by Hogan, James
by wishing them to be otherwise."
The Enlightener wrote finally:
3. BEWARE THE TONGUES OF DECEIVERS. LET THY WORDS BE KEEN HEEDERS OF TRUTH, FOR
TRUTH IS NO HEEDER OF WORDS.
It went on until the Taloid had written several more rows, and then Price
reappeared carrying a video camera-copier and a light-duty general-purpose
plasma torch from the flyer's tool locker. "What are you doing?" Zambendorf
asked.
"Saving him the trouble of having to come all the way back up here if he forgets
any of it," Price replied. "Also I'm collecting samples of Taloid handscript."
He used the camera to transmit several shots of the slab into the flyer's
computer storage system, and then, satisfied that a record of the original
script had been preserved, carefully traced over the markings with the torch to
melt a deeper, clearer impression into the ice. After taking several shots of
this too, he directed one of them to the recorder's local hardcopier, and a few
seconds later a sheet of Titan-duty plastic was ejected into his gauntlet and
quickly rigidified in the low-temperature surroundings.
"You know, Vernon, sometimes I get the impression you're too sentimental,"
Abaquaan remarked.
"Maybe," Price agreed cheerfully. He looked around, picked up one of the smaller
ice flakes that lay all over the summit, and used the torch in fan-mode to melt
its top surface all over. Then he pressed the plastic down onto it and waited a
few seconds for the flake to refreeze, welding the ice and the plastic
inseparably together. Finally, as an afterthought he melted some extra slivers
of ice and allowed the water to flow over the face of the tablet, sealing the
plastic beneath a thin protective layer of glasslike ice. The result was quite
pleasing. He held it out toward the Taloid. "Here you are, Moses, old
buddy—something for you to hang on the wall when you get home."
"We'd better wrap this up," Abaquaan said. "Time's getting on."
"Otto's right," Zambendorf agreed. "Happy now, Vernon?"
"I guess so. It just seemed ... oh, like a nice thing to do."
The Enligbtener gazed down in wonder at the holy Tablet lying in his arms, still
glowing faintly—the Lifemaker's commandments entrusted to him, the Enlightener,
as the Lifemaker's messenger chosen to carry the sacred Word to the robeing
race. There was nothing he could say. The emotions surging within him were too
violent and confusing for him to be able even to think coherently.
"Farewell, Enlightener," the frond said. "Our work awaits. Do not remain here
now. Good fortune to thee." The Enlightener looked up and saw the frond-bearing
angel turn away and return into the shining creature. Then the second angel—the
one that had caused the living plant to bring forth the Tablet written in fire
and sealed inside the solid rock—followed. Finally the angel that had appeared
first of all backed slowly to the glowing opening, raised an arm in salutation,
and was swallowed up by the light. Moments later the opening closed, and the
cone of radiance that the shining creature had been emitting from a point just
above vanished suddenly.
"Take thee hence from this place, Enlightener," the creature roared, "or thou
wilt surely be burned." As if in a trance, clutching the Tablet securely under
one arm and taking his staff in the other, the Enlightener retreated from the
summit.
Only when the creature was lost to view behind the intervening rocks did his
faculties begin functioning again. Still in a daze he retraced his steps
downward to the stream. "Indeed thou wert meant to bring me to this place," he
murmured to his steed as he untethered it and remounted. "Now may we rest easy
in our minds that Meerkulla has received many blessings in return for his
sacrifice." He turned the horse round and descended the slopes below. Only when
he was almost at the trail did he see Captain Horazzorgio and the company of
Kroaxian Royal Guard waiting for him.
According to Clarissa, they were between Padua and Genoa, at a point almost at
the edge of the desert in which the first Terran-Taloid meeting had occurred—in
fact not that far at all from the very spot at which it had taken place.
Therefore the cruising time to Genoa would only be about fifteen minutes. Things
hadn't worked out too badly at all, Zambendorf thought to himself as he stood in
the cockpit doorway and watched the takeoff routine.
"Any sign of Moses down there?" Price asked curiously from the cabin behind.
Abaquaan brought up a series of infrared views on the copilot's scanner screen
until one showed a bright dot on the lower part of a broad slope some distance
below the summit on the side of the mountain down which Moses had disappeared.
He switched in the telescopic viewer and produced a large, clear image. "He's
got a horse," Abaquaan said. "Must have left it lower down someplace."
"He's riding a horse back down the mountain, with the slab you gave him under
his arm," Zambendorf said over his shoulder. "Want to come and see?"
Price moved forward beside Zambendorf and studied the screen for a few seconds.
Moses had stopped and seemed to be staring down the hill at something. Abaquaan
switched back to a low-resolution image, which showed more dots clustered
together not far away below. A close-up revealed them to be more Taloids, also
mounted. "I wonder who they are," Price murmured. "Do you think Moses might be
in some kind of trouble down there?"
