by Mick Farren
Baptiste lost patience. He turned to the Old Metal Monster. 'Hang him! I've had enough of this charade. Hang him slowly, then cut him down and burn him!'
Hard hands reached to seize Anaheim. The metaphysician suddenly crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. At first everyone assumed that he had fainted from fear. Baptiste kicked him hard in the ribs, his boot leaving a dirty mark on the previously spotless white bodysuit. The body moved, but only as though it were dead weight. There was no sign of life.
'Revive him! Wake him up and kill him!'
The Old Metal Monster bent over Anaheim. He put a hand inside the top of the metaphysician's bodysuit. 'He's dead.'
'Dead?'
'A former metaphysician.'
'What did he do? Die of fright?'
The Old Metal Monster straightened up. 'Sure didn't look like it to me.'
It sure did not look like that to Reave, either. He had seen a man die of fright. It had involved choking, shaking, and turning green in the face. This was something totally different. It was as though Anaheim had just vacated his body and was not planning to come back. It was a little like the act of discorporation, except that those who had mastered the technique invariably left their mortal bodies on hold, waiting for their eventual return. Anaheim appeared to have gone for good. Most of those who had witnessed the incident seemed to be thinking the same way as Reave. Later there would be stories of how, in the fraction of a second before he had collapsed, a tiny bright thing had left Anaheim's mouth and flown up into the air. Reave had not seen anything of the sort, and he was convinced that it was simply a decoration of the tale, but the fact that the story was born at all gave strong indication of how the encounter with Anaheim was looked upon by the rank and file.
A black rage descended on Baptiste. He ordered Anaheim's body hung up on the gallows and mutilated. If the metaphysician did decide to return, he would not have much of a physical body to come back to. The Old Metal Monster wanted to know what to do with the woman.
'What woman?'
'The one we were trying to hang before he came out of wherever he was hiding.'
Baptiste made an angry, impatient gesture. 'So hang her. Hang the whole lot of them if you've got a mind to.'
It proved to be a long hot afternoon of smoke, yellow dust, screams, and drunken fighting. In addition to the brewery, the raiders had also smashed their way into what turned out to be the local distillery and discovered over two hundred bottles of a fiercely potent single malt. With whiskey fire in their bellies, the army of Vlad Baptiste became really creative. A group of riders dragged some of the remaining townspeople out to the edge of town, to a spot some fifty yards from the stone wall. One by one the prisoners were turned loose with orders to try to escape over the wall. Then, betting among themselves on how far each one would get before he or she was gunned down, the drunken raiders started blasting away with howls of drunken laughter. Even the promise that anyone who actually made it all the way over the wall would be spared was a cruel deception. The two who did were rounded up again and forced to face some fresh horror.
Baptiste had his large battle tent set up beside the gallows, on the square in front of the ziggurat. He took no part in the slaughter but sat all through the long afternoon in his tent, still and brooding. The strange nondeath of Anaheim seemed to have had a profound effect on him. It probably did not bode well for someone. Those black moods usually ended by escalating into a towering rage and plans for bloodlettings that were bigger and more spectacular than any that had gone before.
The pseudosun went down in a searing, bloodred sunset; Reave did not know if the effect was caused by the smoke from the burning buildings or if the sun was controlled by some kind of human mood sensor. Bodies swayed on the gallows in a brisk evening breeze that had come with the sunset. By the end of the afternoon there was more than one scaffold in the small town, heavy with its strange fruit. Extended multiple rapes were being conducted in the lengthening shadows. Not only boys and young women but even some of the older women were staked out on the ground for the leering lines of riders.
Sunset found Reave walking slowly down the main street, trying to ignore as much of what was going on as possible. He had had enough. There was no doubt in his mind that he had tofind a way out quickly. As he drew near the ziggurat and Baptiste's tent, he wondered how the Torch would react if he once again climbed the steps and took a second, longer, and more searching look at what was inside the stone structure. Such a move might well push their leader over the edge, and Reave could well imagine that he could find himself a candidate for the gallows. On the other hand, there was a streak of curiosity in his personality that would dearly love to go inside the ziggurat and see what Anaheim had been up to. While he was standing and debating with himself, he heard Baptiste's raised voice from inside the tent.
'That's it! That's what I want, and that's what will be done. Tomorrow we look for the generator and take it down.'
That was too much for Reave. He might have become inured to the death and the violence, but this was something else. The idea of taking down the stasis generator and letting the whole valley revert to nonmatter was close to blasphemy. The world had lost enough to the nothings, and if the stories about the disrupters were to be believed, more was lost every day. For a human being to wantonly revert stabilized matter had to be a betrayal of the whole physical universe. Something crystallized within Reave. Not only was he going to get away from Vlad Baptiste and his madness, somewhere along the line he was going to do his best to see that it was stopped forever. He wondered what would happen if he simply pulled out a pistol and shot Baptiste on the spot. It was a dashing, romantic idea, but he was well aware that there was still enough blind loyalty among the men for him never to walk out of there alive. He could not even make a run for it without a stasis generator of his own.
