A LOW ROAR SOUNDED DISTANTLY FROM BEHIND JUST AS THE riders reached the crest of the saddle at the valley head, beyond which the land dropped again toward the river that marked the Carthogian border. They stopped and looked back to watch as the sky-dragon that had carried them high over the world rose, slowly at first, with violet heat-wind streaming from its underside, and then turned its head upward as it gained speed and soared higher to shrink rapidly to a pinpoint and eventually vanish. Dornvald had needed all of his powers of argument to talk the rest of the outlaws into allowing themselves to be flown the remaining distance to Carthogia in one of the Skybeings’ dragons. Accepting a roof as shelter out in the desert was one thing, but being enclosed on all sides as if in a trap was another. And after watching the Skybeings entering and emerging from their dragon furnaces unscathed, how could one be sure they appreciated the limits that the mere steel and titanium casings of robeings could withstand?
“Those are strange dragon-tamers indeed, who reduce the King’s soldiers to scrap in a trice, and then request Kleippur’s pleasure,” Geynor said as the riders resumed moving. “If they wish to meet with Kleippur, why do they not simply fly to the city of Menassim and command him forth? It seems to me they hold a considerable advantage in persuasiveness, which would assure a rapid reversal of any inclination he might choose toward recalcitrance.”
“It appears to be their desire to give opportunity for the citizens of Menassim to be forewarned,” Dornvald replied.
Geynor shook his head in amazement. “From such unassailable strength they speak, yet they would invite our agreement? Is this not true nobility of spirit? Horazzorgio could have spared himself his not inconsiderable inconvenience by attending more to his manners and yielding less to his impetuousness, it seems.”
“And yet, who knows what subtleties and unsuspected protocols might constitute the chivalry code of Skybeings?” Dornvald asked. “Did their request in fact confer the freedom of answer that might be supposed, or was it no more than a command couched in such form merely through rules of foreign custom which we know not?”
Geynor pondered the question for a while, and eventually answered, “If the latter, then our refusal might have been construed as no less ill-mannered than the assault by the King’s soldiers. As penalty for such error of judgment, we could have found ourselves strewn across the desert in like fashion.”
“Aha!” Dornvald exclaimed. “Now, at last, I think you see my reasoning, for your words echo my own conclusion.”
“Let us hope that Kleippur is compelled by the same logic,” Geynor said.
“You need have no fear,” Dornvald assured him.
Beside them, Thirg was unusually quiet. It was significant, he thought, that the outlaws were referring to the mysterious domeheaded visitors as Skybeings now, which seemed to indicate that they, like Thirg, no longer thought of them as servants. The Domeheads didn’t act like servants. They seemed to come and go, and act freely. The two dragons, by contrast, had just sat docilely throughout the negotiations in the desert, and after a while had given the impression of serving no other function than of being bearers of the Domeheads and the strange creatures that carried them around like living chariots and attended their every need. Presumably, therefore, flying creatures existed in the world beyond the sky that the Domeheads were from, and the Domeheads had learned to tame them just as robeings had learned to tame steeds, power generators, load-lifters, and foodmaking machines. But what form of being was it that was not a machine yet was attended by machines, and at whose bidding magic creatures saw through mountains, reported distant events, and destroyed without hesitation any who aroused their masters’ displeasure? Thirg brooded over the question and said little as the band descended into the valleyhead beyond the saddle and crossed the slopes below to pick up a track leading in the direction of the river.
Lower down, the slopes leveled out into flat banks covered by pipe-fronded chemical processing towers, storage tanks, and picturesque groves of transmission lines and distribution transformers, beyond which the track joined a wider road that crossed a stretch of open ground to a bridge. The party had just emerged onto the road when a group of horsemen wearing the uniforms of Carthogian soldiers appeared ahead, approaching at full gallop from the bridge. Thirg braced himself for the brutalized fanatics that Kroaxian teachings had led him to expect; then he saw that Dornvald had eased his mount to a halt and was sitting relaxed and at ease with a broad grin on his face while the column drew up behind. “Major Vergallet, unless I’m much mistaken,” Dornvald murmured to Geynor, who was shading his imagers next to him.
“It is,” Geynor confirmed. He glanced at Thirg and explained, “From the Carthogian border fort across the bridge.”
