Among the Powers (15 page)

“
He marvelled at this, and wondered who could
have found him, so far out in the desert, but then his weariness
caught up to him and he fainted.

“
When he awoke again he was in a tent, bright
with the desert sun’s light through the cloth; rugs covered the
sands to make a floor, musicians played on pipes somewhere outside,
and he lay upon a pile of embroidered cushions atop the
rugs.

“
Before him sat a richly-robed man, holding out a
cup.

“
He took the cup and sipped from it, and found
that it held an invigorating liquor he had never tasted before. He
drank deeply, and when the cup was empty he felt well enough to
stand and bow politely to his host.

“
The man waved for him to sit down. ‘I am
Khalid,’ he said, ‘and you are my honored guest. Welcome to the
Tents of Gold!’ He waved a hand, and for an instant the wanderer
saw not a simple tent, but a vast banquet hall, where fountains
poured forth bubbling streams, and beautiful women danced to the
pipers’ music, and the tables groaned beneath the weight of a great
feast.

“
Then the tent was back, and Khalid said, ‘What
is mine, is yours. You have but to ask...”

—
from the tales of Atheron the
Storyteller

Bredon awoke slowly, uncertain where he was and
puzzled by the darkness.

He remembered going to sleep well after
sunset, and he felt well-rested, so how could it still be dark? Had
he slept clear through firstlight and into the midwake dark? He
felt the soft fur coverlet under which he lay, and knew it was not
one of his own furs; the texture was not quite anything he
recognized. He did not smell the familiar scents of smoke and
leather that filled his own tent; in fact, he did not smell
anything. Nor did he hear anything; the sound of the wind in the
grass was eerily absent.

He sat up.

Light sprang up, a soft golden glow, and he
remembered.

He was in Arcade, the secret home of Geste
the Trickster.

The golden light was localized; all he could
see was his bed—which was now yellow, though he remembered it as
blue—and a small open expanse of smooth, shining floor that looked
yellow, but might have been white in a more ordinary light.

He hesitated, unsure what he should do.
Wandering about unguided in a Power’s hold could surely be
dangerous.

“Is anyone there?” he called softly into the
unsettling silence.

“Sure, kid, I’m here,” came the calm reply.
“What can I do for you?”

Bredon recognized the voice as the invisible
housekeeper, the one Geste had called “Gamesmaster.”

“I don’t know,” he said, speaking normally.
“What am I supposed to do?”

“Whatever you like,” the intelligence
replied. “The boss told me to take care of you, and he didn’t set
any rules. You can pretty much do as you please while you’re here,
at least as far as I’m concerned. I’m just supposed to see that you
have what you need and don’t get hurt.”

That was reassuring, and Bredon relaxed a
little. “Where is Geste?” he asked.

“He’s gone out to the Skyland for a council
of war. He wants to stop Thaddeus from screwing up anything, and to
get Lady Sunlight back here for you while he’s at it.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Sorry, kid, but I doubt it. I figure you
had best just wait here until the boss gets back—or gets killed,
whichever it is.”

Bredon was not sure whether Gamesmaster was
joking in speaking of his master’s death—after all, could a Power
really
die? Geste had said so, but Geste was a notorious
liar.

Still, whether there was any genuine danger
or not, Bredon could not shake the feeling that he was somehow
responsible for involving Geste in something unpleasant. “I want to
help, though,” he said. “There must be
something
I can
do.”

“I don’t know what it could be. Look, kid, I
know you mean well, but this is between the immortals. You haven’t
got the technology or the knowledge or the experience to be of any
help, so far as I can see.”

Bredon knew that was true, but he refused to
accept it without argument. He had never enjoyed sitting by and
watching while others acted, and he felt somehow responsible for
Lady Sunlight. Besides, from a purely selfish point of view,
anything he could do to help would also improve his chances of
eventually bedding her. “Maybe I can learn,” he said. “Maybe I can
see something the Trickster would miss,
because
I’m only a
mortal, something that a Power wouldn’t think of.”

