Ventus

by Karl Schroeder

  "Goddess!" The voice was a woman's. "Are you all right?"

  A shadow bent over him. He heard another intake of breath. "Goddess, you are not!"

  Armiger tried to lift his hand. "Please," he croaked. "Help me." His black fingers closed in fine hair.

  "No!" Jordan was barely aware that his plate was skittering across the table, and off to shatter on the floor. He had fallen forward, fighting to hold back Armiger's distant body. "Run! Get away from him!"

  No one was paying any attention to him. Brendan Sheia was on his feet, shaking his finger at Yuri. "This is a calumny!" he shouted. "We all know the real reason you're supporting parliament, father. It's to cut me out of my birthright!"

  A gasp went around the room. Then everyone was shouting at once.

  No one could hear Jordan—not those in the banquet hall, transfixed as they were by the drama unfolding here, nor the distant woman, too close to Armiger. Jordan felt her hands on him—or were they Calandria's?

  A torrent of outraged voices enveloped him—"Your anger does you no credit, Brendan!" "Quiet, Linden, you traitor." Chairs toppled; ladies scurried for cover as the two Boros heirs confronted one another below the head table.

  None of this mattered to Jordan. He tried with all his will to take control of Armiger's body, but it was futile. That hand in her hair... He dimly knew that Axel had him in an armlock and together with Calandria, was marching him from the banquet hall.

  He fought the wrong bodies, and even as they resisted, in that distant place the one who should resist, should flee, did not. Instead, her gentle arms gathered him up.

  8

  Calandria poured some wine and handed Jordan the cup. He accepted it gratefully, and hunched further under the blanket next to the fire Axel had lit in the fireplace. Axel now paced angrily at the doorway to their tower room. He had barred the door. Several times people had knocked, but he'd shouted that things were under control, Jordan was fine.

  It seemed he'd disgraced them at the banquet. Jordan could still taste vomit faintly; he gulped at the wine to mask it. His hands shook, and he stared at them dumbly.

  "What's wrong with him?" Axel demanded.

  "He seems to be becoming more attuned to the implant. He was only able to receive when he was asleep before. Jordan, can you hear me?"

  He drew himself closer to the fire. Reluctantly, he said, "Yeah."

  Her fingers alighted on his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah." He drained the wine, facing into the fire.

  "This is too much for him," Axel said. "We should stop."

  "We don't know where he is yet!" she retorted. "The avatar is a threat until we find him and neutralize him. You know how the gods are. We have no way of knowing whether 3340 hid a resurrection seed in Armiger. If it did, and the seed sprouts... then, everything we've done is threatened."

  "There are other ways to find him."

  "No!" They both turned their heads. Jordan glared at them. At that moment the two of them reminded him of his parents, ineffectually mouthing words instead of acting. "We have to do something now! He's hurting people."

  Calandria came to sit next to him. "What do you mean?"

  "We have to find out where he is right now," Jordan insisted. "You promised you would take the visions away when I'd told you where Armiger is. Well, let's do it. I thought after the manse that things would get easier, since you said you knew what was happening and I thought you could do something about it. But you didn't expect what happened tonight, and it's getting worse!" He hunkered himself down, trying to pin her with the reproach of his gaze.

  Calandria and Axel exchanged looks. Axel shrugged, appearing almost amused. "There are three of us in on this venture now, Cal. He's got a point."

  "Where's the wisdom you were going to trade me for telling you where Armiger is?" Jordan pointed out. "I haven't got anything out of this. You kidnapped me, and put visions in my head till I'm almost crazy!" He was mildly astonished at his own outburst. Of course, he'd had a few cups of wine tonight, but really enough was enough. An echo of the force that had driven him into the night after Emmy drove him to speak now.

  "You seem like the Winds sometimes," he said, "but you haven't done anything for me. You said you would."

  Calandria stood. "I'm sorry," she said. "I promise to make it up to you. And I realize I made a mistake in bringing you to the banquet. I didn't think you would find it so stressful."