Thirg nodded and turned his head back to look. The Carthogians were smartly attired, alert, and well disciplined, and their leader was at that moment smiling in a way that was anything but brutally fanatical. He drew up before Dornvald and saluted crisply. “It’s good to see you back again, sir. I trust your mission was successful.” Thirg blinked his imager shades, jerked his head round toward Geynor for a moment, and then stared back at Dornvald. Sir?
“Very much so, thank you, Major,” Dornvald replied. He turned and indicated Thirg with a gesture. “This is Thirg, an inquirer, who has wearied of Kroaxia’s stifling ways and comes to enjoy fresher air among our thinkers and artificers in Carthogia. Thirg, meet Major Vergallet.”
“We are honored to have the general’s companion as our guest,” Vergallet said.
General? Thirg blinked again and shook his head. “The honor is surely mine to be admitted into such league,” he replied lamely as the column began to move again and the soldiers formed up on both sides.
Dornvald laughed at Thirg’s bemusement. “You will find Kleippur’s officers in the most unexpected places and the strangest garbs,” he said. “A small nation such as ours has to live by its wits and its ability to know more about its enemies than they know about each other.”
“And more by the skills and knowledge of its armorers than by the size of its army,” Geynor added as he saw Thirg looking curiously at one of the strange elongated steel tubular devices which the Carthogian soldiers were carrying slung across their backs. “And that of course, Question-Answerer, is one of the reasons why you are here.”
The party rested and refreshed themselves at the border fort, and by the end of even that brief stay Thirg had already dismissed most of what he had heard about the Carthogians as ignorant superstition at best, and at worst as a campaign of misinformation and lies waged deliberately by the more orthodox ruling elites of other nations to protect themselves from the threat that Kleippur’s social experiment represented. “The servility and obedience that the Kroaxian priests teach as a duty heretical even to question serve the nobles and princes in ways that are clear enough,” Dornvald remarked as he and Thirg talked over their meal. “But why the whims and fancies of mere mortals should be of such concern to an all-powerful Lifemaker is far more difficult to conceive. And does it not seem strange that eternal salvation for the many, in a hereafter which they are asked to accept on mere assurances, should be attainable in no other way than by their enduring hardships gratefully and laboring their lives in wretchedness for the further enrichment of a pious few who exhibit a suspiciously unholy interest in the quality of their own herenow?” Neither Dornvald nor his companions mentioned the Skybeings, and Thirg followed their example.
When the party left to continue its journey, the garrison commander assigned a detachment of troops to escort it to the city of Menassim, apparently because the Waskorians had been causing trouble again in an area that the road passed through. The Waskorians, Dornvald explained to Thirg, were an alliance of extremist sects who denounced as sinful and decadent the liberties that had come with Kleippur’s rule and were committed to bringing down the regime in order to return the land to its old ways. The rulers of Kroaxia and Serethgin had been quick to exploit the resentments of the Waskorians, and supplied them with weapons and fomented uprisings. The freedom to earn their salvation in their own way if they thought they needed to be saved from something wasn’t sufficient for the sects, it seemed; everyone else, willingly or otherwise, had to be saved their way too.
The remainder of the journey passed without incident, however, possibly because of the escorts. Slowly the rugged border country fell behind and was replaced by hills of thin pipeline, power cable, and latticework scrub, giving way to open slopes of bare ice higher up. After leaving the hills, the riders passed through many miles of dense forest, and the first edge of dark was showing low in the sky before signs of robeing habitation began increasing noticeably. At first isolated homes and then villages appeared; at the same time the landscape took on a tidier appearance with lubricant-fractionation columns standing in well-kept rows, neatly cultivated nut, bolt, and bearing orchards, and rich fields of electrolytic precipitation baths. Dornvald advised Thirg that they were approaching the outskirts of Menassim.
It no longer came as any surprise to Thirg to see that the reactions of the populace showed no signs of the fear and hatred manifested by downtrodden slaves encountering their oppressors; on the contrary, the soldiers were greeted with smiles and friendly waves, and children in the villages ran to the roadside to watch them pass. The adults seemed healthy and well plated; they were neatly and adequately dressed; and their houses were trim and in good repair. It was a strange kind of “living in perpetual terror” that produced such results; he thought to himself.