The intelligence hesitated, then replied,
“I’m sorry, kid, but I just can’t see it. Even if there is some
little fact that you know that we don’t that could be of use, how
will we ever know it? You don’t have the first idea what’s really
happening here.”

“I
know
I don’t, but I
want
to
understand,” Bredon insisted. “I want to learn. Can you teach
me?”

“Well, sure, I can,” Gamesmaster replied.
“Of course I can teach you. But I don’t know how much you can learn
in time to do any good. I’ve got direct neural loading in a lot of
fields, imprinting, we call it, but not for any of the basics that
you’ll need, because Geste and all the rest had all that centuries
ago and weren’t planning on having any kids on this planet. I’d
need to teach you a lot of stuff with ordinary sight and
sound.”

“That’s fine!” Bredon said happily.

“Well, maybe it’s fine. We’ll see.”

“When do we start?” The prospect of a new
adventure, of learning what was really going on, thrilled him.

“Oh, any time, I guess. But first, aren’t
there a few little things to take care of?”

“Like what?” Bredon demanded, suddenly
suspicious.

“Oh, details like food, drink, and a quick
visit to the equivalent of a hole in the ground?”

“Oh.” Bredon realized sheepishly that the
mysterious voice was quite correct; his bladder was full and his
belly was empty. He flushed slightly, then smiled at his own
discomfiture and stood up. “Lead the way,” he said, his hand hooked
into the waistband of his breeches.

Behind him, the bed shifted its shape, and
oozed around him, forming a receptacle in the appropriate position.
Other appendages formed, but waited their turn.

In the next several minutes Bredon was
stripped, bathed, checked for parasites, shampooed, massaged, and
generally cleansed and invigorated. He had no names for most of
what the “bed” did to and for him, but when it had finished he felt
absolutely wonderful.

“Would you like your old clothes back, or
something new?” a soft, feminine voice asked.

Bredon was startled, and momentarily
embarrassed by his nudity until he realized that speaker was surely
another inhuman spirit. When he recovered he decided he felt ready
to take a little risk. “Something new,” he said.

“Anything in particular?”

“No.”

“Delighted to be of service, sir.” Something
silky slid up his legs and onto his back; he raised his arms to
slip into the sleeves, and found himself wearing a one-piece
garment that looked like velvet, but that weighed almost nothing
and shimmered in a dozen shades of soft brown.

“Nice,” he said appreciatively. He was
dressed as well as a Power now.

A table appeared before him, seeming to form
out of thin air, and a strangely-shaped chair rose out of the floor
behind him. He sat down gingerly.

“Did you have anything special in mind for
breakfast?” Gamesmaster’s familiar voice asked.

“I can’t say I did,” Bredon answered.

He expected more of the foil packets, but
those, he discovered, were strictly trail food. Here at Geste’s
home meals were served properly, on plates of various sizes, and an
assortment of oddly-shaped dishes, some of which had the
disconcerting habit of floating in mid-air a few centimeters above
the table. All the plates and dishes had the knack of quietly
vanishing once they were emptied.

Bredon did not recognize a single one of the
foods he was served, whether by sight, taste, or aroma. All,
however, were delicious.

When he had eaten his fill the golden light
blinked out, plunging him into total darkness. Gamesmaster
announced, “We’ll begin your lessons now, and we’ll start with some
elementary cosmology. I’ll do my best to put this so that you can
understand it, and if there’s anything that you
don’t
understand, please stop me and I’ll try to explain it more clearly.
I expect some of this will conflict with what you were taught by
your own people, but this is the way those you call the Powers
understand the universe.” It paused, but whether it expected a
response or merely wished to heighten the drama, Bredon could not
decide.

“In the beginning,” a deep new voice said,
“there was the Bang.” An image appeared, a blaze of light hanging
in the darkness before him, spreading out and scattering.

