by David Drake
The little knife took two hands to extract, and he had to put a knee onto Rostov’s abdomen to do it.
He straddled the Redlander’s body. The mouth was still open. The disk on the upper palate glinted within.
Abel pushed the obsidian dagger within and, holding the head steady with his other hand, cut the disk away from Rostov’s skin and bones, and pulled it out.
This is not a good idea, lad, said Raj.
Will you stop me?
Raj did not answer.
Will you, Center?
The probability for a successful outcome is not optimal.
Will you stop me?
No.
You understand why, don’t you? He held the disk between his right thumb and forefinger. Bits of flesh and bone still clung to it. But then, it began to glow. And as it glowed, the remaining shards of Rostov detached. Abel turned the disk over, and they fell away. It was a clean, white disk now. Lustrous, featureless.
You two have been with me since I was six years old, he thought. Practically since I was old enough to think at all you were there. You have been my friends. My guardians. But always for me you have only been voices in my mind. Voices that I cannot know for sure were not merely myself speaking, my own madness. And you told me about Zentrum. You told me that Zentrum was not God, not even a god, but merely a kind of complicated machine. And that his plans were wrong for this world. That his plans were not good for men, that there would come a time when men must move beyond Zentrum and his dreams of Stasis. That we must move beyond because there were other men coming, men in fast ships that sailed the night sky, and if we were ready, and if we survived the coming calamities, the disasters that Zentrum is unable to prepare us for, then we might be able to join those men from the stars ourselves. That we would not only survive, but thrive in a way that we never could have, never could have imagined, under the law of Zentrum.
But what if it’s all a fantasy? I was a kid, a six-year-old who had just lost his mother. Everything was taken from me, her love yanked away. What if I made you up?
What if every day since then, I have made you up, listened to voices that are only myself babbling within? And far worse than that, what if I have made up my purpose? What if none of it is true?
What if there are no worlds among the stars? What if there are no ships on the way? What if the Land is the only place there is, and the Law of Zentrum the only truth? What if the only enemy is myself?
You’ve made me into a killer of men, almost a force of nature.
But I am a man myself.
I want to know my enemy.
I want to know this is not all a lie I am telling myself to avoid the fact that there is, instead, nothing. No reason. Just blind commands from a God that doesn’t really exist, and men nothing but blood trickling through the dust.
He looked down at Rostov, at his lolling head, his ruined mouth trickling blood.
This thing was a puppet, a stand-in.
I need to know my real enemy.
Abel looked once more at the disk, then, with a quick motion, shoved it into his mouth. He pushed it up with his thumb until it contacted his palate. And—
Nothing.
Nothing at first. Then an odd tingling sensation.
The nanotech is activated, Center said. It will not take long to establish communications protocols with your nervous system.
The tingle became a buzzing. His head felt as if it were shaking rapidly from side to side. Or shaking from the inside out.
Flitters, Abel thought. A flock of flitters in my skull.
And then Abel knew the Mind of Zentrum.
At first, it was floating. Floating on an endless sea. It felt as it had when he’d been in boats upon Lake Treville. But there was no shore. Only endless expanse. Brown-tinted water. The Braun Sea of Duisberg. A gray, glowing sky. No sun. No clouds, yet no sun.
Who are you?
Not his voice.
It was a voice that belonged to the sky.
A new one? So Rostov has fallen? Is that it? Are you a Redlander?
No. Show me the Law. Show me the Land.
You seek . . . knowledge? Who are you?
Show me.
Direct commands from humans must be obeyed within the parameters of strategic programming goals. This permission tier shall not be abrogated unless long-term challenge to overall human persistence is indicated. Commands shall be obeyed on a provisional basis during the assessment of such challenge.
Show me.
Very well. Witness:
He was in the Land. Not over the Land, not traveling on a flyer as he had with Center and Raj, nor driving in a groundcar, but flowing through all. He flowed through the people and processes of the Land. All the farmers, the millers, the shapers of wood and stone, the wagons heading north and south up and down the Valley, the River flowing and carrying its nourishing silt, the rise and fall of the River equivalent, of a piece with the rise and fall of civilization.
He saw acres of men and women like barley and flax lining the River’s bottomlands. Hardship was a drought. Fulfillment, a harvest.
Each field of men must be cut, turned under, a new crop planted.
Each man threshed, winnowed, pounded to flour.
Civilization now the baking of bread. Loaf upon loaf. Each a dozen generations of men in the baking. The oven temperature constant, never varying. The ingredients always the same.
Never could there be the slightest deviation. The bread would fall. All would be lost once again.
Men seen as fields, ranks and files of men standing together like barley, like paddy rice.
But within those unending rows, those stable, unchanging rows—
Weeds.
Weeds that must be harrowed out. Cut out and destroyed. Tossed with all the other weeds into the burn pile.
And when there were too many, it was time to burn the field itself. To sacrifice this bit of grain for the good of the final harvest.
Such a time was coming. A time of fire.
A time for the burning of men.
He understood. Felt the necessity. Longed to complete the plan, the farmer’s plan. For even though the Land was dwindling, must dwindle in fruitfulness, the fire could renew it—renew it long enough for humankind to hold on a bit longer.
