“Such as?”
“The city’s changing,” said Steck. “Haven’t you noticed?”
Karsman looked at the gray towers that loomed over them. As far as he could tell, they looked the same as ever.
“That tower there—Sixteen,” said Steck. “It was always shorter than the Twins. Now look at it.”
Karsman frowned. The skyline of the city was so familiar that he had long ago ceased to pay any attention to it. Yet now that he thought about it, Steck might be right. The flattened rhomboid of the tower seemed more elongated than he remembered, and the stubby spire that crowned it now definitely rose above the tops of its neighbors. Near the top were a cluster of projecting vanes that seemed unfamiliar.
“Twenty-Four’s changed, too. I’ve been working on a piece up there. When I came back yesterday morning it had rotated a quarter-turn to the right. Some of the others are showing new lights, but Three and Six have gone dark.” Steck gestured toward the tops of the tallest buildings. “Even the mist up there is different,” he said.
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . different.” He hesitated. “Do you think the soldiers are doing this?”
“Maybe,” said Karsman. It seemed reasonable. The city had been stable for as long as he could remember. If it had begun to change now, just as the soldiers arrived, it was probably not a coincidence.
“Do you think they’re Builders?” Steck asked.
Karsman considered the idea. The Builders were always thought of as godlike beings, remote and inscrutable. All anyone knew of them was that they had made the Road and the cities and then, so far as anyone could tell, vanished utterly.
Popular belief was full of theories about them, of course. Some people thought the Builders were the servants of the Nine Gods and that the cities were palaces built for the deities. But if that were the case, then taking apart the towers for scrap would be sacrilege of the most heinous kind. Given that the Muljaddy actually encouraged people to scavenge the ruins, that couldn’t be the case. Maybe the Builders were not servants but enemies of the gods. The matter remained a mystery. The Muljaddy themselves had declined, as far as Karsman knew, to issue any unambiguous declaration on the subject.
As a child, Karsman had never worried too much about the details. Later, when he traveled off-world, he learned that the universe was filled with cooperating or competing Powers. Powers were of many different kinds: post-humans, the evolved artificial minds known as Intelligences, and strange hybrids of the two. Even if they weren’t gods in the strictest sense of the word, they possessed abilities that far surpassed those of mere humans. Clearly, the Builders must have been such a Power.
If so, they were simply one among many. No one Karsman met could tell him who the Builders really were or why they had made the Road, but the galaxy turned out to be littered with artifacts made by one faction or another. The Road was just one more. For all Karsman knew, it might have been something that the Builders had thrown together in the same way a man might put up a plastic-board shack, slotting the prefabricated pieces together to have somewhere to sleep for a few nights and then abandoning it without a second thought when it was no longer needed.
He did not talk about any of this with his neighbors. Even Steck, to whom Karsman had confided a little about his past, had struggled with the idea that the universe was home not to nine gods but to nine thousand or more. In any case, the distinction between an actual god and a being that merely possessed godlike powers was too subtle for him. If an Intelligence could fly between stars as quick as thought, conjure up vast structures, and create whole races of novel living things to do its work, even reshape whole planets, who was Karsman to say that it wasn’t really a god? After a while, Karsman gave up trying to argue the finer points and just let the matter rest.
“No,” Karsman told Steck at last. “I don’t think they’re Builders.”
He could not say for certain why he thought so, but he was sure that he was right. For all their arrogance, there was something furtive about the soldiers. If the Builders came back to reclaim what they had made, everyone would know.
Three men isn’t a return in force, observed Warrior. It isn’t even an invading army. Three men is a commando unit. Whoever they are, whoever they’re working for, they’re operating behind enemy lines.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Temple guards came down the line of the strip-town again early the next day, banging on doors and turning people out into the wind. Karsman came out of his shack to find his neighbors, some only half dressed, being pushed and chivvied into lines by squads of guards who looked almost as ill-tempered as they did.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked the man closest to him.
The man shook his head, one hand held over his eyes to protect them from windblown dust. The guards had turned him out of his home without even giving him time to put on his goggles. “More trouble from those damned off-worlders,” he said. He cleared his throat and spat a mouthful of red dust on the ground at his feet.
“Go get your mask and jacket,” Karsman said.
“But the guards—”
“Get them. I’ll cover for you.”
A flat-truck rolled past. An amplified voice boomed from the cab. “—groups of ten. Anyone who isn’t at the Temple in five doesn’t eat today. Leave your tools behind—you won’t need them. Form into groups of ten—”
It took the guards more than an hour to round up the last of the stragglers, an hour in which the rest of the people of the strip-town stood and grumbled outside the closed gate of the Temple precinct. The wind was warm but fierce, raising streamers of red dust from the dry ground. People huddled in small groups, their heads bowed and shoulders hunched against the blast. Karsman was relieved to see that men and women were once again mingled together. Apparently the soldiers’ project of separating the sexes had been only temporary. He wondered if they had already found the woman they were looking for and, if so, whether they had killed her. No one around him seemed to know.