  "Wait a second," said Axel. "So he was under extreme stress tonight. And started having visions. Is stress the trigger?"

  She nodded, and sighed. "Sorry, Axel. I wasn't sure of it before, so I didn't mention it. But the banquet proves it. There's a correlation between stress and his receptivity."

  "Maybe if he can control his stress reactions, he can control the visions," said Axel. Jordan looked up again at this.

  Calandria looked pained. "Yes, but we don't want to eliminate them entirely. On the other hand, he won't be able to learn to control himself fast enough to prevent us learning what we need to know."

  "We can at least teach him how to avoid the sort of thing that just happened." Axel nodded, his arms crossed and his eyes on Jordan. "Teach him some of your tricks. Relaxation games. Mind control. We owe him that much, and you'd said we'd pay him in wisdom. So let's start paying."

  Calandria looked from Axel to Jordan, and nodded wearily. "All right." She sat down again. "Jordan, we will start your education right now, if you want."

  "Yes!" He turned to face her. Finally.

  "This will take time, and a lot of practise. It might not even work for the first while, but with practise you'll start to get it. Okay? Good. The first thing you must learn is that you cannot do anything if you cannot control your own mind—your emotions and your reactions. So, that is the first thing you will learn. Beginning with how to relax."

  Jordan forgot the heat at his back and the wine in his cup, and listened.

  §

  Two anxious days passed. Armiger wasn't moving, so Jordan had nothing new to report to Calandria. He knew she was frustrated by the delay; they went over his previous visions time and again, but he could provide nothing new for her. He often saw her meditating with her eyes closed, and often after these sessions she had new questions for him about the landscapes he had glimpsed: "was there a tall rounded hill in the distance? Did the forest extend in three tongues near the horizon?" He had no answers.

  On the third day, on one of his infrequent breaks, Jordan went to the roof to stretch. The Boros estate sprawled out below. People went to and fro about duties that were all familiar to him. He could tell what was happening by watching the servants, though the purposes of the Boros' themselves were impossible to read.

  Though politics as such was beyond him, Jordan could read the story of the Boros family home from its very stones—could tell what was added when, and in what style. If you went by the boasts of the visiting family members, the clan had always been prominent. But this tower was ancient, and the manor house new, and in between were traces of buildings and walls in styles from various periods. Jordan could imagine each in turn, and he saw large gaps between the apparent razing of one set of buildings and the growth of the manor. If this were the Boros' ancestral home, it had lain unoccupied for up to a century at a time.

  This exercise was a good way to take his mind off things. And, he had to admit, he was starting to relax despite himself. Over the past days he had constantly practiced the skills Calandria May had taught him. He'd never known he should breathe from the belly, not the chest—or that his body carried tension in tight muscles even when his mind was relaxed. He scanned his body every minute or two, and every time he did, he found some part of it had tightened up, usually his shoulders. He would concentrate for a second, relax them, and go back to what he was doing. The feeling of being pursued that had plagued him was receding.

  Best of all, the visitations by Armiger were no longer arbitrary and uncontrollable. He still dreamed about the demigod,
but in daylight he could tell when a vision fit was creeping up on him. Using the relaxation exercises Calandria had taught him, he could usually stop it dead. Calandria encouraged him to think of the visions as a talent he could master, and not as some alien intrusion.

  He knew this worked to her ends, but was prepared to go along because, at last, her ends paralleled his own. He was able to think about the visions with some objectivity, and report what he saw and heard in detail to her.

  Most importantly, what he saw and heard had changed. Armiger lay in bed in a cabin somewhere to the south. He was being nursed by a solitary woman, a widow who lived alone in the woods. In his convalescence Armiger seemed like an ordinary man. His terrible wounds were healing, and the small snatches of dialogue between him and his benefactor that Jordan caught were mundane, awkward, almost shy. Armiger had not eaten her, nor did he order her about. He accepted her help, and thanked her graciously for it. His voice was no longer a choked rasp, but a mellow tenor.