The city too, though bustling and crowded, was clean and seemed prosperous: The shops and stalls of the merchants were amply stocked, and the wares were of good quality; the streets were paved and cleared of rubbish; and the taverns and eating houses were noisy and busy. Other things that Thirg, who had tended to avoid cities as much as possible in Kroaxia, would have considered inseparable from the urban scene were conspicuous by their absence. There were no beggars or derelicts to be seen pleading or picking a living from the gutters, and neither did priests or nobles in tall headgear ride haughtily in six-legged carriages behind burly servants wielding bludgeons to clear the way. There were no burned or partly dissolved corpses on public display as a warning to others against blasphemy and heresy; no lesser offenders being exhibited and tormented by mobs in the marketplace; no penitents in emery cloth and carbon black confessing their sins to the world from street corners; no ascetic monks shackled to pillars for the length of a bright—no signs at all, in fact, of the holy and the devout dreaming up what had always struck Thirg as ever more absurd ways to degrade and debase themselves in order to prove themselves worthy creations of an all-wise and all-benevolent Lifemaker whose judgment and disposition were supposed to be capable of being influenced by such antics.
Nearer the center of the city the buildings became larger and taller, with organically grown structures giving way to fabrications of welded blocks of cut ice. Building with ice was not unknown in Kroaxia, but the scale and ingenuity of the Carthogian architecture made everything that Thirg had seen previously appear crude by comparison. Such advanced art was made possible, he learned, by the discovery of new methods for actually synthesizing artificial lifting and cutting devices from metals and other materials, which could mimic many of the functions of natural, living machines. Such discoveries also accounted for the extraordinary proficiency of the Carthogian army. The strange tubes that the soldiers carried on their backs, for example, were actually weapons that used explosive gases to hurl a projectile capable of shattering a slab of ice a finger’s-breadth thick at over a hundred paces.
Thirg was astounded. To exercise his intellect he had often speculated on the possibility of creating artificial machines, but he had never expected to see anything actually come of it. He remembered a friend who long ago had entertained preposterous notions of creating a device to harness vaporized methane for turning wheels. The friend had vanished abruptly after escaping arrest on sorcery and heresy charges issued by the High Council of Pergassos, and Thirg had almost forgotten their interminable arguments. On impulse he asked the Carthogians if they knew of his friend’s whereabouts. The friend was alive and well, he was told, and in fact lived not far away on the outskirts of Menassim. He was trying to improve a device he had constructed which used vaporized methane to turn wheels.
The news of Dornvald’s arrival had gone ahead, and a messenger met the party to advise that Kleippur would receive them at his official residence, which turned out to be an elegant but not over-ostentatious ice-block building inside a walled courtyard, situated not far from the former royal palace, which now served as government offices. On arrival the riders were conducted to guests’ quarters and invited to bathe and change into clean clothes, after which, refreshed and considerably more presentable, Thirg was taken to the warm, brightly furnished and cheerfully decorated Council Chamber on the ground floor, overlooking the courtyard across a wide terrace. Inside, Kleippur, flanked by two aides, was sitting at the far end of the large table that took up most of the room; Dornvald, Geynor, and Fenyig were also present, now wearing the uniforms of officers of the Carthogian army, and another figure was sitting with its back to the door. By the wall on one side of the room, one of Lofbayel’s maps was fastened to an easel, and more were stacked on the table in front of it.
Then Lofbayel himself turned in his seat, grinned delightedly at the amazement on Thirg’s face, and stood up to pump his hand vigorously. “Welcome to Carthogia, Thirg! I’m pleased to see you here safely. Have no doubts—you will find your true home here. I guarantee it.”
“You h-here?” Thirg stammered. “What of Kersenia and the family? Are they—“
“All here at Menassim, and well. Indeed, we would have you as our guest again if it pleases you.”
“But how? I thought you were watched constantly.”
“Another escapade of Dornvald’s, of which you will no doubt hear in good time. But come forward and meet Kleippur, and let us obstruct the more important business no longer.”
Kleippur, who was younger than Thirg had imagined, and wore a tunic of gleaming plate gold with a short cloak of royal blue ceramic links, began by welcoming Thirg to Carthogia a second time. It had been a somewhat irregular way of extending an invitation, he said, but he hoped Thirg would understand the occasional necessity for such measures. Though not of exceptionally tall or heavy build, Kleippur carried himself with an unhurried dignity that Thirg found impressive, and commanded an authority that stemmed more from an instinctive respect displayed by his followers than from any overt exhibition of rank or assertion of status. He spoke with a soldier’s directness and singleness of purpose, yet with an air of detachment and a disinclination to passion that marked him as a thinker. He introduced his two colleagues as Lyokanor, a senior officer from a part of the Carthogian army that Kleippur described as “Intelligence,” and Pellimiades, a director of military constructions and inventions.