A little after Morning 8, the great doors at the rear of the Temple opened and the three soldiers emerged. There was no sign of the Muljaddy or its priests. Karsman watched as the three men took up position on the steps, Flet in the middle, the other two standing a few paces behind him on either side. All three wore sidearms openly now.
“Now, listen up,” said Flet. His voice boomed from the speakers mounted on the towers of the Temple. “In a few minutes, we’re going to open the doors. The guards will let you in, ten at a time. Pick up your food, then come back outside. When you’re outside, stay with your group. Everyone understand?”
“What about the service?” someone asked.
“No service today,” Flet said. The announcement caused a ripple of consternation in the crowd. Flet stood with his hands on his hips for a moment, as if assessing the mood of the crowd. “Listen up,” he said again. “New rules. From now on, if you want to eat, you work. Real work. No more turning wheels and muttering prayers. You want a day’s food, you do a day’s work. Everyone understand?”
A woman in the crowd called out something in which Karsman only caught the word “children.”
“Children too young to work eat for free,” Flet said. “Children old enough to work earn their food same as everyone else. Got it?”
There was a sullen murmur from the crowd. A few of the men closest to the Temple steps started to move forward, but the guards took a step toward them, holding their shocksticks in front of them, and the men fell back.
“What kind of work?” called a voice from the crowd.
Flet turned toward the speaker.
“To begin with,” he said, “we’re going to move the Temple.”
* * *
It had been twelve years since the Temple had last moved under its own power. Sand and dust had piled up in deep drifts around its eighteen giant wheels. Tangles of windblown weeds and brush fouled the massive axles.
Karsman spent most of t
he morning working to help dig out one of the wheels and clear away the caked-on laterite deposits clinging to the understructure. By the end of the morning, his back ached from stooping and he had skinned his knuckles almost to the bone on a projecting piece of the motor assembly. If it had not been for the fact that all three soldiers were now visibly armed, he might have added his voice to the sullenly militant faction among the men who were in favor of finishing with the off-worlders once and for all.
At noon, a Temple guard told his group to take a break and collect their midday meal from inside the Temple. When Karsman emerged from the trench where he had been working, he saw that more than half of the great structure had already been dug free. Workers crawled over the sides of the Temple, and a double line of men and women carried buckets of sand and soil away from the site to empty them in the desert.
The interior of the Temple was dark. The stairway to the upper level had been closed off, and the main hall was empty and silent. In the gloom, the statues of the gods glimmered dully, lit only by threads of light that filtered in from the narrow skylights set in the roof of the hall. Even the incense that normally filled the inner spaces of the Temple had faded to almost nothing, replaced by the acrid smell of dust and the musty odor of the distant swamps. There was no sign of the Muljaddy or the priests.
Despite his atheism, Karsman felt a pang of loss. He might not believe in the Muljaddy’s gods, but he liked the peaceful familiarity of the rituals, the sonority of the music and the sermons. The new regime imposed by the soldiers made no attempt to disguise autocracy with the pageantry of religion, but it was no more democratic for that. When it came down to it, Karsman found little reason to prefer the rule of the gun to the rule of the gods.
As he was making his way outside again, holding a plastic tub of noodles in broth and a squeeze bottle of water, someone called his name. He turned and saw that it was the smallest of the three soldiers, the man who had spoken to him in the Temple the day before.
“You’re Karsman, right?” the soldier said.
Karsman nodded.
“They tell me you’re a mechanic. I need something built. Can you do that for me?”
“Depends what it is,” Karsman said.
The soldier beckoned. “Come with me.”
* * *
“How much power is this supposed to carry again?” Karsman said.
“You think you can’t do it?” the soldier said.
“Give me the materials and I can build the coupling. Whether it will hold up is another question.”
They were squatting in a narrow recess at the base of one of the towers, a recess that only moments before had been hidden behind an access panel that Karsman would never even have known was there. From the back wall of the recess protruded a device that the soldier claimed was a power connector. If so, it was bigger than any Karsman had ever seen. He wondered what the soldiers planned to hook up to it.
“It doesn’t need to last forever,” the soldier said. “The facility is self-powering. It just needs a kick to get it going.”
“The facility?”
The soldier made a circular motion with his hand to indicate the city around them.
“The city?” said Karsman.
“This one and all the others.”
Karsman was silent for a moment, absorbing the idea. It had never occurred to him before that all the cities along the Road could be part of an interconnected whole.
“What is it?” he asked.
“An Intelligence,” the soldier said. “Or it was once. And could be again.” He turned his head slightly to look at Karsman’s face. “You know what an Intelligence is,” he said.
“Yes,” said Karsman.
“Interesting.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “What’s your story? You’re not like the others.” He shifted his balance slightly as he spoke. Even without Warrior to point it out for him Karsman recognized the implicit threat in the movement. He was suddenly aware of the way that the cramped recess limited his own freedom of movement. He stared straight ahead, careful not to let his eyes stray to the weapon on the soldier’s hip.
