"How far did he get?"
"One magic yes. He was borderline for the military, but they would have taken him if he'd not showed some magic ability. None of the masters wanted him though, and he had very little aptitude for anything."
"What can he do?"
"Not much more than an Oracle, and a lot less than most of them. He seems to be very good at predicting small things in advance, so we assigned him to a battle mage to see if he'd be any use in a battle. He was with the army which returned the day before yesterday. I assume he's on leave to visit his family today." He paused. "What was the taunt?"
"I couldn’t remember his name."
There was a long pause this time.
"That little bastard!"
Forty Seven
The mayor, like everyone else, hadn't changed.
He greeted me warmly, even wrapping his arms around me in a hug. He was in his finery, so I assumed he was recently returned from the king's fealty gathering.
"Thorn my boy! You have no idea how happy I was to hear you were still alive. Not to mention being the most powerful mage of all time. And ridding us of a nasty king. Welcome home boy!" He paused for a moment, looking me up and down. "Not a boy. A boy fled, a man returns." His volume decreased. "Don’t tell me how, I'm sure I won't understand it. Just welcome back."
To say I was somewhat overwhelmed, after the lack of reaction I’d had so far, was an understatement. But then, he was the Mayor for very good reasons, and his cheerfulness and outward behavior were chief among them.
"Thank you," I managed to gasp.
"I assume you didn’t swear fealty to our new king?"
"Ah, no. We came to an arrangement for the short term."
"Excellent."
"I assume you did?"
"Actually no. I was briefed yesterday on the situation and what you were up to, and begged a private audience with the new king. I told him big changes were afoot, which he acknowledged, having already talked to you, and we also came to an agreement."
"It obviously didn’t include you being beheaded for failing to swear fealty."
He laughed raucously.
"Of course not. I told him our village's allegiance was to you."
My jaw dropped open, and flapped around for a moment.
"Me?"
"Of course. Our last king declared us treasonous, and tried to destroy the village. As such, we no longer considered ourselves part of the kingdom."
I heard Tasha snigger in the background. It was quickly stifled. The Mayor appeared not to hear.
"How did that go down?"
"Not well, but I pointed out the village was under your protection now, and by all accounts, you could move us somewhere where we could be an independent community."
"I could?"
"So I'm told."
"Hmmm. I've been asking kings, but what do you want? Assuming you do speak for the village as a whole?"
"I do indeed. While our new king is considerably better than our old one, his powers are no less, and while of a better disposition, it has long been wondered if he will really rule better than his sire, or if he would change into him."
He paused, looking to see how I was reacting. My face remained impassive. He went on.
"Not wishing to find out, we would hope you can move us somewhere on this world where we can truly be independent. We've never liked our young people being taken off to fight wars which never benefit anyone here, or lose our promising mages to the king's court and his armies. We only wish to be left alone, to live life as best we can."
His eyes bored into mine, even though his mouth was still grinning.
"You can do this for us, can't you?"
Forty Eight
"Why are you being so obtuse about this?" demanded Jen.
I was wondering the same thing myself. We'd been discussing things for hours now, back on my island, and with dinner well out of the way. It seemed the Mayor had been right, and most of the village did want to leave the kingdom, and go wherever I was. Of course, no-one had told them it was a long way into the future, and they wouldn’t have understood it if they had.
Facts were pretty solid now.
All of the kingdoms wanted to be independent of the others, and independent meant zero contact.
They all had incompatible government types.
They all wanted all of this land mass.
None of them cared less what happened to the others.
None of them understood how co-dependent they all were. Yes there was a major mountain range separating them, but it didn’t seem to slow down the trickle of people from one kingdom to another. They either chose to ignore this, or it was never brought to the ruling level's attention. Personally I thought a fair amount of deliberate head in the sand was going on.
They all thought their style of government was the only viable one, and should therefore be the one to stay put, while the others were removed.
Not moved, removed.
Lastly, and definitely not least, the planet was about to become an ice ball, and none of them could actually stay here. Which of course, they didn't actually know yet. The Matriarchy should have, but the one person who could have told them was ostracized. And since my coming, apparently even more so now than before.
The discussion had more or less reached the 'so what are you going to do about it?' stage, with all eyes on me. And I wasn't answering the unasked question. Nor did I want to.
I wasn’t sure obtuse was the right word. But I also wasn’t going to challenge Jen when she used that tone of voice.
I sighed.
The downside of having so much power was people expected you to use it.
The wisdom of having so much power was recognizing it was better never to use it. But this didn’t work when you already had, and if nothing further was done, things would only get worse.
My problem was, I wasn’t at all sure using the power again would actually fix anything. Sure, it would save everyone's lives in two years' time. But what if…
"He's scared of making things worse," said Lea.
There. It was out there.
