Gamearth

by Kevin J. Anderson

  "The Sitnaltans think only of the future, trying to do everything better than they did the day before. When I brought them items from Gamearth's past, things I had scavenged from the mountains, they told me they had no interest in anything that was so shamefully obsolete."

  Delrael got a twinkle in his eye. "If they are so good with technology, do you think they could fix the Spectres' ship?" He chuckled to himself. "We could use it to send Scartaris right back to the Outsiders."

  Bryl snickered. "Wouldn't that be a wonderful surprise!"

  Paenar shook his head. "You have seen the condition of the ship ¯ it could never be repaired. Barely anything remains of it."

  Vailret rubbed his lips, pondering. "No ... but I'd bet the Sitnaltans would love to have a look at it, nevertheless. Maybe we can use that as a bargaining chip if we need anything from them."

  In her tower room on the edge of Sitnalta, a young woman stared at the wide blackboard. Chalkdust from her furious writings and erasures covered the floor, her garments, and her body. She bit her lip, deep in thought, and tasted chalk.

  She had patented her inventions in her own name, Mayer, and collaborated on a fifth, though none of them had been particularly useful. But this contraption ¯ a calculating machine ¯ would earn her a name beside the two greatest living characters in Sitnalta, Professors Verne and Frankenstein.

  If only she could see a trick that would allow her to mechanically solve the equations ¯

  Mayer stared at the blackboard, baring her teeth and demanding of herself why the numbers would not balance. She reached up with her lump of chalk and intuitively altered a variable, replacing it with an equivalent expression. And suddenly everything worked.

  "Eureka!" Mayer turned to shake her fists in the air and went to the window, grinning.

  She saw the four travelers walking toward the gates of the city. She gawked for a moment and then had the good sense to pick up her "optick-tube"¯ two mounted lenses that magnified distant objects fivefold. Mayer scrutinized the four characters carefully: One was very young ¯ blond-haired and just past boyishness; the other young man was more muscular, obviously a fighter, wearing leather armor and carrying weapons, but he seemed to be limping. His gleaming silver belt looked rather gaudy.

  The other two characters were older. One was thin and white-bearded, smaller in stature than the others, and wearing a blue cloak. But he looked intelligent and shrewd, perhaps even a professor or a great inventor in his own land. The other stood tall and gaunt and seemed to have been blinded in a terrible accident. She was familiar with industrial accidents, since some of the early Sitnaltan steam-engine boilers had exploded ¯ but her father Dirac had developed the pressure-release valve that made steam engines safe for everyday use.

  Mayer mentally constructed a detailed analysis, drawing conclusions from the evidence she had seen. Then she reached for the speaking tube, putting the cuplike brass end to her mouth and shouting the news into it. She pronounced her words carefully and kept the sentences short and clipped. Her voice would be muffled as it bounced around inside the speaking tube until it exited the other end, probably awakening the old man who sat at the telegraph station.

  Within minutes, all of Sitnalta would be alerted to the visitors.

  Mayer replaced the end of the speaking tube on its hook and leaned out over the window sill. The brown-haired fighter looked up at her, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Hello up there!"

  Great Maxwell! Had they no better way of announcing themselves?

  Mayer picked up her own megaphone and blew some chalkdust from the mouthpiece before she spoke down at the four travelers. "Welcome to Sitnalta.

  Please wait for the gate to raise completely before entering. Thank you."

  She threw a lever that dropped a counterweight, which turned a gear, which turned a larger gear, which caused the heavy sheet-metal gate to ratchet upward in its tracks. Mayer took one last look at her equations ¯ now that she knew how to solve the problem, she didn't want to leave. With a sigh, she went down to meet the strangers.

  The wall surrounding the city of Sitnalta was made of stone blocks cut in perfect rectangles, equal in size and with sharp corners. Vailret ran his fingers along one of the cracks ¯ it put even the careful work of Skon the stonecutter to shame. Paenar cocked his head at the odd jumble of distant clanging, hissing, and whistling noises from within the city. The air held strange smells.

