Lake of the Long Sun tbotls-2

by Gene Wolfe

  Silk swallowed. "I see."

  "Remember those we chased off? They'll be back as soon as we're out of here. We'll hear them laughing and fighting over the good parts."

  Sand had halted some distance ahead. He called, "Hurry it up, Corporal."

  Silk, who was already walking as fast as he could, tried to go faster still; Hammerstone murmured, "Don't worry about that, he does it all day. That's how you get stripes."

  They had almost reached Sand before Silk realized that the shapeless gray bundle at Sand's feet was a human being. Sand pointed with his slug gun. "Have a look, Patera. Maybe you knew him."

  Silk knelt beside the body and lifted one mangled hand, then tried to scrape the caked ash away from the place where a face should have been; there were only shreds of flesh and splinters of bone beneath it. "It's gone!" he exclaimed.

  "Gods can do that. They tear the whole thing off with one bite, the way I'd pull off my faceplate, or maybe you'd bite into a ... What do you call those things?"

  Silk rose, rubbing his hands in a desperate effort to get them clean. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."

  "The round red things from the trees. Apples, that's it. Aren't you going to bless him or something?" "Bring him the Pardon of Pas, you mean. We can do that only before death is complete-before the last cells of the body die, technically. Did you kill him?"

  Sand shook his head. "I won't lie to you, Patera. If we'd seen him and yelled for him to halt, and he had run, we would've shot him. But we didn't. He had a lantern, it's over there someplace. And a needler. I've got that now. So he probably figured he'd be all right. But there must have been gods hanging around here like there always are. It's always pretty dark here, too, because ash gets on the lights. Maybe his lantern blew out, or maybe the gods got extra hungry and rushed him."

  Hammerstone grunted his assent. "This isn't a good place for bios, Patera, like the sergeant said."

  "He should be buried at least," Silk told them. "I'll do it, if you'll let me."

  "If you were to bury him in these ashes, the gods would dig him up as soon as we were gone," Sand said.

  "You could carry him. I've heard that you soldiers are a great deal stronger than we are."

  "I could make you carry him, too," Sand told Silk, "but I'm not going to do that, either." He turned and strode away.

  Hammerstone followed him, calling over his shoulder, "Get going, Patera. You can't help her now, and neither can we."

  Suddenly fearful of being left behind, Silk broke into a limping trot. "Didn't you say it was a man?"

  "The sergeant did, maybe. I went through her pockets, and she seemed like a woman in man's clothes."

  Half to himself, Silk said, "There was someone in front of me on the Pilgrims' Way, only about half an hour ahead of me then. I stopped and slept awhile-I really can't say how long. She didn't, I suppose."

  Hammcrstonc threw back his head in a grin. "My last nap was seventy-four years, they tell me. Back at Division, I could show you a couple hundred replacements that haven't ever been awake. Some of you bios, too."

  Recalling the words Mucor had spoken in his dream, Silk said, "Please do. I'd like very much to see them, my son." "Get a move on, then. The major may want to lock you up. We'll see."

  Silk nodded, but stopped for a moment to look behind him. The nameless corpse was merely a shapeless bundle again, its identity-even its identity as the mortal remains of a human being-lost in the darkness that had rushed back even faster than the misshapen animals the soldiers called gods. Silk thought of Patera Pike's death, alone in the bedroom next to his own, an old man's peaceful death, a silent and uncontested cessation of breath. Even that had seemed terrible; how much worse, how unspeakably horrible, to die in this buried maze of darkness and decay, these wormholes in the whorl.

  Chapter 9. IN DREAMS LIKE DEATH

  "Patera Silk went this way?" Auk asked the night chough on his shoulder. "Yes, yes!" Oreb fluttered urgently. "From here! Go shrine!"

  "Well, I'm not going," Chenille told them.

  An old woman who happened to be passing the first white stone that marked the Pilgrims' Way ventured timidly, "Hardly anyone goes out there after dark, dear, and it will be dark soon."

  "Dark good," Oreb announced with unshakable conviction. "Day bad. Sleep."