"How could things get worse?" asked Jess.
Jen face palmed. At least she could see the same problems I did. Jess gave her an annoyed look, which didn’t happen very often. Normally it was Lea providing face palm moments.
"Everyone dies immediately," said Tasha, "instead of in two years' time."
There was silence for a while.
"Can someone please explain that?" asked the healing mage. "I'm afraid I can't see where the danger is."
"Look up," I said. Everyone did. "Pick a pinprick of light. Around that tiny bit of light might be a planet like this one."
"So?"
"Point to a star." He did. I sent my sight there, and very quickly looked the system over. "Bad choice. There is no air to breathe anywhere there."
"You can see THAT far?" exclaimed the basics mage.
"Yes. I can move you there too."
The moving mage looked even more shocked than the basics mage. Both of them took in what I'd just said, and began shivering at the same time.
"Exactly."
The healing mage still didn’t get it. I looked at him, and then around at all of them.
"The kingdoms have to be moved. There is nowhere else in this system they can be moved to where it's viable in the long term. So in order to move the kingdoms, they have to go to one of those lights up there."
The healing mage looked shocked, while the creating mage closed his eyes and grimaced. The battle mage had worked it out himself, and simply nodded to me.
"The danger," I went on, "is moving anything that distance. I've moved myself, even small groups, but not a whole kingdom."
"Thorn," said Jen deliberately, "you're overselling it. Just accept it has to be done, and let's get on with how."
The girls nodded their agreement.
"But…"
"No Thorn," interrupted Tasha. "Get a grip. We know what happ
ens to two of the kingdoms already, and we take a third group with us when we go. It leaves either three kingdoms to relocate, or possibly two if one of them is broken up."
I must have looked confused. Tasha shook her head sadly.
"It's obvious Thorn," said Lea, "even to me. Our people have a strong democracy. One kingdom here is a fledgling democracy. We know which planet they need to go to."
"And," put in Jen, "our new 'cousins' have a total phobia about magic, and until centuries ago, we know they were a kingdom. There is a kingdom like that here now, and you just removed the mages. So we know which planet they need to go to."
I nodded. Their logic was sound. And it did solve the mystery of where the two civilizations came from. And why they technologically evolved at much the same pace. It also explained why they simply went to war when they first met each other. War was the state they came from, and at some level, it must be written into the mindset of each group, or certainly those who would lead them.
"And the others?" asked the battle mage.
"There are two main divergent groups of mages," said the basics mage. "The Matriarchy, and the Patriarchy. Both are essentially divided by the sex of their dominant mages. Just find two more planets to put them on, on different lights."
I had a thought, and left it at the back of my mind to think about.
"What about the mages who don't want to go with the kingdom they are part of?" asked the healing mage.
"Good point," said Jen. "Our people have never seen mages. We remember magic, but mainly as a joke."
Four of the five mages looked offended, but the battle mage laughed.
"Or at least we did," added Jess, "until Thorn came along."
"Seems easy enough," said Lea. "We give people the chance to change which group they wish to go with. Especially mages. I would think female mages in the democracy will want to go with the Matriarchy, and the male mages with the Patriarchy."
"What about mage couples?"
"They choose which suits them best," said Tasha, "or they come with us."
It felt a bit like the other shoe dropping. For the first time, it had been said we would have mages with us when we returned to the future. It hadn't so much as been mentioned before, even by these five, and even with the village going back with us being practically decided.
"Is that a problem?" the battle mage asked me.
"I've never given it any thought. In a way I assumed you five would be coming with us, especially after the mayor made his wishes known. But I've never considered the implications of a society with mages in it, other than me, being so close to the girl's civilization when we return. It opens up a whole new dynamic on the future."
"But is it a problem?" repeated the moving mage.
I looked around at the girls. None of them seemed worried, but they said nothing.
"Apparently not."
Forty Nine
The ships took two days to build themselves.
Up-scaled from the existing one, with extra levels, they were huge and ugly. Five ships for five kingdoms. While breaking up our own kingdom was an option, I couldn’t see our king going for it, and the last thing we needed was a civil war in the middle of trying to save everyone.
I did my homework. I checked on the girl's homeworld for the best place to put a first settlement.
I did the same with our 'cousins' homeworld. I'd lost the argument on where to put them though. The girls were adamant they go to the planet which would turn them orange skinned. It seemed to me a much better idea to put them on any of their other worlds, where when the two civilizations met, they would look alike. It took Jen pointing out the war wasn’t based on skin colour, for me to see it wasn’t necessary. And we had no idea what the consequences would be of putting them somewhere else.
For the two mage societies, I went looking for where I remembered seeing human societies the last time I looked, back then wondering why they were so spread out. I found several, but three of them were not there. And these were the three closest to here.