  Delrael leaned heavily on Vailret's shoulder, barely able to walk on his kennok limb. As they had approached the vicinity of Sitnalta, the kennok magic had begun to fade, leaving the fighter burdened with a cumbersome and rigid wooden leg. Delrael had shown him how the dividing line between flesh and wood now stood dark and distinct again. Vailret didn't know what to do, other than leave the area as quickly as they could.

  After the woman in the tower had called to them, the heavy metal gate clattered upward, opening the city of Sitnalta to their view. Bryl led blind Paenar, and Vailret supported Delrael, thinking how unlikely a fighting team they must appear to be.

  But Vailret forgot all that when he passed through the gate into the city.

  He and Delrael stood amazed, bombarded by the sights. Even Bryl seemed impressed. Paenar remained aloof and silent.

  The main road was paved with colorful hexagon-shaped cobblestones, each formed perfectly and laid in dizzying geometric patterns. Many of the shining buildings were two or even three stories tall. Except for Sardun's Ice Palace and the Slac citadel, Vailret had never seen such enormous structures, certainly nothing made by humans.

  A thin woman stepped out of a tower doorway and walked toward them, looking stiff and businesslike. She had short dark hair, bright fast-moving eyes, and a sharp nose. She wore garments dyed more colorfully than any natural pigment Tarne had ever used in his weaving.

  For a moment, Vailret thought of Tarne and hoped the old veteran was keeping the other characters safe while Gairoth held the Stronghold. He wondered how long it would be until he got home again.

  "My name is Mayer. I am the daughter of Dirac." The Sitnaltan woman paused, waiting for something, then she scowled. "My father invented seventy of the greatest inventions of all time."

  "We're pleased to meet you," Bryl said as cordially as he could. They introduced themselves.

  Mayer swept her arms out to indicate Sitnalta. "We don't get many visitors here. We like to hear about how far ahead we are of the rest of Gamearth."

  Surprisingly, Paenar snapped at her. His hand clenched Bryl's cloak, leaving fingermarks. "Or perhaps you need to learn about some of the things you lack."

  Indignant, Mayer glared at him, but looked disconcerted when Paenar's empty eye-sockets met her gaze. She turned abruptly and motioned for them to follow her. She opened the wide doors of a shed near the gate, sliding the doors along polished tracks. "I can show you more of Sitnalta."

  In the dimness of the shed, Mayer pushed and tugged a large wheeled contraption, a steam-engine car, out onto the hex-cobbled street. When no one moved to assist her, she shouted, "Don't just gawk at me, you barbarians! Help me get the vehicle out. Great Maxwell! How do you expect us to travel?"

  As Vailret helped push, the iron-shod wooden wheels of the vehicle rumbled on the cobblestones. In the full light, Vailret thought the machine looked magnificent. A shining silver boiler took up most of the car's back, but the chassis rode low to the ground, balanced so that the heavy water-filled boiler did not lift the front wheels up in the air.

  Mayer touched the metal of the tank and jerked back her hand, blowing on her fingers. "Good ¯ pressure's still up, and the fires are burning.

  Someone must have just used it." She dumped coal from a bucket into the orange maw of a furnace beneath the water. Steam hissed out of a pressure valve in the back of the boiler.

  "Come on, seat yourselves! We're wasting the pressure buildup."

  Delrael hobbled to the side of the vehicle and swung his stiff leg up into the seat. Paenar climbed in without any assi
stance after Bryl had led him to the car. Vailret hopped in the back, near the boiler.

  Even before they had settled in, Mayer twisted a crank that released steam through the piston chambers, turning the gears. She jerked locking pins out from the wheels, and the car rattled forward over the cobblestones.

  Vailret grinned in excitement. Thick white steam belched from the mouth of their smokestack. Mayer pulled a rope that caused a shrill whistle to blast, hurting their ears. The steam-engine car clattered over the streets.

  Mayer wrestled with two steering levers that pulled the front wheels one way or the other.

  "This is marvelous!" Vailret said. "It's like magic."

  Mayer corrected him sharply. "Not magic ¯ technology."