  The old woman tittered.

  "A friend of ours went out to the shrine earlier," Auk explained. "He hasn't come back."

  "Oh, my! Cenille asked, "Is there something out there that eats people? This crazy bird says the shrine ate him."

  The old woman smiled, her face breaking into a thousand cheerful creases. "Oh, no, dear. But you can fall. People do almost every year."

  "See?" Chenille shrilled. "You can hike half to shaggy Hierax through those godforsaken rocks if you want to. I'm going back to Orchid's."

  Auk caught her wrist and twisted her arm until she fell to her knees.

  Awed, Silk stared up at the banked racks of gray steel. Half, perhaps, were empty; the remainder held soldiers, each lying on his back with his arms at his sides, as if sleeping or dead.

  "Back when this place was built, it was under the lake," Corporal Hammerstone told Silk conversationally. "No going straight down if somebody wanted to take it, see? And pretty tough to figure out exactly where it was. They'd have to come quite a ways through the tunnels, and there's places where twenty tinpots could stand off an army."

  Silk nodded absently, still mesmerized by the recumbent soldiers.

  "You'd think the water'd leak inside here, but it didn't. There's lots of solid rock up there. We got four big pumps to send it back if it did, and three of them haven't ever run. I was pretty surprised to find out the lake had gone over the hill on us when I woke up, but it'd still be a dirty job to take this place. I wouldn't want to be one of them."

  "You slept here like this for seventy-five years?" Silk asked him.

  "Seventy-four, the last time. All these been awake some time, like me. But if you want to keep going, I'll show you some that never was yet. Come on."

  Silk followed him. "There must be thousands."

  "About seven thousand of us left now. The way he set it up, see, when we come here from the Short Sun, was for all the cities to be independent. Pas figured that if somebody had too much territory, he'd try to take over Mainframe, the superbrain that astrogates and runs the ship."

  Somewhat confused, Silk asked, "Do you mean the whole whorl?"

  "Yeah, right. The Whorl. So what he did, see-if you ask me, this was pretty smart-was to give every city a heavy infantry division, twelve thousand tinpots. For a big offensive you want armor and air and armored infantry and all that junk. But for defense, heavy infantry and lots of it. Bust the Whorl up into a couple of hundred cities, give each of them a division to defend it, and the whole thing ought to stay put, no matter what some crazy calde someplace tries to do. So far it's held for three hundred years, and like I said, we've still got over half our strength fit for duty."

  Silk was happy to be able to contribute some information of his own. "Viron doesn't have a calde anymore." "Yeah, right." Hammerstone sounded uneasy. "I heard. It's kind of a shag-up, because standing orders say that's who we're supposed to get our orders from. The major says we got to obey the Ayuntamiento for now, but nobody really likes it much. You know about standing orders, Patera?"

  "Not really." Silk had lagged behind him to count the levels in a rack: twenty. "Sand said something about them, I think."

  "You've got them too," Hammerstone told him. "Watch this."

  He aimed a vicious left cross at Silk's face. Silk's hands flew up to protect it, but the oversized steel fist stopped a finger's width short of them.

  "See that? Your standing orders say your hands got to protect your clock, just like ours say we've got to protect Viron. You can't change them or get rid of them, even if maybe somebody else could do it by messing around inside of your head."

  "A need to worship is another of those standing or
ders," Silk told the soldier slowly. "It is innate in man that he cannot help wanting to thank the immortal gods, who give him all that he possesses, even life. You and your sergeant saw fit to disparage our sacrifices, and I will very willingly grant that they're pitifully inadequate. Yet they satisfy, to a considerable degree, that otherwise unmet need, for the community as well as for many individuals."

  Hammerstone shook his head. "It's pretty hard for me to picture Pas biting into a dead goat, Patera."

  "But is it hard for you to picture him being made happy, in a very minor fashion, by that concrete evidence that we have not forgotten him? That we-even the people of my own quarter, who are so poor-are eager to share such food as we have with him?"

  "No, I can see that all right."