  Jordan didn't doubt Armiger's capacity for evil. He was not human. But what Jordan saw was no longer nightmarish, and that, too, was a relief.

  "Hey, there you are!" Axel Chan's head poked up from the open trapdoor of the tower's roof. He emerged, dusted himself off, and came to join Jordan at the battlement. "What are you doing up here? The gardens are fine today. Soaking up the sun?"

  Jordan nodded. "I like it up here. I can see all the buildings." Gardens didn't interest him; they were the provenance of gardeners, not stoneworkers like him.

  He hesitated, then asked something that had been on his mind. "We're not staying here, are we?"

  "We'll be leaving as soon as we have a fix on Armiger." Axel leaned out carefully, and spat. "Hm. Twenty meters down." He looked slyly at Jordan. "You wouldn't be hiding from Calandria up here, would you?"

  "No." It was the truth, though Jordan did know what Axel meant. "She works me pretty hard." If she had her way, Jordan would spent sixteen hours a day on his exercises.

  Axel shrugged. "She's trying to pack as much information into you as she can in a short time."

  "But she won't answer all my questions."

  "Really? Like what?"

  "I asked her what the Winds are. She said I probably wouldn't understand."

  "Ah. No, you probably won't. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't tell you," added Axel with a grin. "You want to know? The unabridged version?"

  "Yes!"

  "Okay." Axel steepled his hands, looking out over the estate. "Has she told you what gods are?"

  "Primal spirits," Jordan said. "Superior to the Winds."

  Axel scowled. "You see, here's one of those places where the questions will go on forever. Okay, first of all, the gods aren't spirits, they're mortal. Second, humans existed before the gods. Thirdly, we made the first gods, centuries ago. They were experiments in creating consciousness in mechanisms. Nobody knows where 3340 came from, but He was the same kind of thing as the Winds, and just as out of control."

  "How could a god be a mechanism?"

  "Hmmf. Look at it this way. Once long ago two kinds of work converged. We'd figured out how to make machines that could make more machines. And we'd figured out how to get machines to... not exactly think, but do something very much like it. So one day some people built a machine which knew how to build a machine smarter than itself. That built another, and that another, and soon they were building stuff the men who made the first machine didn't even recognize. Some of these things became known as mecha, which is the third order of life here on Ventus. Mecha's as subtle as biological life, but constructed totally differently.

  "And, some of the mechal things kept developing, with tremendous speed, and became more subtle than life. Smarter than humans. Conscious of more. And, sometimes, more ambitious. We had little choice but to label them gods after we saw what they could do—namely, anything.

  "Most of the time gods go on about their own concerns. 3340 decided its concern was us. Luckily we—humans—know how to create things of equal power that serve us. The Winds were intended to be your slaves, not your masters. Apparently there's stories here to that effect."

  Jordan nodded.

  "The exact design of the Winds has been lost," Axel said, "since they were a one-shot project of the European Union, and the university that oversaw the project was nuked along with Hamburg in 2078. Anyway, the Winds were created and given the task of turning Ventus from a lifeless wasteland into a paradise where people could live. They did so—except that when the colonists arrived, the Winds didn't recognize you.

  "It seems there was no way to communicate with them. One of the things we don't know to this day is what the chain of command within the Winds was supposed to be. There seems to be no central 'brain' which rules the planet. And communications between the Winds seems spotty and confused. It's as if they've all gone their own ways.

  "A lot of people think this is what happened. The Winds all concern themselves with the ecology of the planet, but at different levels. The vagabond moons worry about the overall distribution of minerals and soil nutrients, so they scoop here and dump there; they want to do in centuries what evolution and tectonics would take billions of years to accomplish. The mecha embedded in the grass are advocates of the grass, and they may object to the moons' dumping crap on them, say. There's no central brain telling both it's a good idea. But maybe there was originally supposed to be a central plan, that they would all have access to. Knowing this plan, the grass would acquiesce to its death by salting, or drowning in a new lake made by the desals. So, though none of the Winds were to be answerable to any of the others, they would all be answerable to the Plan, because that was the only way to guarantee the proper terraforming of Ventus.