Thirg said he was glad to be in Carthogia; there was no need for apologies. He had been treated well and courteously despite the difficult circumstances, and on top of that had enjoyed stimulating and thought-provoking company. “It had become a mystery to me even before the high pass above Xerxeon,” he said in conclusion. “For what kind of outlaw was this who rode my philosophical challenges as skillfully as he did his steed?”
Dornvald laughed. “I’m surprised that you could have been so easily deceived. For most of the time it was all I could do to cling with my philosophical fingers to avoid falling off.”
The preliminaries over with, Kleippur turned and gestured toward the maps. “I don’t have to explain how valuable this kind of information is to us,” he said. “Lofbayel has told me that you too believe the world to be a sphere, Thirg—a strange notion, and one which I admit causes me more perplexity than comfort...but nevertheless I will concede the possibility and grant that you have considered the evidence at greater length than I. So can this claim be tested? If so, how? If it is within my power to furnish the prerequisites, it shall be done, for I would sooner know the world as it is than place misguided trust in false appearances.”
The utterance was so unlike anything that Thirg was used to hearing from those in authority that for a second or two he just stared in disbelief. Then he recovered quickly and remarked, “It would appear that heretics have little to walk in fear of in this land.”
“Facts cannot be changed by convictions,” Kleippur answered. “He who is willing to change his convictions to suit new facts cannot be a heretic, while he who persists in holding convictions that deny the facts is not a heretic but a fool—as would I be for fearing him. Therefore the term has no meaning to me.”
“So is this the new faith of the nation that you would build?” Thirg asked.
“A philosophy, not a faith,” Kleippur replied. “Since it acknowledges the existence of nothing unknowable to reason, it has no place for belief without reason. I could not build such a nation, but I would help it build itself.”
“This is the land that Kroaxia has pledged to free from its chains and fetters?” Thirg said, sounding incredulous and allowing his eyes to come to rest finally on Lofbayel.
“Now you see which has the greater need to be freed,” Lofbayel said.
Thirg looked mildly uneasy. “So does Carthogia now pledge itself to free Kroaxia?” he asked.
“The chains that bind the Kroaxians are in their minds,” Kleippur replied, shaking his head. “Can a robeing be freed who asks it not, for is it not a self-contradiction to speak of imposing freedom? The Kroaxians must come to see truth as you have—each by his own way and in his own time. Only then can a mind be free and not merely have cast off one set of chains for another.”
“A noble thought,” Thirg agreed dubiously. “But let us not forget that my eyes were opened only after I was brought to this land forcibly.”
“Not so,” Dornvald said. “We merely brought your eyes to where they could behold the truth. You opened them yourself, a long time ago.”
Thirg thought for a moment longer, and at last nodded, satisfied. “Then the building of your nation shall have the help of both of us,” he told Kleippur. Kleippur nodded and seemed unsurprised. In that brief moment Thirg felt a touch of the compulsion that Kleippur was able to radiate as a leader. His simple and unassuming acceptance of Thirg’s declaration had done more to cement a bond of mutual respect and trust than any kind of elaborate speechmaking ever could.
“And so to business,” Kleippur said briskly. He looked at Dornvald. “Well, what tidings do you bring from Kroaxia? The Serethginians are reequipping and recruiting mercenaries as far afield as Corbellio in preparation for a new campaign against us, I am advised, but jealousies war within their camp which I have designs to turn to our advantage. What is new from beyond the Meracasine?”
A short silence fell. Dornvald’s two lieutenants glanced at each other ominously. Eventually Dornvald said, “Serious though that matter may be, Kleippur, events have come to pass which render it insignificant. We do indeed bring tidings—strange tidings—not from beyond the Meracasine, but from within it.”
Kleippur frowned from Lyokanor to Pellimiades, and then looked back at Dornvald. “Explain yourself, Dornvald,” he said. “What new events?”