  "Then we have nothing to argue about," Silk told him, "because that is what I see, too, applied not only to Pas but to all the other gods, the remaining gods of the Nine, the Outsider, and all the minor deities."

  Hammerstone stopped and turned to face Silk, his massive body practically blocking the aisle. "You know what I think you're doing now, Patera?"

  Silk, who had finished speaking before he fully realized what he had said-that he had just refused to number the Outsider among the minor gods-felt certain he was about to be charged with heresy. He could only mumble, "No. I've no idea."

  "I think you're practicing what you're going to tell the brass on me. How you're going to try to get them to let you go. Maybe you don't know it, but I think that's what it is."

  "Perhaps I was trying to justify myself," Silk conceded with an immense sense of relief, "but that doesn't show what I said to be false, nor does it prove me insincere in saying it."

  "I guess not."

  "Do you believe that they will?"

  "I dunno. Patera. Neither does Sand." Hammerstone threw back his head in a grin. "That's why he's letting me show you around like this, see? If he'd of been sure the brass would turn you loose, he'd of turned you loose himself and not said nothing. Or if he was sure they'd lock you up, he'd have you locked up right now, sitting in the dark in a certain room we got, with maybe a swell bottle of water 'cause he likes you. But you were talking about how we had to send for your advocate, and Sand's not sure what the major's going to say, so he let you clean up a little and he's treating you nice while I keep an eye on you." "He allowed me to keep my needler as well-or rather, the one a kind friend lent me, which was very good of him." Silk hesitated, and when he spoke again did so only because his conscience demanded it. "Perhaps I shouldn't say this, my son, but haven't you told me a great deal that a spy would wish to know? I'm not a spy but a loyal citizen, as I said earlier; and because I am, it disturbs me that an actual spy could learn some of the things I have. That our army numbers seven thousand, for example."

  Hammerstone leaned against a rack. "Don't overheat. If I was just some dummy, you think I'd be awake pulling C.Q.? All that I've told you is that taking this place would be holy corrosion. Let the spies go back home and tell their bosses that. Viron don't care. And I've notjust told you, I'm flat showing you, that Viron's got seven thousand tinpots it can call on any day of the week. No other city in this part of the Whorl's got more than half that, from what we hear. So they better leave Viron alone, and if Viron says spit oil, they better spit far."

  "Then the things you've told me should not endanger me further?" Silk asked.

  "Not a drip. Still want to see the replacements?"

  "Certainly, if you're still willing to show them to me. May I ask why you're concerned about spies at all, when you don't object to someone who might be a spy-I repeat that I am not-touring this facility?"

  "Because this isn't what the spies are looking for. If it was, we'd just trot them around and send them back. What they want to know is where our government's got to."

  Silk looked at him inquiringly. "Where the Ayuntamiento meets?"

  "For now, yeah." "It would seem to me that it would be even more heavily defended than this headquarters is. If so, what would be the point?"

  "It is," Hammerstone told him, "only not the same way. If it was, that would make it easy to spot. You've seen me and you've seen the sergeant. You figure we're real tough metal, Patera?"

  "Very much so."

  Hammerstone lifted a most impressive fist. "Think you might whip me?" "Of course not. I'm well aware that you could kill me very quickly, if you wished."

  "Maybe you know a bio that you think could do it?"

  Silk shook his head. "The most formidable bio I know is my friend Auk. Auk's somewhat taller than I am, and a good deal more strongly built. He's an experienced fighter, too; but you would defeat him with ease, I'm sure."

  "In a fistfight? You bet I would. I'd break his jaw with my first punch. And you remember this." Hammerstone pointed to the bright scratch left by Hyacinth's needler on his camouflaged chest. "But what about if we both had slug guns?"

  Diplomatically, Silk ventured, "I don't believe that Auk owns one."

  "Supposing Viron hands him one with a box of ammo."

  "In that case, I would imagine that it would be largely a matter of luck."

  "Does this Auk that you know have many friends besides you, Patera?"

  "I'm sure he must. There's a man named Gib-a larger man even than Auk, now that I come to think of it. And one of our sibyls is certainly Auk's friend."

