IGMS Issue 26 Page 12

  "Pretty image while I'm eating," said Param.

  "I had no idea you were so fussy," said Rigg, with a grin. Param rolled her eyes.

  "Why couldn't we eat it?" asked Umbo.

  "When they were testing me to see if I should get access to the library," said Rigg, "I met a scientist in Aressa Sessamo was separating out the plants and animals that came to this world with our ancestors -- which is most of them -- and the ones that evolved here, which is only a few. Every single one of them, Father and I had already identified as plants and animals that we can't eat. Even dead, only certain carrion eaters will go after them. It's as if we had two separate ecologies twined together. Father called them 'mildly toxic' and my guess is he knew."

  "So maybe that parasite can't use our bodies either," said Olivenko.

  "But Vadesh says it can," said Rigg.

  "And yet you touched it," said Param.

  "Tomorrow let's go back in time," said Rigg. "When we're rested and fresh. Come on, we passed through the Wall today. People tried to kill you and Umbo not that many hours ago, Param! Can't we get some sleep?"

  But when they finally cleaned up supper, laid out their dosses, and took up their sleeping positions, with Loaf on first watch, Rigg couldn't sleep. Because as soon as he knew what the facemask's path looked like, he began to find the same kind of path riding along with humans ten thousand years ago. Vadesh was telling the truth -- humans had been infested with facemasks.

  And the more of them Rigg followed, the more certain he became of a pattern. At first the facemasks had been rare and were never inside the city. Then they came along with humans when they approached the city in large groups. It looked to Rigg like war, or raiding parties.

  But abruptly, about five hundred years before the city emptied out, all the facemasks were inside the city, and the only human paths without facemask paths traveling with them were outside the city -- again in raiding parties.

  The conclusion was obvious to Rigg. Halfway through the history of humans in this city, the ones infested with the facemask parasite became the possessors of the city, and the uninfected people were the ones who lived outside.

  And the tallest buildings were not built until the city belonged to the infested ones. Rigg knew this because none of the human paths rose up into the sky inside those towers until the relatively newer ones, the ones with facemask companions.

  This is a city whose greatest buildings were erected by people with parasites embedded in their brains.

  Now that was something Vadesh might have told them, if he were actually obeying the command to tell them everything. Which meant that he was deceiving them. He must have found some logical loophole in the orders Rigg had given him. Or maybe there was no deep law that required him to obey the first humans to pass through a Wall.

  Eventually, exhaustion won and Rigg slept.

  * * *

  Rigg and his companions, not trusting Vadesh, go back in time and see a battle between the people of the city and a large band of humans who have been taken over by the facemasks. They realize that Vadesh regards the melding of human and facemask as a good thing, and allied with the facemask people. They also learn that the jewels give their owner the power to control the starships that lie buried at the center of every wallfold. After some argument, Loaf decides to take the jewels and go with Vadesh into the ship. Rigg and Umbo decide to go with him, but Umbo is warned by his future self not to go and not to warn the others.

  * * *

  3

  Into the Starship

  Rigg noticed when Umbo fell behind, but he assumed that he would catch up. Rigg felt the same sense of awe at the huge machines, but he knew that if both boys stopped to look at them, Vadesh would be alone with Loaf and that's what Vadesh wanted. Which meant that was the thing Rigg couldn't allow to happen.

  As usual, thought Rigg. Umbo feels free to be a child, easily distracted from the task at hand, while I keep my mind on what has to be done. But later, Umbo will resent me for taking responsibility.

  I don't take responsibility, I'm just left with responsibility in my hands and no one to help me carry it.

  Which wasn't fair. Loaf was there, wasn't he? But Loaf was playing the risky game of taking Vadesh at his word, testing him.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a tunnel, and in the tunnel there was a kind of wagon, though it had nothing to pull it and no cargo. But there were benches at the front and back, so people were meant to ride. Vadesh stepped onto the wagon and Loaf followed him.

  "Umbo's not here," said Rigg.