  The pressure valve in the back of the boiler popped open, shrieking out excess steam, and then closed itself again. Paenar sat in silence, bouncing up and down as the car rumbled along the cobblestones.

  The steam-engine vehicle traveled too swiftly for Vailret to take in all the wondrous things around them, but Mayer pointed out the more prominent structures.

  "We create all of our materials there, in the manufactories." She pointed to massive buildings where smoke stacks dumped thick steam and black smoke into the air. "That one makes ingots of steel for us to use in our inventions. We also harvest natural gas from underground, and mine minerals from the sea. You'll find a great deal of gold used in some inventions, since gold is abundant in the sea water."

  As the car passed by, other Sitnaltans stared at them from the windows of tall buildings. Mayer pointed at the web of wires stretching from house to house, connecting all the buildings together.

  "Over those wires, I was able to inform all of Sitnalta of your arrival. Instantly." Mayer smiled to herself.

  "I could do the same thing with a sending or a message stick," Bryl countered.

  "But you would need magic. Our telegraph runs on electricity."

  "And he should be ashamed of using magic?" Vailret said.

  "I certainly would not be proud of it. The Sorcerers nearly destroyed Gamearth with century after century of their senseless wars. And then they abandoned us with only a few worthless Sentinel representatives to help out."

  She turned and looked up at the tall buildings. "All you see here in Sitnalta we have done. Human characters ¯ with no help from Sentinels.

  Magic may be the crutch of the Sorcerers, but we have developed science, we have invented tools and machines to do everything the magic used to do. We have discovered the true scientific Rules by which the world works. We can well be proud."

  Bryl muttered to himself. "I'd like to see her create the Barrier River with a machine!"

  But Vailret gazed around in awe. What she said struck him on a sore spot ¯ these were human characters, and they had accomplished much of what he had always thought impossible. Perhaps he could learn from them, study how they worked their miracles and be able to create a different kind of magic by himself. Even without Sorcerer blood.

  Mayer pushed down on a pedal at her feet and released another lever, bringing the steam-engine vehicle to rest. Vailret heard a different hissing that had been hidden by the din of their own car. "Look there!" Mayer pointed down another side street. "One of my father's inventions."

  They saw a three-wheeled contraption with a wide spinning brush under its belly. The machine chugged along, driven by a smaller steam engine, hissing and whistling to itself from its pressure valves. The wide rotating brush scrubbed the cobblestones, devouring all the dirt and grit from between the cracks.

  "Sitnalta has ten of those machines to keep our streets clean."

  She released the foot pedal, engaged the gears once more, and they rolled onward.

  The vehicle reached a broad rectangular plaza that stood empty in the early afternoon. An ornate fountain spurted in the center of the square, running an elaborate water clock. Mayer pulled the steam-engine car to a halt and squinted at the level of water in the clock. She locked the pins in the wheels and hopped out, running around to the back of the boiler and opening a red valve that spilled the excess steam pressure into the air. The car made a sigh as it shut down, but steam burbled out of the smokestack for several more minutes.

  Vailret could think of nothing to say; his mind had been overwhelmed by the marvelous sights and Mayer's enthusiasm. He climbed out of the car and went to the fountain to see better, staring at the spraying water and at the clock. His ears still rang from the steam engine's loud noises.

  In the pool four large, clumsy-looking mechanical fish puttered around and around in perfect circles. He stuck his hand in the water, but the mechanical fish paid him no heed.

  "The leaders of Sitnalta will be here momentarily," Mayer said.

  "The leaders?" Bryl asked. "Who runs the city?"

  "The people of Sitnalta decide for themselves what we will do. We are a weighted democracy. Each character has at least one vote, but those who have done the most for Sitnalta have the most votes. It is very fair ¯ the ones who work hard for our city have a significant say in the decisions we make, and those who have done little, say little. In an ordinary democracy, the vote of a vagrant is valued as highly as that of a great inventor. And that just isn't logical."

  "Why don't you tell us how you determine these weighted votes?" Paenar seemed to know the answer already.

  Mayer looked at him as if he had asked something obvious. "By the number of inventions a character has contributed, of course. My father Dirac has designed seventy new inventions for the betterment of Sitnalta, and therefore he has seventy votes. I have five, soon to be six."