“I lived in the capital,” he said. “I worked for a Muljaddy there.”
“Ah,” the soldier said. He relaxed, apparently satisfied by the explanation.
“So what are you planning to do?” Karsman asked.
The soldier shook his head. “Don’t get curious,” he said. “Remember what I told you before.”
“Don’t get involved,” said Karsman.
“That’s right.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s get you to work. You’ll find the parts and tools you need in the Temple.”
CHAPTER SIX
Karsman was dreaming. In his dream, the loose panel on the side of his shack, the one that always banged when the wind picked up, had finally torn away completely, opening it up to the elements. He could feel the wind blowing across him as he lay in bed, covering him with its payload of fine sand. The sun shone through the opening, bathing the interior with orange light. He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to shut it out.
You have to get up, said a voice in his head.
The voice pulled him out of the dream, but he did not open his eyes. He lay still, feeling the hard surface of his bed under him, the fine grit on his skin.
He became aware that he was still wearing his jacket and coveralls. He must have been so tired the night before that he had fallen into bed without undressing.
Get up, Karsman, said the voice again.
Leave me alone, he told it, and rolled over. Something hard jabbed him in the side.
His eyes flickered open. He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked around him.
At first what he saw made no sense. He lay on a flat gray metal surface, lightly filmed with red dust. Beyond the edge of the metal were layers of color, laid out in diminishing stripes under an orange glow almost too bright to look at.
He pushed himself onto his hands and knees and tried to stand up, but the wind tugged at him and he dropped down again, scrabbling for a handhold on the smooth metal. He pressed himself flat, hardly daring to move.
He lay there for a long moment. Gusts of wind pulled at his jacket. From somewhere above him he heard a dull droning sound that he guessed must be a length of wire or thin metal vibrating in the wind. He closed his eyes, slowly gathering the courage to push himself up and roll over into a sitting position.
The roof of the tower on which he was sitting was a flattened pyramid crowned by a stubby spire made of a black glassy material. The slope of the roof was very gentle, but there was no parapet or railing around it. On hands and knees, he crawled as close to the edge as he dared and found himself looking directly down onto the Road. On the far side, the shacks and warehouses of the strip-town huddled against the base of other towers, reduced to the size of toys by distance. The Road itself was empty, the doors and windows of the houses firmly shuttered. Fine veils of sand blew across the black surface, forming patterns like red lace that swirled for an instant and then disappeared. Nothing else moved.
He raised his eyes and saw the wide swathe of red desert that stretched to darkward, the red slowly fading to a dull ochre as it receded. A band of white fog hovered above the distant horizon and a rift in the clouds showed an orange sky speckled with points of light.
He crawled back up to the summit of the roof and put one arm around the spire. It was warm to the touch, much warmer than it should have been. He could feel a faint vibration through the soles of his boots.
He rested his head against the spire and closed his eyes again.
The last thing that he remembered, he had been working on the connector that the soldier had wanted. Machining the parts that he needed by hand in the settlement’s workshop and then assembling everything under the soldier’s direction had taken him two days. It was pleasantly undemanding work, much better than shoveling dirt underneath the Temple. He did it all in a state something like meditation, letting Artificer guide his hands and make
all the decisions.
Of all his personas, Artificer was the most unassuming and the least problematic. In some ways, Artificer was not properly a persona at all. He never spoke as the others did. He was more like a state of mind, a state of mind in which Karsman instinctively knew what to do. The solutions to mechanical or electrical problems simply suggested themselves, and Karsman’s hands moved smoothly to execute them. Karsman had always had some talent for this type of work, but he would have to admit that most of his reputation as a skilled craftsman he owed to Artificer.
So Karsman had called on Artificer to help him fabricate the connector. But Artificer and Karsman always worked as a team, with Karsman in full control. Artificer had never before seized control the way that Warrior or Diplomat might.
On hands and knees, he crawled back to the edge of the roof and looked down. Below him, the bulk of the Temple was slewed across the Road. A rectangular patch of discolored soil surrounded by a low fence marked the spot where it had stood for the last decade. Great ruts in the earth, strewn with loose stone, showed where it had been dug out. One side of the fence that surrounded it was flattened.
The Temple had been pulled up close to the base of the adjacent tower. A heavy umbilical jutting from its lower part joined it to one of the towers. Karsman could just make out the coupling that he had made attached to one end of the cable. He had no memory of finishing it, but there it was.
As he crouched by the edge of the roof, something below him caught his eye. Three meters below the lip of the roof, a broad ledge ran around the tower, punctuated at intervals by vaned finials that jutted out like a crown. At one corner, a climbing rope had been attached to an eyelet at the base of the finial. Karsman almost smiled. He might not have any idea how he got up onto the roof, but he had at least found a way down.
He made a last survey of the roof, looking for any hatch or opening that might offer an easier way down. Finding none, he went back to the edge and looked down on the ledge below. The drop to the ledge itself was nothing. What worried Karsman was the continuation of the drop: two hundred meters to the Road below.
The Warrior Within Page 5