Dornvald nodded at Fenyig, who reached down and produced a flat package of what looked at first like more charts, and put it down on the table. When he removed the wrappings, however, the contents were seen to be not handproduced drawings, but thick, glossy sheets carrying pictorial representations that contained incredible amounts of detail. Fenyig selected several sheets from the set and passed them to Kleippur, who leaned forward to pore over them while his aides peered down from beside him with equally mystified expressions on their faces. The pictures seemed to be of patterns of shapes distributed in rows and groups about an irregular network of lines. After watching in silence for a while, Dornvald stretched out an arm and traced a finger lightly along one of the lines on the sheet that Kleippur was holding. “Do you not recognize the Avenue of Emperors in our own city of Menassim?” he inquired casually. “And here...is that not your own residence, in which we are at this very moment gathered?”
Lyokanor gasped aloud suddenly. “It is Menassim! See, here is the course of the river, and the bridges. And there the palace...with the Courts of Justice behind. Every street and house is here!”
“What manner of artist drew this?” Pellimiades asked in an awed voice. He looked across at Thirg. “Is this an example of the mapmaker’s trade that I have not come across before?”
“Not of any art or trade of mine,” Thirg said. “Indeed I have never set eyes on Menassim before this bright.”
Kleippur looked up slowly. “Where did these come from?”
Dornvald’s expression became serious. “Has there been other news of late, Kleippur?” he asked. “Reports of strange happenings in the sky, perhaps?”
Kleippur returned a strange, puzzled look. “Yes...”
“Reports of flying creatures descending, as was supposed to have happened twelve twelve-brights ago?”
“Yes,” Kleippur said again, and frowned. “How do you know about them? Have you seen one too? What do they have to do with...” His voice trailed away as the connection suddenly became clear. He looked down at the picture of Menassim again, then disbelievingly back up at Dornvald.
Dornvald nodded gravely. He drew another picture from the stack but kept it facedown on the table. “The creatures exist, Kleippur. We encountered them in the Wilderness of the Meracasine. They are from another world that lies beyond the sky. They carry Skybeings whom they serve, that are stranger still—of the form of robeings, but not robeings...nor even machines. The Skybeings have mastered arts unknown to us by which they are able to preserve images and likenesses.” Dornvald gestured at the picture in Kleippur’s hand. “That is not an artist’s or a mapmaker’s creation. It is a preservation of a likeness of the city as was actually seen through the eyes of a creature that crossed the sky high above Carthogia. And the likenesses can be viewed in an instant from afar, even though the eyes that see them might be flying over distant lands, or even beyond the oceans.”
Kleippur was staring at Dornvald dazedly. He shook his head as if to clear it and raised a hand to massage the shading vanes above his eyes. “Other worlds?...Creatures that serve beings who are not machines?...What talk is this? If it were not you telling me this, Dornvald, one of my most trusted officers...”
“It is as Dornvald says,” Thirg confirmed. “I too was present. We flew in one of the creatures—all of us—to the hills that lie east of Carthogia’s border.”
“It’s true,” Fenyig said. Geynor nodded but remained silent. Still staring disbelievingly, Kleippur brought his gaze back to Dornvald.
Dornvald flipped over the picture that he had been keeping as final proof. Kleippur and his two aides stared down at it speechlessly. It showed Dornvald, Thirg, Geynor, and several other robeings standing with a group of ungainly, tubby-looking, domeheaded figures in front of what looked like a huge, smooth-skinned beast of some kind with stiff, tapered limbs. Fenyig passed more pictures. One showed Thirg and a Domehead with their arms draped jovially around each other’s shoulders and the Domehead making a curious gesture in the air with an extended thumb; another showed a Domehead perched precariously on Thirg’s steed, and Rex watching suspiciously in the background.
“We were being pursued by Kroaxian Royal Guards,” Dornvald said. “The Skybeings destroyed them. They talked to us through signs and brought us here. They are friends, and wish to come here to Menassim to meet its ruler. That is the message that they asked us to convey. They will be watching from the sky for signs laid out on the ground as your answer.”
As Thirg looked again at the pictures of the Skybeings and the strange animals and other life forms that served them, he thought back to the Carthogian projectile-hurling weapon and the devices constructed by the Carthogian builders. All were examples of the simple beginnings of new arts that mimicked the processes of Life itself. Was it possible that the weapons of the Skybeings and the vehicles that the Skybeings were carried in could be products of the same arts taken to a far more advanced stage of perfection?
Products?
Could the Skybeings have created the weapons and the dragons? But the weapons and the dragons were machines. The first machine must have been constructed by something that was not a machine. So could the Skybeings be the Lifemaker? No, surely not. Surely the thought was preposterous.
And then Thirg remembered that the idea of turning wheels with vaporized methane had once seemed preposterous too.