Bredon listened to the creation myth as
retold by what he had to consider another of the Trickster’s
familiar spirits. The story was not very exciting; his own people
had a much shorter and rather more interesting creation story, full
of people rather than impersonal cosmic forces. The spirit,
however, seemed to take its story more seriously than anyone took
old Atheron’s tale of the warring sects of Kru and Passijers being
cast out of the heavens.

He listened, though, and he watched the
images of planets coalescing out of dust, heard the explanation of
how life arose from the seas, how the creatures changed their forms
over millions of years. He gaped at some of the creatures he was
shown, and laughed at others. The pictures were incredibly real, so
clear and detailed that he had difficulty in believing they were
merely images.

Then humans entered the story, not sent down
from the heavens, but as just another creature.

That was a new and interesting concept;
Bredon rather liked the idea. He watched as the story ran quickly
through the rise of civilization and the growth of technology.

It was only when he was shown the early
sleeperships wallowing out toward the stars that Bredon realized he
had been watching the history of the World in the Sky, rather than
of his own world.

The tale of Denner and his Kru and Passijers
fit in quite nicely with what he had just seen, and he suddenly
understood what Geste and his other familiar had meant in speaking
of other worlds. All those planets that had formed in the beginning
were worlds, and the stars were suns—hundreds, thousands of
them!

He told the spirits to stop while he
absorbed this, and the image diffused into a soft white glow. He
could faintly see the enchanted forest just beyond.

He repeated slowly to himself what he had
just been taught. His world was not the only one between the
heavens and the world of the dead. According to this spirit, there
were hundreds of others, or thousands.

His mind boggled. What a concept! Worlds
upon worlds, each with thousands, or millions of people!

And the stars in the darktime sky—each of
them was a sun, and each sun had a world beneath it. All his life
he had looked up at a thousand other suns, without ever realizing
it.

What were all those other worlds like? What
would it be like to live in the light of another sun?

He stared into the darkness, trying to
imagine an entire different
world
, fully as big and complex
as his own.

He failed. His imagination could not even
encompass the totality of his own world; he knew that already.

Other worlds! He shook his head.

But there was no need to try and absorb it
all at once. He would have plenty of time to digest this
wonder.

“All right,” he said. “Go on.”

The spirits, if that was what they were,
obliged; the darkness lit up anew with the globe they called Terra,
the world where humankind had first developed, and the story rolled
on.

The magic called “technology” grew ever more
powerful, and under its complex spells humans were transformed from
mere mortals into demi-gods, no longer subject to aging, always
strong and healthy, able to create almost instantly anything that
they might fancy, even living creatures. These latter-day humans
could reshape entire worlds at a whim, even bend space itself.
Their machines became self-aware intelligences in their own
right—not spirits, but living creatures that were built instead of
bred.

Bredon was not sure that the distinction
really meant anything; whether built or conjured, these things
still seemed like spirits to him. He shoved that thought aside as
irrelevant.

Naturally, many of the supernal beings that
had been born humans grew bored with their world. With centuries of
life stretching before them, boredom could be a severe problem. The
leading cause of death on Terra was suicide brought on by
ennui.

Millions of weapons against boredom were
developed. Humans transformed themselves into machines or
creatures, transformed machines into humans, plunged themselves
into invented realities, and invented entertainments so complex and
bizarre that Bredon could not begin to comprehend them, but
throughout, one of the most popular ways to avoid boredom was
travel. The universe was full of surprises. Artificial
entertainments were limited by the imaginations of humans and
human-made things, while nature remained unthinkably vast and
varied. Whenever life in one spot grew tedious, one could simply
pack up and go somewhere else.

In just this manner, twenty-eight bored
people took a ship and a handful of ancient, incomplete records
and, on a whim, searched out the lost colony of Denner’s Wreck.
Surprised and pleased by what they found, they settled down for an
extended vacation there.

Bredon asked that the story stop again.