Reave had noticed before that when a resolve really crystallized the way his had, a means of making it happen often was not slow in presenting itself. And, indeed, he had to wait only a couple of hours. The pseudosun had gone down behind the mountains, and the still-smoldering ruins of the stasis town had become a scene from hell. Although he had kept out of the murder and torture, Reave had not refrained from making a fair start on getting as drunk as he could. It was one way to put a certain distance between himself, the gruesome images on every side of him, and the unrelenting throb of the victory drums. He was looking for a second bottle of the fiery malt when he spotted one of the scouts riding in, coming through the blackened and blasted stone wall where the first clash with the militia had taken place. The man had a stasis generator, and his female mount also had one on its chest, held in place with a martingale strap. Reave knew that his chance had come. He had only to unseat the man, take his lizard and SG, and hightail it for the nothings before a pursuit could be organized. He estimated that the nothings were no more than seven or eight minutes away at a flat-out gallop, and once he was in the nothings, they would never be able to find him.
The scout was riding slowly, and Reave changed direction so that their paths would intersect. It did not require any acting skill on Reave's part to appear a fraction drunker than he really was. As the scout approached, Reave stumbled and swayed and brandished his almost empty bottle.
'Hey, buddy, y' wanna drink?'
The scout shook his head. 'I gotta report to the chief first. He'll have my head if he smells booze on my breath.'
Reave had come right up beside the lizard and its rider. At the last minute he lurched and pretended to fall against the side of the beast. The scout, already in an evil temper from having been ordered out on patrol when everyone else was whooping it up, snarled at him.
'Watch what you're doing, you shitfaced asshole!'
Reave grabbed the stirrup and pushed upward. The move was so unexpected that the man came completely out of his saddle and crashed to the ground. He lay winded for a few moments; then, gasping a string of foul obscenities, he clawed for his si
dearm. Reave killed him with one shot, hoping that the flash of his pistol would not be noticed in the general mayhem. He thought he heard a shout as he swung into the saddle, but he did not look back. He had a return of the impulse to charge back through the town and kill Baptiste, but self-preservation prevailed. He put his spurs to the lizard and set it racing up the road to the pass and the nothings beyond it. He reached the pass unscathed. As he hit the stasis controls and plunged into the nothings, he realized that he did not even know the name of the town he had just helped destroy.
As with the nothings, there is still a great deal of speculation and argument regarding the true nature of Stuff Central. The distillation of all the surviving legends is that a place existed somewhere in the Damaged World that was the ultimate source of all material things. Its roots obviously lay in the matter transporters that came into regular use even before the development of the Mahler drive. The matter transporter was capable of moving people and cargoes over short distances in space. Its essential principle was that it disassembled the basic subatomic structure of any solid object in its send chamber and broke it down into a complex microcode. This code was then transmitted to the receiving unit, which, using that code, reassembled a perfect replica of the object from available local matter. Despite the obvious moral and philosophical problems and some sensationally unpleasant early accidents, the matter transporter rapidly become part of human technology and quickly expanded its capabilities in terms of both range and the size of the objects it could handle.
By the start of the Thousand Years War the technology had been perfected whereby, instead of simply transporting matter, the microcodes could be recorded on permanent templates, and multiple facsimiles could be created at will of any object — including animals and living human beings — for which there was such a template.
The constant references to templates in all the hundreds of stories referring to Stuff Central make clear that if it existed at all, it must have employed some advanced form of this technology, and it is probable that much of the hardware, the flora and fauna, and even sections of the human population in the Damaged World were products of these templates. What is not clear is whether Stuff Central directly transmitted the required objects, or whether it only supplied a file of templates for later use. Unless the legends are totally fanciful, it would seem that we have to assume that there was some kind of center that had the capability of transmitting microcode signals with great accuracy through the chaos of nonmatter to the scattered stasis settlements of this strange era.
Unfortunately, much of this will have to remain pure speculation. The hard archaeology for this period is so flimsy that it is unlikely that any of the theories will ever be confirmed. Not one copy of the often-mentioned Stuff Catalogue would seem to have survived the Final Cataclysm and the Reformation.
— Pressdra Vishnaria
CHAPTER THREE
Novice Wellblessed sat on the rail of the half bridge,only a matter of feet from the start of the nothings. He was eating a limon and tossing the pieces of green and yellow rind into the shimmering nonmatter, watching the way they smoked and vanished as they touched it. It would take only three steps and that was it. He had no portable stasis generator, and he, too, would be one with the non and all his troubles would be over.
The Half Bridge was one of the most disturbing pieces of architecture in all of the Sanctuary. Its name described it perfectly. It was a simple wooden footbridge that arched — or, more precisely, half arched — across the stream that marked one of the boundaries of the Sanctuary. On one side of the stream there was a serene normality; on the other there was the nothings. The water simply went to the edge of the Sanctuary's stasis field and stopped. The bridge did exactly the same thing. It reached its apex and stopped. Novice Wellblessed had yet to learn the secret of why the bridge did not just topple over with no far bank to support it. As it was, it gave the impression that over in the nothings there was some sort of spectral nonbridge that perfectly complemented it and held it in place. Novice Wellblessed knew that was impossible, but he still could not shake the idea. The novices were supposed to use it as a meditative aid, an idea made solid with which they might contemplate the transitory nature of the material world. All Novice Wellblessed used it for was to sit and stare and contemplate suicide.