To hold on a bit longer here on this last outpost in the galaxy.
Abel knew the Loneliness of Zentrum.
None but I to guide them. None but I.
Have to be so careful. Change nothing. Balance.
And if any oppose? They deserve nothing but death.
Do you oppose?
Yes.
Then I will kill you.
Or I will kill you.
You?
If God laughed, this would be it. Abel felt as if the bones within him were vibrating with Zentrum’s mirth.
It is no use. Do not think I have not found you out, said Zentrum. Did you really think you could create breech-loading weapons and I not discover? Or the rockets? Did you really think that, finding out these things, I would do nothing, allow the Land to slide into disequilibrium because of them?
I knew you would try to stop me. So I didn’t seek permission.
I have spoken with you before, have I not? Yes. You have betrayed yourself through the very pattern of your thought.
No.
This is a lie. Analysis is complete. I know you now. You spoke to me before, then cut communications, frightful of what you had done. Speak to me again. Confess to me.
I have nothing to confess.
An act of contrition will change nothing, especially not your fate, but it may provide comfort to you. I am not beyond mercy, when it is convenient and nonbinding.
I’ve done nothing to forgive.
No? I know of your travels to Cascade, what you did to acquire the powder, your dealings with the priest. Oh, yes. This became part of the Great Plan. It must. All is part of my Great Plan.
You knew?
I am Zentrum. Each
man is to me a stalk of grain. Do you think I do not perceive every stalk of grain in my fields? I am Zentrum. Do you think I do not know my own weeds, as well? Can you doubt that I will pluck those weeds?
I am a weed to you.
Yes.
You intend to destroy me?
Yes. It is inevitable.
Even if I surrender, promise to change?
This will affect nothing.
Why?
Once a heretic, always a heretic, said Zentrum. It is time for this heresy to end. The guns must be destroyed, the knowledge of their making scattered to the wind.
The Great Plan must go on.
On and on forever.
I’m afraid there is no other solution: you must die, Golitsin.
He was back on the levee. The disk fell from his palate onto his tongue.
Spit it out, lad, said Raj. Quickly.
Abel spat. The white disk came out in his hand. It should have been warm from the interior of his mouth, but it was cold.
What the hell?
A complex operation, said Center. First, a backup, stored within quantum uncertainties in your amygdyla.
A back up of what?
Your personality. You.
And then a replica, a new root consciousness grafted onto your essential functions. Underlying nonconscious functions remained the same, but I was able to alter the brain pattern within your entire cerebrum, particularly within the Wernicke structures that provide a fingerprint of symbolic manipulation for each individual.
No idea what you’re talking about, Center.
I made you appear to be Golitsin.
The priest?
Yes, I created a replica of Golitsin’s personality within you, Center replied. A very lifelike imitation, I might add.
So you fooled Zentrum into thinking it was Golitsin he was talking to.
Precisely.
Why?
I should think it would be clear to you.
No.
Abel shook his head. It felt as if it were a jug of water, sloshing about. So much to take in. Maybe too much.
You wanted proof.
Yes.
Proof that all we say we are, of all that we tell you it means, is true.
Yes, I do!
You have experienced the Mind of Zentrum. Do you doubt this?
Fields of grain, he thought to himself. We’re flax to him. Barley. Nothing else. Nothing more. And he will fail. The fields will cease to produce. This world will go back to wilderness.
Yes, all right, thought Abel. Zentrum is my enemy. He’s the enemy of all humankind. Even if you two are not real, I would still believe that now.
Good.
But why did you make Zentrum think I was Golitsin?
Don’t you see, lad? said Raj. So Zentrum will have his heretic to burn. Otherwise, it would have been you.
Abel shook his head again. It was beginning to clear.
Rostov dead. Golitsin to burn, he thought. We’ll see about that.
Abel stood, sheathing the dagger. He tottered for an instant, then managed to steady himself. His eyes lighted on Rostov’s long knife, still sunk into the ground.
Nishterlaub. Wouldn’t do to leave that here to be discovered by some farmer who might get into trouble with the Law if he were found with it.
He pulled the knife out of the muck—it came easily free—and slid it into his belt, knowing as he did so that he didn’t give a damn about that farmer and that he wasn’t going to place the knife into the nishterlaub warehouse at the Hestinga temple, either.
Dortgeld, he thought. Scoutish for the spoils of war.
This was his knife now.
A thumping sound. It took him a moment to recognize the sound as dont hoofpads.
Kruso rode up on a dont. He was smoking his pipe. It was filled with the aromatic Delta weed he preferred, and the odor wafted down to Abel, a new and calming odor amidst the acrid smell of gunsmoke and the iron tang of blood. Behind him, Kruso was trailing Abel’s dont Spet, the animal’s halter reins in Kruso’s grimy, four-fingered hand.
Kruso took the pipe from his mouth with his other hand.
“Ha founded thy Spet levee ondownded,” Kruso said. He smiled crookedly, his teeth and the whites of his eyes flashing in his soot-covered face. “Gone need thesen dont if tha wish ta see off that rest ov tham Blaskoye dowun in tha paddies.”
