves that built to a crescendo. Trees rustled, leaves and twigs fluttering as if trying to break away from their parent stalks and flee the jungle. Zufa narrowed her eyes and studied her students.
Now they were reaching the most dangerous part. The mental energy had increased until their bodies began to shimmer and glow. Zufa had to use her own skills to erect a protective barrier against the combined psychic pressure on her mind. One slip and all would be lost.
But she knew these dedicated apprentices would never make such a mistake. They understood the stakes and the consequences. Zufa’s heart ached as she gazed upon them.
One trainee, Heoma, displayed more strength than her companions. She had built her power to a higher level while still maintaining control. The destructive force could easily have become a wildfire in her brain cells, but Heoma held onto it, staring with unseeing eyes as her hair whipped like a storm.
Suddenly, out of dense branches high above, a thick-bodied slarpon dropped, a scaly creature with needle teeth and thick body armor. It tumbled among the young women with a crash, disturbed from its predatory perch and maddened by the backwash of mental energy. All muscle and cartilage, it thrashed, snapping with powerful jaws and scrabbling with thick talons.
Startled, Tirbes twitched—and Zufa felt an uncontrolled surge of power spouting like a released jet of fire. “No!” she cried and reached out, summoning her own powers to blanket the student’s slip. “Control!”
Heoma, with perfect calm, pointed toward the slarpon as if she were erasing a smudge on a magnetic board. She drew a line of psychic destruction across the scaly predator. The slarpon burst into white-hot flames, thrashing as its bones turned to charcoal, its skin crackling and tearing until it flaked off in puffs of ash. Flames smoldered out of its now-empty eye sockets.
Heoma’s companions struggled to clamp down and exert their mental forces. But they had been distracted at a critical moment and were losing their slippery grips on their telepathic battering rams. Steadfastly, Heoma and Zufa maintained a superhuman calmness in their midst, a stark contrast to their frenzied efforts. The combined psychic force rippled and undulated.
“Back down,” Zufa said, her lips trembling. “Ease the power away. Draw it into yourself. You must retain it and reel it back into your minds. It is a battery, and you must maintain its charge.”
She breathed deeply, saw that all of her psychic warriors were doing the same. One by one they inhaled, and gradually the tingle in the air dissipated as they began to dampen their constant efforts.
“Enough for now. This is the best you’ve ever done.” Zufa opened her eyes and saw her students all staring back at her, Tirbes pale and frightened, the others amazed at how close they had come to self-annihilation. Heoma, an island apart, looked entirely unrattled.
In a broad circle around them, the soft fungal underbrush was curled and singed. Zufa studied the blackened foliage, fallen twigs, and shriveled lichens. Another instant, a hair’s breadth less control, and everyone would have been vaporized in a ball of telepathic flames.
But they had survived. The test had succeeded.
After the tension finally evaporated, Zufa allowed herself a smile. “I am proud of all of you,” she said, and meant it. “You…my weapons…will be ready as soon as the Armada arrives.”
Mathematical answers are not always expressed numerically. How does one calculate the worth of humanity, or of a single human life?
—COGITOR KWYNA,
City of Introspection archives
At Tio Holtzman’s extravagant house, high on a bluff, Norma Cenva spent three exhilarating days settling into her expansive laboratory space. She had so much to do, so much to learn. Best of all, the Savant was eager to listen to her ideas. She couldn’t have asked for more.
Quiet Poritrin seemed so different from the dense, dangerous jungles and lava-rock canyons of Rossak. She was anxious to explore the streets and canals of Starda, which she could see from her high windows.
Tentatively, she asked Holtzman for permission to go down to the river, where she had seen many people performing some kind of work. She felt guilty for even asking, rather than working tirelessly on a means to fight the thinking machines. “My mind is a little tired, Savant, and I am curious.”
Instead of looking at her skeptically, the scientist whole-heartedly endorsed the idea, as if pleased to have an excuse to accompany her. “I remind you that we are paid to think, Norma. We can do that anywhere.” He shoved aside a sheet of doodles and sketches. “Perhaps a bit of sightseeing will inspire you to a work of genius. One can never know when inspiration might strike, or where.”
He led her down a steep stairway that clung to a cliff over the Isana. As she stood beside the taller man, Norma inhaled deeply of the river’s smell, sour and peaty from silt and vegetation dragged down from the highlands. For the first time in her life, she felt giddy with her own possibilities; the Savant was genuinely interested in her imagination, her mind, and he listened to her suggestions, unlike the constant scorn she had received from her mother.
Norma raised an idea that had occurred to her that morning. “Savant Holtzman, I have studied your scrambler shields. I believe I understand how they function, and I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to…extend them somehow.”