  "You wait for him and take the next wagon," said Vadesh.

  Rigg understood immediately that what Vadesh was really saying was good-bye. So he bounded onto the wagon. It was already moving forward when his feet hit the floor, accelerating so quickly that Rigg fell over and slid to the back of the wagon. Vadesh had somehow given the wagon the command to go while Rigg was still standing on the platform. If he had hesitated, if he had tried to call out to Umbo, anything but board the wagon at the instant that he did, Vadesh would have left him behind.

  It's Loaf he wants, because Loaf has the jewels.

  Or maybe it's the other way around -- I have something Loaf doesn't have. Something Vadesh fears. I have knowledge. I was trained by an Expendable, and Loaf was not.

  What did Father teach me that Vadesh should fear? Whatever it was, Rigg was not aware of it. Everything Rigg could remember had to do either with trapping animals and surviving in the wilderness, or the training in politics, economics, languages, and history that had enabled him to thrive in Aressa Sessamo. If nearly getting killed a dozen times could count as thriving.

  And science. Father had taught him biology, physics, astronomy, engineering. As much as Rigg could absorb. Useless things that suddenly became useful when he was getting tested by leading scholars to determine whether he could have access to the library.

  Useless things that suddenly became useful. But Father couldn't have known that I would face such a board of examiners. Could he?

  One thing Father did know, though, was that one day I would face another Expendable. If every wallfold contained an Expendable like Vadesh and Father himself, and if the jewels somehow allowed their owner to control the Walls and take them down, Father must have taught him what he needed to know to deal with the threat of someone like Vadesh.

  But all of Rigg's language and negotiation skills had to do with humans, and Vadesh wasn't human. He didn't want what humans wanted, he didn't fear what humans feared.

  What did he fear? Surely the worst thing had already happened, when all the humans in his wallfold had died. What could Rigg do now that would make Vadesh want to be rid of him?

  It was a joke that Expendables had to obey humans. Father didn't obey anybody, and Vadesh only pretended to comply with human commands, when he bothered even to pretend. I have no power over him. No way to make him do anything he doesn't want to do. Because he knows more than me, I never have enough information to give him a command that he can't weasel his way out of. Even now, we have only his word that this wagon leads where he says he's taking us, or that the jewels can even do what he says they do.

  And it bothered Rigg more and more that the two jewels that mattered -- the ones that Vadesh had identified as controlling the Wall of Vadeshfold and the Wall of Ramfold -- were clutched in Loaf's fist instead of being in the bag with the rest of the jewels. It sounded like nonsense, the idea of the jewels being attuned to anyone who had grown up in the wallfold. That seemed wrong. But it was true that Vadesh must have a set of jewels of his own, and he couldn't do anything with them or he would have done it, so apparently he did need a human to do whatever he was planning to do.

  Where was the lie? More to the point, where was the truth hidden within the lie?

  Meanwhile, the wagon began to move so fast that Rigg had no concept of their speed. He didn't know how to measure it. He knew that he could normally walk a league in about an hour; he could run much faster, but in shor
t bursts. This wagon was going so fast that even the fastest horse couldn't keep up with it. So as the minutes wore on, the tunnel gradually taking them lower and lower, moving in a nearly straight line, Rigg couldn't begin to guess how far they had traveled, how many leagues beyond the factory where they had boarded the thing.

  Yet however fast the walls of the tunnel went by, there was something wrong.

  Oh, yes. The wind. There wasn't any. Moving at this speed should be blowing air past their face faster than any gale. Yet the air was as still as if they were inside a closet.

  Rigg put a hand toward the edge of the wagon. Nothing. No wind. He reached farther, half expecting to reach some invisible barrier. Glass, perhaps, only too clean and pure for him even to see it.

  Instead, he reached his fingers just a bit farther and suddenly they were being blown backward. He had to press forward just to keep them in place. He pulled his hand away from the edge, and the wind was gone.