  "But what about the characters who aren't inventors?" Bryl asked.

  Mayer snorted. "Useless people ¯ who cares what they think?"

  Paenar smiled to himself.

  At some unheard signal, dozens of characters emerged from the doorways of buildings around the square and filed toward the fountain. They stared at the travelers, but talked little among themselves. The other characters wore bright clothes similar to the ones Mayer wore, but some were covered with grease or wore work-smocks. One woman's hair looked singed; perhaps a new invention had backfired on her.

  Mayer smiled and motioned to a rotund man striding toward them. The man had a bald crown and shaggy reddish hair sticking out around his ears. "This is my father, Dirac, who has designed seventy inventions."

  "If she says one more time how many inventions he's done ¯ " Delrael grumbled.

  "You were early, Mayer," Dirac said, still smiling at the travelers.

  "Did you run short of things to show our guests?"

  "No, Father!" Mayer looked at the water clock for defense, but she said nothing more.

  Dirac gazed at them with a distant expression on his face, then he extended his hand to each of them, beaming. "I am pleased you've come to Sitnalta. We'll have time to discuss many things."

  Paenar's blindness did not trouble Dirac at all; he reached out, guided the blind man's hand into his own grasp and shook it. Paenar seemed to dislike the Sitnaltan's touch.

  Before they could say anything to him, Dirac turned and waved two other men over to join them. "Allow me to introduce the greatest inventors in all of Sitnalta ¯ Professors Frankenstein and Verne. I cannot begin to tell you the great wonders these men have brought to us."

  Frankenstein was a young, haggard-looking man, with dark brown hair and intense, bloodshot eyes. He nodded cursorily to the guests but went back to brood with his ideas, as if incapable of making light conversation.

  Verne, on the other hand, blinked in surprise at being personally introduced to the visitors. Verne had a great bushy beard and tangled gray hair hanging over his ears. He scratched his head and extended a hand to each of the four, smiling politely. A peculiar, haunted quality lay behind the eyes of both professors, as if they had the dreams and nightmares of several lifetimes locked within their skulls.

  Verne rubbed his hands together. His voice had a strange accented lilt.

&nbs
p; "Monsieur Dirac himself is not a trivial personage either. He has ¯ "

  "We know," Delrael interrupted, "seventy inventions to his credit."

  Dirac looked pleased, paying no heed to the sarcasm in Delrael's comment. "You must be hungry," he said, interrupting Verne. "We were about to break for our midday meal."

  Both professors slipped away and stood back to observe the crowd. Dirac led the travelers over to stone benches ringing the square. Delrael lurched, nearly unable to walk on his kennok leg. Vailret helped him, but Delrael acted frustrated at himself.

  After watching the water clock, everyone turned to face other sets of doors around the square. Wheeled carts shuttled out of the building, bearing individual plates heaped with steaming food.

  Dirac sat down on the bench next to Delrael and Vailret, elbowing his way into a place of honor. Delrael absently rubbed his thigh, at the line where the kennok wood joined with flesh. The carts came around, and the Sitnaltans each took a plate and began to eat. As Vailret tried to choose between several different entrees, he noticed how every plate appeared the same, so carefully arranged. But after days of pack food ¯

  They ate in relative silence. The smokestacks of the manufactories had stopped exhaling great gray clouds, and many of the background noises had also fallen silent. Off on another bench and oblivious to the others, Frankenstein and Verne argued over the fine details of some new invention.

  Delrael scraped the last remnants of food from his plate into his mouth, finishing well before anyone else. After swallowing his food he spoke to Dirac. "I don't understand one thing. We arrive at your gates as perfect strangers, your daughter invites us in and gives us the grand tour, now you introduce us to all of Sitnalta and give us a good meal. But nobody's even asked us why we're here or where we're going. Isn't that a little strange?"

  Dirac wiped his mouth and looked flustered. Mayer watched her father, waiting for him to answer. "We assumed you had heard of our great city and came to see its wonders for yourself. That was Mayer's hypothesis."