"I don't know," Zambendorf replied slowly. He sounded concerned. After a second
or two he turned his head toward Clarissa and said, "Take it down lower. Let's
have a closer look at what's going on."
"I have no fear of thee now, Horazzorgio, Defender-of-False-Faith," the
Enlightener called down the hillside, his voice loud and firm and his eyes
glinting brightly. "For verily have I climbed the mountain and seen the angels,
and I return now to be known henceforth as the Enlightener, who has been chosen
to carry the Lifemaker's true Word to all comers of the world and bring a new
faith of love and brothership to all robeings. Heed my words well, Horazzorgio,
for they are indeed His, the Lifemaker's." He held high a slab of ice that he
was carrying. "Swear your allegiance now to the true faith of which I speak, and
renounce thy false creeds, and thy transgressions shall be forgiven thee. Dost
thou so swear, Horazzorgio?"
Uncertain if he could believe his ears, Horazzorgio was still too astonished to
reply when he saw the sky-dragon rising from the mountaintop in the background.
His imagers dulled in cold fear, and his body trembled. Twice now he had come to
Xerxeon in pursuit of one or the other of this pair of accursed brothers, and
twice they had eluded him. And now, just as before, the dragons of the
sky-beings were appearing in the sky to protect them. He wasn't about to mess
with dragons a second time, he decided. No way was he going through that again .
. . not for anything or anybody.
Horazzorgio jumped down from his saddle and fell to his knees. "I swear, O
Enlightener!" he shouted. "Horazzorgio has found the true faith! I believe! I
believe! Truly thou speakest the
Lifemaker's Word. What is thy wish, Chosen One?
Thy servant awaits thy command."
The troopers behind were looking at each other in amazement and murmuring among
themselves. "What sorcery has this hearer worked?"
"Horrazorgio on his knees? This is surely a miracle."
"What wondrous faith is this of which the hearer speaks?"
"I see no miracle."
Then the flier swooped down low over the riders, released two flares, turned on
its searchlight, and circled slowly to observe the scene. All around
Horazzorgio, metal figures were hurling themselves to the ground and adding to a
rising chorus of terrified voices.
"We believe! We believe!"
"Behold the Enlightener, the Chosen One!"
"Spare us sinners, O Dragon. We repent! We repent!"
Even the Enlightener was astounded by the efficacy of his own words.
"All this, and with such economy of effort?" he murmured to his horse as he
stared disbelievingly. "I must truly be inspired."
"What's going on down there?" Clarissa demanded, totally bemused. "Karl, what in
hell did you say to that guy?"
Price was looking worried. "Why are they all falling off their horses?" he
asked. "Are they okay? What's happening to them?"
"They look as if they're worshipping Moses," Abaquaan said incredulously. "He's
waving that videocopy you gave him."
Zambendorf had gone very quiet. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he continued
staring at the screen. At last he said in a faraway voice, "They're all dressed
very similarly, which suggests they're soldiers. And this is a part of Padua,
isn't it."
"So?" Clarissa asked.
"Galileo says that the Paduan horse-guards are among the most zealous and
fanatical soldiers anywhere on this part of Titan," Zambendorf replied. "Yet
we've just demolished a whole squadron of them . . . and without a single one of
the weapons that Arthur is yelling that he has to have—which we'd have a hard
job getting our hands on anyway, even if we thought it was the right way for him
to go."
Silence fell for a few seconds while the others absorbed what he had said. At
last Price asked him, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Zambendorf frowned, rubbed his beard, and looked back at the screen. "Believe it
or not, but I've absolutely no idea, Vernon," he replied candidly. "I do have a
strange feeling, however, that we might just have stumbled on the answer to
Arthur's problem with the Druids."
29
AT ONE END OF A SPECIALLY CLEARED AREA THAT STRETCHED THE full length of the
walled grounds behind Kleippur's residence, the Carthogian infantry sergeant lay
prone with a captured Waskorian projectile hurier fitted snugly against his
shoulder and one arm partly extended to support its length. He sighted along its
top tube at the first of the red disks along the far wall, aimed carefully, and
squeezed the small firing lever with a finger of his other hand. The hurier
barked and kicked vigorously, and in the same instant most of the red disk at
the far end of the grounds disappeared. The sergeant repeated the process
rapidly while Kleippur and Dornvald watched grimly with a small group of
Carthogian officers and military advisers. In short order, a small ice boulder
exploded; a piece of outer wall cut from an organic building disintegrated into
pulp; and two sets of standard-issue Carthogian body armor mounted on full-size
dummies at the end of the line were reduced to shreds. Dornvald signaled to the
far end of the grounds, and soldiers who had been standing well back from the
line of fire moved forward to collect the target plates.
"There can be no protection against this," Lofbayel whispered to Thirg, who was
looking on numbly. "Those soldiers were doomed from the moment they set out to
pursue the Waskorians. The outcome was a foregone conclusion."
