by Laer Carroll
"Put on some warm clothes. I'm taking you to say goodbye to my horse."
The prince was bitterly and obscenely unpleasant to her but only briefly before he acceded to her command. When he returned to the window Heyalna had provided him with a wooden ramp with sturdy banisters to support his exit from his bedroom. One open end butted against the side of the castle, the other led into the shuttlecraft she had been using since the war began. To the rest of the planet it and the ramp would be invisible, but from the angle of his gaze he could see the pearly sides of the roughly hundred-foot dart-shaped craft floating beside the castle.
A few feet away, obviously well supported by the ramp, Heyalna stood looking at him. After taking it all in he grasped a banister with each hand and climbed through the window onto the ramp. She turned and he followed her into the shuttlecraft.
Inside he stood and looked about him. The insides were hollow, colored a muted green, dark-shaded below and light- above, and followed well the contours of the outside skin. There was not much to see besides the empty horse stall floored with remnants of hay and two contoured padded seats resting side by side near the front of the vehicle.
In front of the seats was a contoured window of glass or something like it which let him see everything in front of the vehicle, including the rough side of the grey castle visible as if in daylight. The window material was so invisible that only a guess and the warm stillness of the room let him know it shielded them from the weather.
She led him to the seats and motioned him to one while she sat in the other.
"Take us to my horse's stables." Her speech was only for his benefit. Her actual commands were sent over her neural link.
The outside view showed the castle seeming to move away from the craft but this was an illusion brought about by the internal gravity that protected them from the inertial effects of their motion.
"Are you from Mirtha?" The country he mentioned was nearly halfway around the planet. It was the most advanced technologically of all the civilizations on the planet.
"No. We moved long ago to the Moon." This meant the larger moon. The smaller was called the Companion.
"And you're not supernatural?"
"No. Don't confuse us with any of your gods. We're just people. Though " She smiled at him. " as you have seen we can pretend to have a close relationship with the gods.
"A few of us stayed here when the rest left. We try to help you but it's not easy. We're supposed to remain hidden and let you take the paths you think best. I skirted very close to breaking our rules when I showed some of our powers. I've lived so long among you that I care more about you than I should. So I did what I could to end the war quickly. For that I have to leave. And I want to say goodbye to my horse."
"Your horse?"
"He will miss me much when I am gone." The seriousness of her voice and demeanor was belied by the mischief in her eyes.
Then the great stables rose toward them, two hundred yards from the side of the castle where the prince's guest room was. As the craft grounded she spoke.
"While we are here everyone near will doze if awake and sleep deeper if not. Still we must walk carefully and speak quietly."
The craft grounded and they walked down the ramp and into the stable. Beauty heard and smelled them right away.
"Here I am, boy. Did you miss me? No. You missed my apples."
Heyalna gave him an apple and the horse crunched into it, slobbering a bit as he did so. She scratched his ears and neck just right and he butted his great head into her chest. She laughed.
"Here. You give Greedy Guts one." She handed the prince a second apple. He took her place and fed and caressed the horse as she had while she looked on in approval.
Minutes later they left the stables and re-entered the shuttlecraft. It drifted upward as they returned to the seats.
"Take us above the sky," said Heyalna. The earth beneath them seemed to tilt downward as the craft's nose tilted upward.
"Beauty is now your horse. I could see that you will value him and care for him. He will serve you well in all ways. He is stronger and smarter than other horses and has strong protections. Still he can be harmed and it will be your job to protect him. And that includes protect him from loneliness. When...or if...you tire of him give him to someone else the way I gave him to you tonight."
"I will. I love him already. Who could not?"
He looked around him as the craft rose. The tilt of the nose was not so great that he could not see the earth below, almost as bright as if seen in day but with colors muted. He inspected the hills and valleys he knew so well, then the farther countries he knew less of. Soon they rose enough so that he could see the edge of sunrise to the east. She took him toward that and began to circle the planet from a few hundred miles up.
As the blue globe with its white and blue-white clouds rotated beneath them she pointed out some of the other countries below. One of them was swathed in storm clouds that reached so high their tops were pure white.
"It's hard to believe from up here but beneath that the clouds look grey and dark."
He watched in awe as spider webs of lightning flashed in the storm clouds.
They passed over the great eastern desert, brown and yellow despite the atmosphere that colored the rest of the world blue.
"That was once green forest and rolling plain. But the people let their goats and sheep run too wild and the grass was depleted so badly it could no longer shield the good soil from floods and winds."
He turned to look at her perfect white face looking on the world below. He gazed for long moments before turning back to the sights.
"I remember the lessons of the Harvest Goddess toward gently treating the land. I will not forget."
Presently she spoke again. The shuttlecraft was moving north as well as east and the polar cap became clearer.
"All ice and snow for much or all of the year. Yet people and animals live there or near there."
And presently: "All jungle, vast trees, deadly snakes and fish and other animals. Yet people live there too and prosper."