The scientist showed guarded interest, as if afraid she might criticize his invention. “Extend them? They already stretch across planetary atmospheres.”
“I mean a different application entirely. Your scramblers are purely a defensive concept. What if we used the same principles in an offensive weapon?” She watched his expression, detected puzzlement but a willingness to listen.
“A weapon? How do you propose to accomplish that?”
Norma answered in a rush. “What if we could make a…projector? Transmit the field into a thinking machine stronghold, disrupt their gelcircuitry brains. Almost like the electromagnetic pulse from an atomic air burst.”
Holtzman’s face lit with comprehension. “Ah, now I see! Its range would be quite limited, and power requirements off the scale. But perhaps…it just might work. Enoug
h to knock out the thinking machines within a substantial radius.” He tapped his chin, excited by the idea. “A projector—good, good!”
They walked along the bank until they reached the foul-smelling expanse of mudflats dotted with sloppy pools. Crews of ragged, half-clothed slaves sloshed out onto the mudflats, some barefoot, some wearing boots that extended to their upper thighs. At regular intervals across the featureless field, flat pallets on pontoons held metal barrels. Laborers marched back and forth to the barrels, where they scooped dripping handfuls of the contents and went to plunge their fingers into lines marked in the soft mud.
“What are they doing?” Norma asked. It looked as if they were embroidering the mudflats with their work.
Holtzman squinted as if he had never considered the details. “Ah! They are planting clam seedlings, tiny shellfish that we raise from eggs filtered out of the river water. Every spring, slaves plant hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions. I’m not certain.” He shrugged. “The waters will rise again, cover the clam plantings, and then recede. Every autumn, harvesting crews dig up the shellfish: clams as big as your hand.” He held up his right palm. “Delicious, especially when fried with butter and mushrooms.”
She frowned to watch the backbreaking labor, the sheer number of people wading in the mud. The concept of captive workers remained strange and unpleasant to her, even Holtzman’s teams of solvers.
The scientist didn’t venture too close to the smell and the slaves, despite Norma’s obvious curiosity. “It’s wise to maintain our distance.”
“Savant, doesn’t it strike you as somewhat…hypocritical that we fight to keep humans free from the domination of machines, while at the same time some of our own League Worlds use slaves?”
He seemed perplexed. “But how else would Poritrin get any work done, since we have no sophisticated machines?” When he finally noticed Norma’s troubled look, it took him a moment to realize what bothered her. “Ah, I’ve forgotten that Rossak keeps no slaves! Isn’t that correct?”
She didn’t want to sound critical of her host’s way of life. “We have no need, Savant. Rossak’s population is small, with plenty of volunteers to scavenge in the jungles.”
“I see. Well, Poritrin’s economy is based on having hands and muscles for constant labor. Long ago, our leaders signed an edict banning machinery that involves any form of computerization, perhaps a little more extreme than on some other League Worlds. We had no choice but to turn to human labor, a manual workforce.” Smiling broadly, he gestured toward the mudflat crews. “It’s really not so bad, Norma. We feed and clothe them. Bear in mind, these workers were taken from primitive worlds where they lived squalid lives, dying of diseases and malnourishment. This is paradise for them.”
“They’re all from the Unallied Planets?”
“Leftovers from colonies of religious fanatics that fled the Old Empire. All Buddislamics. They’ve fallen to distressing levels of barbarism, barely civilized, living like animals. At least most of our slaves receive a rudimentary education, especially the ones who work for me.”
Norma shaded her eyes from the reflected sunlight and stared skeptically at the bent-backed forms out on the mudflats. Would the slaves agree with the scientist’s blithe assessment?
Holtzman’s face hardened. “Besides, these cowards owe a debt to humanity, for not fighting the thinking machines as we did. Is it too much to ask their descendants to help feed the survivors and veterans who kept—and still keep—the machines at bay? These people forfeited their right to freedom long ago, when they deserted the rest of the human race.”
He seemed offhanded about it and not quite angry, as if the problem was beneath him. “We have more important work to do, Norma. You and I have a debt to pay as well, and the League of Nobles is counting on us.”
THAT EVENING, GRIPPING the cool metal of a wrought-alloy railing, the small woman gazed out from her balcony window at twinkling city lights. Boats and barges on the Isana looked like waterlogged fireflies. In the gathering darkness, flaming rafts drifted out from the slave sector, mobile bonfires that floated into the marshes. Each fire rose and peaked, then diminished as the burning rafts sputtered and sank.
Humming to himself, Holtzman came to offer her a cup of seasoned tea, and Norma asked him about the boats. Squinting out at the drifting bonfires, he was slow to realize what the slaves were doing. “Ah, must be cremation rafts. The Isana takes the bodies away from the city, and the ashes are carried out to sea. Basically efficient.”