"Truly," Thirg agreed. "Just as Horazzorgio and the Kroaxians were doomed from
the moment they chose to set foot in the Meracasine. And now the whole of
Carthogia is surely doomed."
Lumian weapons such as these which a Carthogian raiding party led by Dornvald
had seized deep inside Waskorian territory, had been the cause of the disasters
that had befallen the Carthogians recently in rapid succession. A routine border
patrol had failed to return, and the force sent to look for it had been almost
annihilated in a Waskorian ambush. Then the Waskorians had attacked a border
fort which fell after putting up a stiff fight. A small band of survivors
escaped and managed to join up with a relief column advancing from Menassim
under the command of a General Yemblayen. Kleippur had ordered Yemblayen to halt
and avoid further engagements until the reason for the sudden Waskorian
invincibility was better understood.
The most worrisome aspect of the unexpected Waskorian successes was that the
Lumian weapons must have come from the Kroaxians, with whom the Lumians were
known to have made contact. If the Waskorians were taking over the border zone
as preparation for an all-out invasion from Kroaxia, and if the whole of the
regular Kroaxian army had been equipped, with firepower as devastating as that
being demonstrated behind Kleippur's residence, then Carthogia wouldn't last
another bright. Kleippur's social experiment would be over; night would fall
over an Age of Reason that had barely begun to dawn; and everything that Thirg
and Lofbayel had sought to escape would ensnare them once again.
"What is your opinion, Pellimiades?" Kleippur asked the technical advisor, who
was examining another sample of Waskorian weaponry with an artisan's keen eye.
Pellimiades shook his head dubiously. "Such detail and precision are only to be
found growing naturally upon this world," he replied. "No work of any craftsman
that I have seen, nor any of which I have heard tell, could remotely approach
it. If this is Lumian workmanship, then the Lumians could well be lifemakers
indeed."
"You can offer no imitation, however crude, nor any other means by which our
soldiers might hope to compete on equal terms?" Dornvald asked.
Pellimiades shook his head again. "None, General."
Two soldiers arrived at a run from the far end of the grounds and presented four
target plates. The first had the center of its red disk completely blown away;
the second was torn into a tight cluster of overlapping holes offset to one side
of the disk; the third was peppered with a pattern of more widely scattered
holes; and the fourth was much like the first. Kleippur drew a long, heavy
intake over his coolant vanes and shook his head gravely. "We have no choice,"
he said. "Our only chance is to accept the terms which the Merehant-Lumians
offered us originally. If we cannot supply comparable armaments of our own, then
we must obtain theirs; and if taming forests for Lumians is the price we must
pay, then so be it. This has become a matter of survival." He turned to
Lyokanor, the army's senior intelligence officer. "Assemble the Cabinet to agree
what shall be the form of our message. We will convey it to the Lumian merchant
princes by way of the inquirers who still occupy the Lumian camp."
"At o
nce, sir," Lyokanor replied and hurried away.
"We will proceed to the Council Chamber and await the others there," Kleippur
said. "Our first task must be to arm every able-bodied citizen as best we can in
case the Kroaxians invade, and to agree on tactics for holding out until we
begin receiving Lumian aid. The times ahead will be hard ones, I fear."
Thirg felt dejected as he and Lofbayel followed the rest of the party across the
rear courtyard toward the house. Kleippur, with his usual pragmatic acceptance,
was devoting his efforts to making the best of the situation as it existed and
not wasting time and energy on futile accusations or complaints. But it was
Thirg who had persuaded him that the Wearer was sincere, and who had talked him
into heeding the Wearer's treacherous words. It was clear now that the whole
episode involving the Wearer had been a Lumian ploy to keep Carthogia
unsuspecting and inactive while negotiations were concluded with Kroaxia, the
start of a process that would eventually bring all the robeing nations under the
Lumian heel. The Lumian strategy to attain that goal had been cold, calculated,
ruthless, and efficient, and its implementation seemed so practiced that
Kleippur suspected the whole technique to have been perfected long ago—used,
perhaps, for the enslavement of dozens, or even dozen-dozens, of worlds. But
whatever the truth of that, there could be no stopping the process now. Better a
slave state than no state at all—the main task now was to ensure the survival of
Carthogia.
Worst of all, Thirg had placed all his personal trust in the Wearer and had no
alternative now but to admit that he had been betrayed cruelly. That bewildered
him the most. He had never been more sure of anything in his life than of the
special relationship which he had thought he and the Wearer shared—a
relationship based on a mutual understanding of the power of mind and reason
that transcended differences in language, race, form, and even world of origin.
Each had recognized a common quality in the other that reduced all their
differences, striking as they seemed at first glance, to no more than trifling
superficialities, indicating—or so Thirg had hoped—the existence of a bond that
could unite all the unknown forms of life and mind that existed across the
countless worlds above the sky. Truly inquiring minds everywhere had more in