And presently after minutes of silence: "Never doubt your gods love you. But they can rarely help you directly. Your priests and priestesses can explain this. For our part we ketling liken the situation to that of parents and children. The young forever propped up by crutches will never grow strong limbs."
This was more than a rationalization aimed at a primitive human. It was a main philosophical thread throughout the Confederation. People in the eight-hundred-plus Central Planets were incredibly rich, healthy, and peaceful by the standards of more primitive planets and space habitats. They were also so woven about by and integrated with mind tools that no one was sure where man left off and machine began. Thus for several weeks each year every Center citizen "went naked," disconnected completely from the Web except for occasional contacts via voice and flat vision screen.
They came around to the planet's night side and entered the planet's shadow. The shuttlecraft tilted downward. The land below was still visible but as if in muted daylight which turned all colors toward grey.
"What do you think about the princess?" he said. "You've been spending a good deal of time with her."
Heyalna thought he felt as she did that his sort-of-intended was not of great looks but had a slender elfin charm. He wanted to know something less obvious.
"She has more courage than common sense."
He laughed. Before the war the princess had publicly fenced verbally with the increasingly powerful red-robed priests, the only member of the royal family to do so. And now she was not silent about the shortcomings of the Loseliathi.
"But she has a sense of humor. And can even laugh at herself."
She replied. "Marry her because you want her and want to live with her. Don't worry what I think. Or anyone.
"Still, I should point out that she is a healer of unusual power, and that has its merits and problems." On this planet there were an unusual number of people
with the gene complex for perfect health, which could be lent by their possessors by laying their hands on the ill or wounded. Naturally occurring submicroscopic agents not unlike nanotech messengers did the lending. Unlike nanotech messengers, however, their effect was temporary. Still, this often allowed patients to recover enough so that their own bodies could finish healing.
The princess was so powerful she could sometimes bring people back to life if they had not gone far beyond death's door.
"And the new king?"
She looked at him. His eyes were still taking in much of the world below.
"He is wiser than his older brother was and being the second son more modest. I believe you and he could become friends. If your two countries can become collaborators rather than enemies I believe you will come to rule all this corner of the world. But becoming friends is harder than becoming enemies. Friendship takes much work, while hatred can happen in an instant."
She was silent a moment. "And you here may need to be strong in times to come. I showed you the world in part so that you could see how big your world is. Forces in other parts of the world will come to look with interest upon you eventually."
Ketlow was coming up from below them now. Both the prince and the uplift agent were silent until the shuttle positioned itself near the prince's temporary quarters. At the shuttle door, before she had it open and sent the ramp into place, she stopped him.
"I have two presents for you."
The wall nearest them opened briefly and a thin book floated toward them. Heyalna took it and handed it to him. To his sight it seemed crudely made of thin sheets of leather but was of a material that would not biodegrade until industrialization arrived here in a couple of centuries.
"These were the most important lessons I was passing on to your people. They will save millions of live in times to come. The lessons within will seem small to you. I task you to remember they are not, and that it is your duty to see they are passed on."
She was not exaggerating. The first lesson was to wash hands with soap and water before treating ills or wounds. Confederation historical engineers had proved that this simple easy process had saved more lives in primitive and not-so-primitive cultures than all other medical advances combined.
He tucked the book into his tunic while another opening appeared in the ship side. From it floated a sword and dagger in sheaths attached to a sword belt. She handed this to him but kept her hands on it when he grasped it.
"This will mean more to you because it is personal. When you unsheathe them you will see they are plain but elegant. What you cannot see is that they cannot be broken or destroyed in any way. They cannot be lost; you will always know where they are. They are lighter than what you are used to and will never dull. Be very careful. They are sharper than you can imagine. You can cut yourself badly and not know it until the blood flows and the pain starts."
The materials of the weapons and sheathes would last until their nature might betray their off-planet origin. They would then degrade into ordinary steel and leather.
She released the presents to him and spoke to him one last time.
"I esteem you highly. Go and live a wise and good life, my prince for an instant more."
She knelt and bowed her head to him. He placed a hand gently on her shining hair and turned toward the instantly open door and the ramp sliding toward his bedroom window.
"Bless you, Lady. I will not forget you."
There might have been tears in his eyes as he strode quickly to the window and bent to pass through it. There certainly were in hers.
<>
Atop the tallest mountain on the planet, its top half-airless and sheathed in ice, massive splinters of rock folded back and down from its peak. Shattered ice exploded or fell away from the moving stone. Out of the opened cavern a coppery sphere a thousand feet thick rose skyward, accelerating. As it neared the edge of space a shuttlecraft darted past it, leaving behind an invisible bubble filled with warm air and one passenger, Heyalna.
The spherical starship met the bubble when already moving thousands of miles per hour. Yet Heyalna felt not the slightest jar nor alarm when gold-lit corridors appeared around her, banishing the sight of the frigid mountains below her. The last time the technology of the Confederation had failed was millennia in the past.