I sighed, when I realized there had never been any choice. The three systems were widely spaced around the galaxy, and getting them there was going to be a challenge. I did the looking for the best place to seed each planet, and locked in my mind each place.
I knew from the future each of them would at some point meet other species, each one becoming a sub-unit of an empire. There was nothing I could do about it, except warn them to be nice.
With the ships complete, and parked under the water off each kingdom's power base, we gave each of the mage families on the smaller ship the choice of which kingdom they wished to join, and I moved both them and their belongings to the appropriate larger ship. The smaller ship was moved to the water closest to the village.
Now all I had to do was convince five leaders they actually wanted to move.
Fifty
"Thank you all for coming."
They reacted with varying degrees of anger. The table was round, with a large skrying platter in the middle of it. They hadn't seen the image yet.
"Coming?" bellowed the slaver king. "You took us! No choice or warning, just suddenly here."
The others agreed with him, none of them happy.
"I told you we'd be meeting. When and where was irrelevant. Just be thankful I didn’t time it when arriving here would have been embarrassing."
They were too shocked to respond, so I went on.
"Please be seated, and look at the skrying platter."
They did so, and one by one, their eyes went wide with shock.
The Oracle had gone one better than I’d ask her to. Instead of one castle ruin, she'd made a changing image showing all of them. The only common theme was the snow coverage. She'd set it going on her own skrying platter, and I'd simply copied it into my table design.
"What madness is this?" asked the democracy leader.
"This is the future," I responded, "in a little over two years' time. I found an Oracle capable of seeing what will happen, and she made this for you to see."
"And what do we see?" asked the Matriarch.
"The end."
"Don't be cryptic," snapped the Patriarch.
"You are all familiar with what a volcano looks like?"
They nodded. Oracles were common enough for leaders to have been shown things like erupting volcanoes, since volcanos tended to draw the attention, and thus show off what the oracle can do.
"Something similar will happen here, with an effect much greater than any current volcano, and in a few short months after it, this planet will become uninhabitable."
The Matriarch sighed.
"So I've been informed. We did not believe it then. Why should we now?"
"Because I caused it."
They were silent, looking between the ruin images and me.
"How?" asked the new king of my people.
"You wouldn't understand if I told you."
"Why are we here then?" asked the democracy leader.
"To decide what to do, so all our people can survive."
"You mean to hear what you decided," snapped the slaver king.
"No. You all made it quite clear you want to be the sole kingdom here, and all the others should be moved. Well, as it turns out, everyone has to be moved. It's not a decision, it’s a necessity. But there are decisions to be made in order to action it."
"Such as?" said the newest king.
"Either you are all unaware of how co-dependent your kingdoms are, or you choose to ignore it."
"Co-dependent how?" demanded the democracy leader.
I sighed and shook my head for a moment.
"Look at your kingdoms. A Matriarchy and a Patriarchy, where mages rule. Full mages of one sex born into the other, move to the other. A non-mage ruled kingdom, where mages were slaves, and there was a constant movement of escapee mages to all the other kingdoms. A Kingdom where a mage ruled, but men predominate, and Oracles are tolerated, with a traffic of female mages to the democracy a
nd the Matriarchy. A democracy where people who want structure and imposed order move to one of the other kingdoms, or those who consider themselves not represented and oppressed by those who are, seek out one of the others where they can respect the order of things. All of your kingdoms both lose people, and accept people from the others, all the time."
I looked at the slaver king.
"Or they did until your wall went up."
I’d expected a 'what wall?' exclamation, but it didn’t happen. They knew exactly what I’d done. No-one said anything.
"So we are here," I went on, "for you to decide who goes with which kingdom. And for you to understand the consequences of becoming independent."
"Consequences?" asked the Patriarch.
"Are you people leaders? Or dumb peasants?"
It took a moment for me to realize I’d shouted at them. They were watching the water in the skrying dish boil off.
"After the move, it will be thousands of years before any of your descendants meet up with any of the others again."
"Good," said the slaver king, smirking.
I really wanted to wipe the smirk off his face. I pointed at him.
"You need to accept that mages may be born into your society again." I pointed at the Matriarch. "You need to deal with full male mages in your society, and you," pointing at the Patriarch, "need to deal with full female mages." I pointed at the newest king next. "You need to be a better king than your father was, and accept whoever is born into your society as an equal." Which left the democratic leader. "And you will also need to deal with all types of people." I looked around them all. "All of your societies have to adapt, since there will be no way of people escaping what they don’t like."
"We really will be that independent?" asked the new king.
"Yes. But there is also another aspect."
"What?" demanded the slaver king.
"All of you will be going to a different planet, far away from each other, but we are not alone in this galaxy. There are other beings out there, and some of them are already capable of destroying you without giving it any thought."
Tomorrow's Spacemage Page 14