  "It's a field," said Vadesh. "A shaped irregularity in the universe, a barrier. Air molecules pass through it only slowly, so that our movement doesn't affect the air inside the field except to make a gradual exchange of oxygen."

  Oxygen. "So we can breathe."

  "Exactly! If the field were simply impenetrable to air, we'd suffocate as we used up the oxygen. Ram taught you well."

  He didn't teach me about fields. Or about wagons that could move this fast.

  "The Wall is a field, too, you said," Rigg answered.

  "Not a physical barrier, though. The Wall is a zone of disturbance. It affects the mental balance of animals, the part of the brain that can feel a coming earthquake or storm. The sense of wrongness. It makes an animal feel that everything that can be wrong is about to go wrong, which fills them with terror. They run away."

  "That's not how it felt to me," said Rigg.

  "Oh, admit it, that was part of the feeling," said Vadesh. "But you're right, humans have deafened or blinded themselves to a lot of that sense, because you depend on reason to process and control your perceptions. Reason cripples you. So you find reasons for feeling that disequilibrium inside the Wall. And the reason is hopelessness, despair, guilt, dread. Everything that prevents you from intelligent action."

  "But we went through it," said Loaf.

  "You went through it before it was there," said Vadesh. "Cheating."

  "We went back to get Rigg," said Loaf. "We brought him out."

  "Very brave. But you penetrated only about five percent of the Wall when you did that. The weakest five percent. No, the field does its job very well."

  "So there are different kinds of fields?" asked Rigg.

  "Many of them, my young pupil. I can't believe your supposed father never explained any of this. Why, one-third of the controls of the starship dealt with field creation and shaping and maintenance. No aspect of starflight would be possible without it. We couldn't even have crashed into this world and created the night-ring without fields."

  "I don't even wish I knew what you're talking about," said Loaf. "I just want this thing to stop moving."

  "When we get there. Not much farther."

  "You crashed into this world," said Rigg.

  "There was no moon," said Vadesh. "And we needed to hide the starships anyway. By slamming into the planet Garden at just the right angle and velocity, with nineteen starships at once, we were able to slow the rotation of the planet enough to make each day long enough for humans to survive."

  "And you worked all this out?" asked Rigg.

  "Oh, not me," said Vadesh. "That's not what Expendables are for. We don't have minds capable of the kind of delicate calculation that starflight and major collisions require."

  "So who did?"

  "It was done automatically. Starships are equipped that way. What matters is that a collision like that would have reduced the starships to vapor, even though they're made of fieldsteel. But starships also generate protective fields around themselves that obliterate any mass that tries to collide with the ship. With that field turned on, we never actually collided with anything. The field collided with the planet Garden, and only the stone of planetary crust exploded into dust. Millions of tons of it. Filling the air. Killing most life on the planet. But nothing on the ship itself even got warm, let alone hot enough to explode."

  Rigg thought through what Father had taught him of physics. He remembered how the acceleration of the wagon had knocked him off his feet and slid him backward just a few minutes before. "Stopping that abruptly would pulverize everything on the ship anyway," said Rigg.

  "Another point for Ram as teacher of little boys," said Vadesh. "The entire starship also dwelt within an inertial bubble. All the energy of our sudden stop was dissipated into the surrounding space. Which accounted for even more of the heat and dust. Fields are everything, boy, and your supposedly loving father taught you nothing about them. I wonder why."

  Vadesh didn't seem to understand that increasing Rigg's mistrust of his Father only increased his mistrust of Vadesh himself, who was, after all, the same creature, an identical machine. He was assuring Rigg, in effect, that Expendables lie. As if he needed more proof of that.

  The wagon began to slow.

  "I can feel us slowing down," said Rigg.

  "Thank Silbom's right ear," said Loaf.

  "There's no reason to install and maintain an inertial bubble field on a mere wagon -- it never moves fast enough to need it," said Vadesh. "Really, just because you can do something doesn't mean you're required to do it. Not worth the time or energy."

  The wagon came to a halt.

  So did the tunnel. It simply ended. The walls on every side were of smooth stone. There was no door, no sign, not even a loading dock.