She flashed through the corridors, turning several corners without slowing. Her raiment disappeared somewhere along the way, disintegrated into the air. The small bundle of keepsakes also disappeared but only because they had been routed to her quarters. She herself stopped instantly in a large white-walled spherical room in the center of the starship.
She clothed herself in fiery-seeming air and sat back into an invisible easy chair. The stark walls disappeared and she seemed to float in space. Behind and to one side of her she knew was the sun. Off to the opposite side the larger and the smaller moons receded toward invisibility.
Beside her appeared the image of a golden globe of fire. It morphed into a slender teenager of dark curly hair and smiling blue eyes. Clothed in blue fire, he sat in another invisible easy chair. She turned her head toward him. He seemed to be looking forward, though there was nothing visible there except blackness and stars.
"I wondered when you would show up," said Heyalna.
He glanced aside, smiled at her. His appearance was deceptive. He was around three thousand years old.
"Did you guess it was me?" he said.
"I guessed everyone. But you had let us know your age, so you slightly edged out the others.
"Are you really researching star gods? Or is that a cover?"
"Haven't you yet grown beyond binaries? Both of course. And I'm doing mathematical studies you can't even imagine. But the research takes up most of my time. Overseeing uplift takes the least."
"Are you going to reprimand me for going somewhat public? And becoming violent?"
"I'm congratulating you, actually. You stopped a war that would have caused many thousands misery for many years, stopped a toxic religious movement, and began a health revolution that will fan out over centuries."
She looked at his image in surprise. She lowered her head. "I feel like shit. I enjoyed killing those people. I want to kill more."
He chuckled. "Well, you'll have to work yourself out of the shit. You have a destiny as a different kind of agent."
She slewed her chair around. Or she desired his image in front of her and the ship's command system obliged. She neither knew nor cared which was true.
He answered her silent attention. "When was the last time you discussed the genetic policies of the Confederation? Or pondered them for a while?"
She had first discussed them when she was thirty and finishing formal education. Probably next when she started a family at ninety. Then "When I started uplift studies. That would be...about thirty years ago."
"One of the big arguing points is always why we humans have only gene-washed ourselves of our susceptibility to diseases and ability to age. Why we haven't made ourselves spiritually better. Or upgraded our bodies toward superhuman abilities. Remember the position of the College of the Philosophers?"
Each planet of the Confed was a massive consensus democracy, something that worked only for bands of a few dozen primitive humans, who had only speech and their feet for communication and transportation to carry discussions. With better tech the size of consensus decision-making systems could increase but with size also came the complexity of the cross talk.
Hierarchical systems made up for this by reducing the complexity enough so group decisions could be made fast enough to be useful. But with bosses and super-bosses and sub-bosses came choke points of information flow and processing and reduced effectiveness. This was true whether the system was made up of earls, dukes, barons, and so on, or representative democracies, or any other kind of hierarchical decision-making systems.
The Confed had vanquished these problems with worldwide webs of quantum-entangled communication systems, neural links to
the web, and pico-cell parallel databases. Humans and their machines were so integrated no one was sure where one stopped and the other began. A billion such super-cyborgs could engage in a consensus democracy. It included single humans and special study groups. The College of the Philosophers, also called the College of the Pleiades, was one such study group, and highly influential
But cyborgs faced the problem that human brains would atrophy like legs always aided by crutches. Hence the need, the College argued, for humans to "go naked" periodically.
Heyalna knew all this but so well that the thoughts had ceased to be easily available to her consciousness. Researcher was helping her to refresh her understanding.
The starship in which she rode continued to mount in speed. By now it had passed the orbit of the next planet out, a small cold planet with life forms like those around the shoulders of mountains on the planet she had left behind.
"And the reason we have not changed human brains to better integrate with machines?"
"We provide the higher brain functions we can't put into our machines. Such as intuition and holistic reasoning and empathy."
"Which we know how to reproduce in artificial intelligences."
"But they evolve at computer component speeds, so fast that in a few minutes or hours they disappear from ordinary reality." She paused, remembering where this was going, and continued.
"But we could slow them down toward human levels.... Oh, the old argument: we already have computers which do that, biological computers."
He nodded. "We're coming up to hyper-jump speed. I'd better finish this off before we lose comm-lock.
"We also don't clean our genes of the willingness to fight because we sometimes, rarely but sometimes, desperately need the trait, despite all our ethical training and other ways to lessen that need.
"Which is where you come in. You, I suspect, have been thinking of yourself as a wolf, a carnivore, who kills indiscriminately and eats their kills. But I submit that you are a wolfhound, whose prey is specific: wolves. Faced with an ordinary dog, or a human, you are tame, uninterested in killing. Wasn't it only the Ketlow warriors you wanted to kill, enjoyed killing? You never wanted to do the same to the people on your side, did you?"