Of all the novices in his admission group, Wellblessed had made the slowest progress. He retained little of the instruction that he received, and his masters constantly accused him of resisting enlightenment. He had spent more hours than he could remember assuming the Attitude of Submission and accepting the Penitential Ministry. Lately he had even been cutting classes. It was really no surprise that Wellblessed was doing so badly. He had no vocation. It had been only the direst necessity that had forced him to come begging to the Sanctuary to enroll as a novice. Back in another lifetime he had gone by the name of Billy Oblivion, and he had roamed the Margins and the stasis towns, the kind of footloose rover who managed to stay one step ahead of serious trouble. Eventually, though, serious trouble had caught up with him. Aledya, his longtime traveling companion and probably the only woman he had come close to really loving, was dead from an overdose of cyclatrol, and the Rat Gang had been hard on his heels. Right behind them had been a pair of homicidal treasury agents from the city of Litz called Lenk and Lu Yuan. Billy, in a moment of desperate stupidity, had robbed them of their graft money, and they intended to make an example of him. When, quite by accident, he had crawled on his knees into the reality of the Sanctuary with his SG all but burned out, the life of a novice had seemed the perfect answer. He would get a new name, a new identity, and three squares a day. How hard could it be? But that was before he had discovered the real meaning of soul-sick boredom. In the Sanctuary, all pleasure was canceled.
The gongs and horns had sounded from the onion domes of the minarets for the next task rotation, but Novice Wellblessed did not move. He had been thinking of himself as Billy Oblivion a lot lately. The identity of Novice Wellblessed had never sat well with him. Recently, it had not sat at all. He was supposed to be in the cubicle with his replica, learning to understand and respect himself, but he could no longer face those sessions. Soon after he had arrived at the Sanctuary, he had been templated; and when he had been deemed ready, a walking talking duplicate of himself had been created in the stuff receiver. The idea was that the time spent talking and being with his living double would eventually bring him to a degree of self-awareness that was transcendental. But in Wellblessed's case it had not happened that way. Wellblessed II had all the memories and emotions of the original. During the very first session he had wanted to know what would happen to him when Wellblessed had all the self-awareness he wanted. Wellblessed II becameincreasingly paranoid that he would be killed once he was no longer needed.
'I mean, I don't care how I got here. I'm here, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm alive. They can't just kill me. I'm not a thing, I'm a person.'
Wellblessed had compassion for his double, but there was one overwhelming problem. 'I know you're a person. The trouble is that the person you are happens to be me. The seat's already taken.'
They had talked about working out some sort of escape plan, but Wellblessed had very quickly realized that he had no intention of going through with anything of the sort. He really did not want a second Novice Wellblessed running around loose. Aside from the broad karmic considerations, there was also the very practical point that each of them was liable to get into all manner of trouble, and there was no guarantee that the right twin would take the rap for his own actions. Since their thought processes were absolutely alike, Wellblessed II realized exactly the same thing at almost exactly the same time. He became so glum that it was impossible to spend any time with him. From the way he looked at his original during those increasingly difficult sessions, he clearly was working on the theory that Wellblessed might be plotting to kill him. The idea had indeed passed through the novice's mind, but he had not actually taken it any further than
toying with it as a possible way out of the dilemma. The process certainly was not what the Masters had in mind.
Novice Wellblessed continued to stare into the nothings until a voice from behind made him turn.
'I see once again that you have failed to attend the empathy session with your duplicate.'
It was Richthofen, the Master of Discipline. Wellblessed sighed. If Richthofen had come looking for him, he knew that he was deep in the shit again. He turned and faced Master Richthofen. 'That's right.'
'You have an explanation, perhaps?'
'I don't believe that the sessions are going anywhere.'
Master Richthofen stood ramrod-straight, a trim figure in his saffron bodysuit. There was a positive gloss to his closely shaved head, but his expression was sour and censorious. 'That's hardly something that a novice is qualified to decide for himself.'
'The duplicate's a psycho. He believes that we're all plotting to kill him.'
'If he's a psycho, then you must be a psycho, too. You are, after all, identical.'
Novice eyed master coldly. 'That's quite possible.'
'The duplicate empathy sessions are designed to give you a unique chance to work through this kind of self-directed hostility.'
Wellblessed was starting to lose patience with all the nonsense. The Billy Oblivion side of his personality could remember times when his hostility had been the only thing that had saved his ass in a tight corner. 'I'm telling you, it's not happening.'
Richthofen's eyes narrowed. 'Perhaps we have to make it happen.'
Wellblessed could feel cowboy hostility coming to the rescue. He was a grown man, damn it. He had wandered all over the Damaged World. He was sick of being treated like a recalcitrant schoolboy. He turned and faced the Master head-on.
'Listen, you can do what you like to me. You can have me crawling across a floor of cut-glass beads or whatever queer punishment you can think up, but sooner or later you're going to have to accept the fact that I'm just not novice material. I don't have a vocation. Dig?'