  "Humans don't seem to be mentioned in the programming of the Winds. We were supposed to be the apex of the Plan, represented as its ultimate purpose. That's what went wrong—no Plan, no accommodation for the arrival of the colonists.

  "So a strange double-world has developed on your planet. Each object seems to have its resident spirit—the microscopic mecha, or what we call 'nano', that coordinate that object's place in the ecology. Originally these resident spirits were supposed to have a common goal over and above the survival of their hosts. They were to put themselves at our disposal—be our tools. But now, it's anarchy. War in the spirit world. The only ones aloof from this war are the greatest Winds, the Diadem swans, the Heaven hooks and the like."

  Jordan had only understood a little of this speech. "But some people do speak to the Winds," he said. "That's how the inspectors and controllers know what crop yields should be, or where they can build a waterwheel. The Winds tell them what's allowed."

  "Hm..." Axel raised an eyebrow. "I'd heard that from other people here too. Up there," he jerked a thumb at the clouds, "people don't believe it. They say your inspectors are a bunch of charlatans, holding onto power by pretending they can talk to the Winds."

  Jordan crossed his arms. "I don't know. I just know how we do things."

  "Right. That's fair."

  "So what is Calandria May?" asked Jordan. "Is she a Wind, or a thing like Armiger? Or just a person?"

  "She's... just a person. But a person with special skills, and enhancements to her body, such as the armor under her skin. I've got that too," he said, rubbing his wrist. "And I'm still human, aren't I?" He grinned.

  "So how did you get here? I know you followed Armiger, but..." Jordan had too many questions; he didn't know where to start.

  Axel frowned down at the distant gardens. "We were at war against 3340—all humanity was. It wanted us all as slaves. It had all its godly powers; we had our super-mecha. And a few agents who were more than human, but less than gods, like Calandria May. Last year she infiltrated a world called Hsing, which 3340 had enslaved, to try to find a way to turn the population against their unchosen god. She found 3340 had been changing ordinary people into demigods—Diadem swans or morphs, if you will—by infecting them with mecha that ate them from withi
n, replacing all their biology with mechalogy. 3340 enslaved these much more brutally than even the humans. Cal found a way to turn them against 3340, and she did that during our attack six months ago."

  "How?"

  "She had to briefly become one of them herself. You or I couldn't have done it, but Calandria was able to leave her humanity behind. She became a goddess, only for a day or so. And she killed 3340."

  "If she became a goddess, why didn't she stay that way?"

  Axel shook his head. "Don't know. She could have kept fabulous powers; she would have lived for thousands of years if she wanted. She didn't want to. I think she was crazy to give that up. Don't understand. I really don't."

  Jordan was thinking. "So after 3340 died, you came here. To kill his servant, Armiger."

  "Exactly." Axel leaned against the battlement, and squinted at the sun. "What does all of this imply about the Winds, now?"

  Jordan hesitated. What came to mind was impossible.

  Axel nodded smugly. "You're smart. Isn't it clear? The Winds are made of the same stuff as the mecha. They are alive. And they, too, are mortal."

  Jordan turned away. "Crazy talk. If the Winds are mortal, then everything could be. —The sky, or the sun, or the earth itself."

  "You're beginning to understand," Axel said. "Now understand this: what is mortal can be murdered."

  §

  The door to their tower room was bolted; the fire was lit and candles sat on the table. Jordan, Calandria and Axel sat in imitation of some domestic scene, each bent over an evening task. Except that Calandria was not darning, but poring over a map on the table top; and Axel was not repairing tools or his boots, but polishing the steel of a wicked sword; and Jordan was not playing games or cleaning, but sat cross-legged in the center of the floor, hands on his knees, eyelids fluttering. He was trying to count to three, one digit per breath, without allowing any stray thoughts to intrude on the way. Tonight he felt he was finally starting to get the hang of it.