“But why are there so many of them?” Norma pointed at the dozens of flickering lights. “Do slaves die that often, each day?”
Holtzman frowned. “I heard something about a plague traveling through the worker population. Most unfortunate, requiring a lot of effort to replace them.” He reassured her quickly, his eyes brightening. “Nothing you need worry about, though. Truly. We have plenty of good medicines shipped here, enough to tend all the free citizens in Starda if we should happen to fall ill, too.”
“But what about all the slaves who are dying?”
His reply was not on point. “Lord Bludd has requested replacements for them. There’s a standing order for healthy candidates these days. The Tlulaxa flesh merchants are happy to harvest more men and women from the outlying worlds. Life on Poritrin goes on.” He reached down to pat Norma’s shoulder as if she were a child needing reassurance.
From the balcony, she tried to count the floating fires, but soon gave up the effort. Her tea tasted cold and bitter.
Behind her, Holtzman continued happily, “I very much like your idea of using my scrambler-shield concept as a weapon. I am already thinking of how to design a field-portable projector that could be deployed on the ground.”
“I understand,” she said, her voice hesitant. “I will work harder to suggest new ideas.”
Even after he left, Norma could not tear her eyes from the funeral barges blazing across the river, the floating cremation fires. She had seen how the slaves labored in the mudflats planting clam seedlings and in laboratory rooms calculating hundreds of equations. Now they were dying in droves from a deadly fever…but were easily replaced.
The League of Nobles desperately sought to keep from being enslaved by the thinking machines. Norma wondered about the hypocrisy here.
All men are not created equal, and that is the root of social unrest.
—TLALOC,
A Time for Titans
The Tlulaxa slaving crew came down to Harmonthep like a weary convoy instead of a squadron of military raiders.
Tuk Keedair rode in the lead ship, but he left the piloting and shooting to the newcomer Ryx Hannem. Not yet jaded to the slave-acquisition business, young Hannem would be eager to please Keedair, and the veteran flesh merchant wanted to see what this novice was made of.
Keedair had a flattened nose that had been broken twice in his youth; he liked the way it had healed, imparting rugged character to his wolfish face. In his right ear he wore a triangular gold earring etched with a hieroglyphic mark that he refused to translate for anyone. A thick black braid, tarnished with strands of gray, hung between his shoulders at the left side of his face—a mark of pride, since commercial tradition required a flesh merchant to slice off the braid after any unprofitable year. And Keedair’s had grown long.
“Do we have coordinates yet?” Hannem asked, looking nervously at his control panel, then out the cockpit windshield. “Where should we start, sir?”
“Harmonthep’s an Unallied Planet, boy, and the Buddislamics don’t publish maps. We just look for a village and then harvest the people. Nobody’s keeping a census.”
Hannem peered through the viewer, searching for villages. The clustered Tlulaxa ships cruised over a waterlogged green continent. No mountains or hills rose above the soggy landscape of lakes, marshes, and waterways. Harmonthep seemed to have an aversion to pushing its land masses much above sea level. Even the oceans were shallow.
After a few more runs, Keedair might
take a long furlough back on Tlulax, the closed-off world of his people. It was a nice place to relax, though he was sure he’d get restless again before long. As a “procurer of human resources,” Keedair had no regular home.
The Tlulaxa biological industry had a constant demand for fresh material, generated from new subjects, untapped genetic lines. By imposing a high degree of secrecy on their work, the Tlulaxa had managed to fool their innocent League customers. When the price was right and the need great, the nobles easily swallowed stories of sophisticated bio-tanks that could grow viable replacement organs. The dedicated researchers eventually hoped to modify their clone-growth tanks to produce such products, but the necessary technology had not yet been attained.
It was so much easier to just grab swarms of forgotten humans who lived on outlying worlds. The kidnappings would never be noticed, and the captives would all be carefully catalogued according to their genetics.
For the time being, though, the sudden shortage of viable slaves on Poritrin had changed Keedair’s business focus. As long as the plague continued, it would be more profitable just to provide living captives, warm bodies that needed no further processing….
As the slavers approached the tangled swamps, Keedair tapped the scanned topographic map on his console screen. “Fly low over that broad stream and follow it. In my experience, you’re likely to find villages at a confluence of waterways.”
As the craft swooped down, he spotted large dark shapes moving in the waters, serpentine creatures curling through bamboolike reeds. Huge orange flowers bloomed on the tops of the stalks, opening and closing like fleshy mouths. Keedair was glad he didn’t have to stay on this ugly world for long.
“I see something, sir!” Hannem overlaid a magnified display on the windscreen, pointing out a cluster of huts standing on poles within the marshes.
The Butlerian Jihad Page 19
