Part 20 (1/2)

”I know what it is. Your mother guessed what you must be doing. So did Dela. Oh, you fool! What use is saving me if I had to lose you in the process?”

He pressed the vial into her hand. ”Take it to Dela,” he whispered. ”She will know what to do. Hurry now. It's what all this has been about, after all.”

She bit her lip, and ran out of the door.

And HuroEldon walked in, his robe sweeping. ”Well, well. Somebody told me they saw you come staggering back down out of the blue.”

Celi straightened. ”Philosopher.”

Huro leaned closer. ”You smell like a spindling's breath. And what is this you're wearing, mouse fur? I take it you found your cure.”

”Oh, yes.” And the Blight, once cut off from its human host and eliminated, could never be resurrected, even by stratified time.

”I knew you would do it,” Huro said grudgingly. ”But I never thought you would reduce yourself to this in the process. And you ran out on your patients, despite the vows you doctors take.”

”I came back ”

”But what use are you now, like this?” He inspected Celi, as if he were a curious specimen. ”Your wife can't love you again, you know. We humans don't seem to have evolved to handle such differential s.h.i.+fts in time. That's another point that convinces me this is a made world, by the way, that we are designed for a different environment... ”He idly picked up Celi's notebook, and paused at the very first note Celi had made so long ago, about the effects of differential weathering rates. ”An acute bit of geology. I told you, you would have made a good Philosopher. But you've thrown your life away.”

Celi had no reply. Huro was articulating doubts that had plagued him during his vigil on the mountain in all those years alone, how could he not have had doubts? As he had worked through his monumental combinatorial challenge with his vials of infected blood and trial remedies, slaughtering generation after generation of white mice, his intellectual curiosity, even his basic impulse to save his wife, had worn away, leaving nothing but a grim determination to keep on to the end. He had even stopped counting the years as they had piled up. Of course he had been lonely, up there on his plateau, looking out over uncounted layers of time! But what choice had there been?

Well, he had succeeded, and he must not let Huro stir ancient doubts in his soul. ”You Philosophers exploit the time strata selfishly ”

”While you have burned up your own life to save others. Yes, yes. You aren't the first, you know; your heroism isn't even original.” Huro peered into Celi's eyes, his mouth. ”You might have found your Blight treatment up there, Celi, but you sacrificed your own health in the process. I'd give you a year. Two at the most.”

”It doesn't matter.”

”No, I don't suppose it does to you, does it?” Huro's expression softened, just a little. ”My offer still stands.”

”What offer?”

”To come with me, downbelow. You may only have a year, but spin it out! Some of us are planning to go on, you know.”

”Go where?”

”Down into the red. n.o.body knows how deep we can go, how much we can stretch time before it snaps like an overextended sinew. Some of us dream of pus.h.i.+ng on into the future, all the way to the next Formidable Caress. And if we can do that, who knows what's possible? Come with me, Celi. You've given up almost all of your life. Surely you owe yourself that much.”

But Celi heard a sound from a neighboring room. It was a soft gurgle, the cry of a waking baby. ”I have all I need here,” he said.

HuroEldon snorted. ”Well, we won't meet again. The time streams will see to that.” The Philosopher walked out of the house.

And Celi, broken and old, went to comfort his infant son.

[image]

The Mechanist balloons, fast and gray, drifted over the ruins of Old Foro. Belo couldn't even see the crude bombs they dropped until they came streaking down out of the blues.h.i.+fted air to splash fire.

But the Mechanists' advance was driving Belo and the last of his troopers towards the Shelf's edge, where the river Foo, running with blood, plunged into the abyss. And all across the battlefield, Creationist soldiers were dying. Belo could see their Effigies rising up like smoke, spectral distortions of the human form that twisted and spun away.

All this for the sake of an idea, Belo thought. No, not an idea the truth. He must cling to that, even as the blues.h.i.+fted fire from the sky blossomed around him.

”Captain?”

Tira, his most trusted lieutenant, was shaking his shoulder. In his exhaustion he had drifted into abstraction, as he so often did. He was, after all, trained as a Natural Philosopher, and his senior officers had never let him forget that intellectuals with their long perspective didn't necessarily make for good soldiers. But if not for intellectuals, this war wouldn't be fought anyhow.

”I'm sorry, Tira. It's just that you have to admire them.”

”Sir?” Her small face, smeared with blood and dirt, was creased with concern.

”The Mechs. We think of them as stupid, you know, backward. After all, the reason we fight is because they will cling to their absurd, primitive idea that the world is a product of natural forces, acting blindly in the absence of mind. But now they have come up with this this.”

This was Old Earth, where time came in layers: the higher you climbed, the more rapidly time pa.s.sed. This basic truth about the world shaped everything about the lives of the people who inhabited it including the way they made war. For a soldier of Old Earth, gaining the high ground was everything. everything. If you were higher than your enemy you had the benefit of accelerated time; you could think faster, prepare your strategy and aim your weapons, while he stumbled, slow-moving, trapped in glutinous, red-s.h.i.+fted slow time. If you were higher than your enemy you had the benefit of accelerated time; you could think faster, prepare your strategy and aim your weapons, while he stumbled, slow-moving, trapped in glutinous, red-s.h.i.+fted slow time.

So, in this campaign, the Creationists of Puul had taken the Attic, the long-abandoned community on the cliff face above the town of Foro itself, where rich Forons had once kept time-accelerated slaves. The campaign had gone well, and Belo had started to believe that the Forons and their hated Mechanist notions might soon be purged from the world.

But then the Forons had produced their balloons, which wafted on wings of heat even higher than the Attic, and the Creationists' advantage was lost.

”A stunning idea,” Belo said. ”So simple! Nothing but bags of hot air. But look at that formation. You've got to give them credit.” Belo had a flask of gin in his coat pocket, meant to comfort battlefield wounded. Perhaps he should crack it now, and spend his last moments watching the wondrous spectacle of fighting soldiers and flying machines working in tandem to snuff out his life.

But Tira was almost screaming in his face. ”Sir! We have to get out of here. Dane has found a way.”

”Dane?”

Stumbling towards them through the rubble came a trooper, blood-soaked, a small, squat man. Dane's bayonet had been snapped in two, and he was dragging one leg: both weapon and man damaged, Belo thought bleakly. Grimacing with pain, Dane showed Belo what he had found: a shaft in the ground, no wider than Belo's own shoulders, covered by a heavy stone slab. ”I think it's a well,” he said.

”Or a larder,” Tira said. A place where you could store meat, preserved in the slower time of depth.

”No, Belo said grimly. ”See the lock on this hatch, broken now. This is a time pit. A place you would throw down thieves and murderers and forget about them”

”So where does it come out?”

”Who knows? But where where scarcely matters. It just needs to be deep enough, deep into slow time. A neat way to dispose of your criminals to hurl them one-way into the future!” scarcely matters. It just needs to be deep enough, deep into slow time. A neat way to dispose of your criminals to hurl them one-way into the future!”

Tira peered into the time pit, her face twisted with fear. ”It's this or nothing,” she said.

Belo said, ”Do you love your Effigy so much, Tira? Shall we not stand and fight?”

Dane said, ”Dying like this won't do any good.” His accent was coa.r.s.e; he had been a farm worker before the war. He was wheezing, exhausted. ”I say we live to fight another day.”

”Even if that day is far in the future?”

”Even so,” Dane said.

Firebombs bloomed ever closer. Looking around, Belo saw that the three of them were alone, beyond help.

Belo grinned. ”Another day.”

”Another day,” they mumbled.