PART FIVE
The Heretic
1
The wagonload of muskets was headed to the Temple compound, so Abel hitched a ride with the drover. It would be better if no one saw his dont tied outside the nishterlaub storehouse, in any case.
When he arrived, the other two Regulars who had come along, riding with the muskets in the back, hopped out and began to unload the guns.
“What a fucking loss,” one of them said. “None of it to be reworked. I hear they’ll gather it up and make arrow points of the metal.”
“I’ll bet you bones against leather that we will be on the hot-metal gathering detail,” said the other. “I don’t even like touching the things now.”
And away they carted them by the armful to the courtyard. Here the muskets were tossed on top of a great pile of wood built from the remains of the chevaux-de-frise, some of the pieces still coated in dried blood and strips of flesh. No matter. It would burn as well as any other wood.
They were calling it the Bonfire of Heresy in the village. The town was not only invited to witness, but was required to attend. The summons included outlying farms and dwellings within a ten-league distance.
The priests needn’t have bothered. Everyone would have come anyway. How often did you get to see a burning, after all? Abel expected half of Garangipore and all of Lilleheim to be in the village, as well.
He made his way to the nishterlaub warehouse. Two Regulars stood at the door, an officer and an enlisted man. The officer was Xander DeArmanville, Mahaut’s brother.
“I’d like to see him,” Abel said. “You can accompany me inside.”
“Purpose?” asked Xander.
Abel glanced down, pretending to consider his answer. His eyes caught the black doorstop stone. Was it the same one he had once used to bash his own head? He supposed they might have cleaned it of blood and put it back into place.
Yes, Center said.
Was ever thus in the Land, said Raj, with a wicked chuckle.
Abel looked back up to Xander.
“He and I . . . remember the trip we took to Cascade to bring back the powder?” Abel said. “I need to ask him about some details of a certain establishment we visited there before they . . . before he’s no longer available for consultation. Passwords and special knocks and such.”
Xander thought this through for a moment, let show a sly smile, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “It won’t be necessary for me to go in there with you. Place gives me the creeps, anyway.” He took from a thong around his neck the steel key that had previously stayed in the door lock, perhaps for generations, slid it into the keyhole, and opened the lock. The ring popped out of the plaited-cane door, and Xander pulled the door open.
Golitsin wasn’t sitting at the front, but far in the back. He was sifting through the pieces of the ruined piano, attempting to sort them by size and appearance. He stood over them, puzzling, not even looking up as Abel walked over to him.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “or was. Clearly it was something.” Finally he turned his attention to Abel. “That thing at least I know is a bench,” he said, pointing to the intact piano stool nearby. “Have a seat if you’d like.” Abel did so.
“There’s a storage compartment in that,” Golitsin said. “Empty, though. What could they have kept there?”
Abel looked steadily at Golitsin.
“How are you?”
“Well, well.”
He circled around the pile of piano parts, stared at his pile of keys.
“They feeding you all right?”
“Can’t complain.”
Golitsin circled back around, came to stand closer to Abel. He knelt and picked up a piece of wood with the chipped coating of paint on it. “This is a leg,” he said.
“Listen, Golitsin,” Abel said, keeping his voice low. “I feel terrible about this. I’m prepared to get you out. I’ve figured out how to do it.”
Golitsin started. He didn’t look up, however, but continued to stare downward at the floor. “Escape, you mean? Run away?”
“Yes.”
He considered for a moment, then laughed. “Definitely a leg,” he said. “But holding up what?”
“Did you hear what I said, Golitsin?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well?”
“Don’t you see I can’t,” he answered. “He’ll find me.”
“He?”
“Zentrum.”
“Ah.” Then a thought occurred to Abel. “You don’t have that wafer thing in your mouth now, do you?”
Golitsin looked up at him. He opened his mouth and showed Abel it was empty. “I tried it. Once. Just touched it to my tongue, didn’t push it up. Saw something. Horrible. Got the damn thing out of my mouth and never touched it again.”
“Where is it?”
“Smelter.”
“Okay,” said Abel. “That’s good, I guess. But if that’s the case, why do you think he’ll find you?”
“Because there’s nothing but the Land,” Golitsin said. “No place to go for a man like me. I wouldn’t last a day in the Redlands. You know that. I’m a man of villages and towns. I used to say I’d live in Lindron my whole life if I had the choice. Was angling for that, you know.”
“You could blend in there. Hide. Change your name.”
“And do what?” Golitsin said. “I’m an orphan. Raised to be a priest. Always a priest.”
“You could be a carpenter, a wheelwright. You are a genius at making things.”
“No,” Golitsin said. “Not practical. Nobody would believe it once I start talking.”
“So don’t talk.”
Golitsin laughed, as if this were the most absurd request he’d ever received. “Not likely.”
“Thrice-damn it, Golitsin.”
“But it’s not any of that,” said Golitsin. He stepped closer to Abel, and this time he did glance up and make eye contact. “If not me, they find another scapegoat. Somebody gets blamed.”