  "We'll leave her out. Suppose I had to fight you and Auk and this other bio Gib, and all three of you had slug guns."

  Still anxious not to offend. Silk said, "I would think that any outcome would be possible."

  Hammerstone straightened up and took a step toward Silk, looming above him. "You're right. Maybe I'd kill all three of you, or maybe you'd kill me and never get a scratch doing it. But what would you say's most likely? I'm telling you right now that if you lie to me, I'm not going to be as nice to you as I been up till now, and you best think some about that before you answer. So what about it? The three of you against me, and we've all got guns."

  Silk shrugged. "If you wish. I certainly don't know a great deal about fighting, but it would seem to me probable that you would kill one or two of us, but that you would be killed yourself-in the process, so to speak."

  Hammerstone threw back his head in another grin. "You don't scare easy, do you, Patera?"

  "On the contrary, I'm a rather timid man. I was quite frightened when I said that-as I still am-but it was what you had asked me for, the truth."

  "How many bios in Viron, Patera?"

  "I don't know. "Silk paused, stroking his cheek. "What an interesting question! I've never actually thought about it."

  "You're a smart man, I've seen that already, and it's been a long time since I spent much time in the city. How many would you say?"

  Silk continued to stroke his cheek. "Ideally we-the Chapter, I mean-would like to have a manteion for each five thousand residents, and these days nearly all of those residents would be bios-there are a few chems left, of course, but the number is probably less than one in twenty. I believe that there are a hundred and seventeen manteions in current operation. That was the figure, at least, when I was at the schola."

  "Five hundred and fifty-five thousand, seven hundred and fifty," Hammerstone told him. "But the actual ratio is much higher. Certainly over six thousand, and perhaps as high as eight or nine."

  "All right, let's say six thousand bios," Hammerstone decided, "since you sound pretty sure it's more than that. That's seven hundred and two thousand bios. Suppose that half are sprats, all right? And half the rest are females, and not enough of them will fight to make much difference. That leaves a hundred and seventy-five thousand five hundred males. Say half those are too old or too sick, or they run off. That's eighty-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty. You see what I'm getting at, Patera?"

  Bewildered by the deluge of figures, Silk shook his head.

  "You and me said three to one would probably end up with me dead. All right, eighty-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty a
gainst thirty-five hundred tinpots, which is about what we think Wick's got, just to grab a for instance, makes it about twenty-five to one."

  "I believe I'm beginning to understand," Silk said.

  Hammerstone aimed a finger as thick as a crowbar at his face. "That's everybody that'll fight. Take just the Guard. Five brigades?"

  "They're forming a new one," Silk told him, "a reserve brigade, which will make six."

  "Six brigades, with four or maybe five thousand troopers in each of them. So what matters if there's a new war soon, Patera? Us tinpots, or the Ayuntamiento, that gives the Guard its orders and could pass out slug guns to half the bios in Viron if it wanted to?"

  Lost in thought, Silk did not reply.

  "You know now, Patera, and so do we. These days we're an elite corps, where we used to be the whole show. Come on, I want to show you those replacements."

  At the back of that wide and lofty arsenal, in the racks nearest the rear wall, lay soldiers swaddled in dirty sheets of polymer, their limbs smeared with some glutinous brownish black preservative. Full of wonder, Silk stooped to examine the nearest, blowing at the dust and cobwebs, and (when that proved insufficient) wiping them away with his sleeve. "One company," Hammerstone announced with casual pride, "still exactly like they came out of Final Assembly."

  "He's never spoken a word, or ... or sat up and looked around? Not in three hundred years?"

  "A little longer than that. They were stockpiling us for maybe twenty years before we ever went on board." This man had come into being at about the same time as Maytera Marble, Silk reflected-had come to be at the same time that Hammerstone himself had, for that matter. Now she was old and worn and not far from death; but Hammerstone was still young and strong, and this man still unborn.

  "We could wake him up right now," Hammerstone explained, "just yell in his ear a little and beat on his chest. Don't do it though."