  Vadesh bounded from the wagon. "Come along, lads," he said.

  "Lads?" said Loaf.

  "He thinks he's making friends with us," said Rigg.

  "He's a bit of a clown, isn't he?"

  "He wants us to think so," said Rigg. "Or else he wants us to think that he wants us to think so. I'm not sure how complicated it gets."

  Vadesh -- who could hear everything they were saying, Rigg never allowed himself to forget that -- was standing on the ground near the end of the tunnel. "Come along, the door only opens for a few moments and I'd hate to have either of you get caught in it when it slides shut."

  As they got off the wagon, it immediately whisked away back down the tunnel.

  "No return trip?" asked Loaf.

  "I can always call it back," said Vadesh. "And there are many other ways to make the same journey." Vadesh turned to face the wall. He said nothing, made no gesture -- but he did face the wall. Why, Rigg wondered. Was he communicating some other way?

  Apparently so, because the end of the tunnel was suddenly gone. What had seemed to be smooth stone was now a continuation of the tunnel. The wagon could have kept going. Only now, beyond where the tunnel had ended, there was an obvious station, with loading dock, stairway, and other doors, not disguised at all.

  Here, though, the stairway went down rather than up. They had come down to get to the tunnel at the other end, and had traveled steadily downward since then, if Rigg's directional sense was at all reliable in a place like this and at such a speed. And yet their destination was lower still.

  But they did not take the stairs. "Down," said Vadesh, and a set of doors opened to reveal a smallish room. Vadesh walked in. Loaf and Rigg followed, and then the doors closed. Rigg could not understand why they would enter such a room, which had no doorway other than the one they had come through.

  "It's an elevator," said Loaf. "It's on pulleys. The whole room goes up and down, with counterweights to balance us. Some of the taller buildings in O have them, and a bank in Aressa Sessamo had one, too."

  "Very good," said Vadesh. "Only there's no counterweight."

  They plummeted.

  "Exhilarating, isn't it?" asked Vadesh.

  Rigg and Loaf were both clutching at the wall, filled with panic.

>   "Oh, sorry," said Vadesh. "I forget how sensitive humans can be."

  Suddenly the sensation of falling went away. "Now we have a mild inertial field. You have to understand that humans knew about this sort of thing when we first built the colony. They used to enjoy riding the elevator down without the field. They enjoyed the thrill."

  "Then they weren't human," said Loaf.

  "Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if they only give themselves the chance."

  The doors opened. There was a bridge in front of them, spanning a gap of about six meters. On the other side was a smooth, convex surface of fieldsteel, exactly like the surface of the Tower of O.

  As they stepped into the bridge, Rigg looked to left and right, up and down. "It's the Tower of O, lying on its side," he said.

  "Let's say that the Tower of O, as you describe it, was probably intended to be a monument to a starship. Not the real thing. Come along. Ship, open!" said Vadesh.

  A gap appeared in the side of the ship, right where the bridge ended.

  "Welcome to the starship that brought humanity to Garden," said Vadesh.

  "One of nineteen," said Rigg.

  "It began as a single ship," said Vadesh. "We had an accident. The physics of it is beyond you, I promise you."

  "You never know how much Father taught me," said Rigg.

  "I know he didn't teach you that, because even the ship's computers don't understand it. Nineteen computers brought one ship into the folds of space, but brought it out again in nineteen slightly different locations. Oops."

  "And where on this starship are you taking us?" asked Rigg.

  "To the control room. To the place where all the decisions were made. Where Ram Odin plunged the human race toward its first successful colony on an Earthlike planet."

  As they walked along narrow passages, Rigg got the distinct impression that something was helping them move -- that each step took them farther than it should, that their bodies were somehow lighter here. Another field? Probably.

  A door opened and they stepped into a spotlessly clean room, walls and floor and ceiling all the same light-brown color. Along one wall there was what seemed to be a track, rather like the passage that the wagon had run along, only much narrower. There were doors at both ends.