Among the Powers (29 page)

“
The Power called Leila of the Mountain of Fire
lives inside a mountain, in the great jungles far to the southwest.
The top of the mountain was blasted away long ago, and inside the
hole that the blast left burn fires so hot that the rock itself
melts and flows like water. Whether it was Leila who blasted the
mountain and lit the fires, or whether that happened before she
came to live there, no one now remembers.

“
Whatever the cause, the mountain burns, but
Leila lives in it unharmed. Her skin is darker in hue than any
mortal’s, even a southerner’s—almost black. Some say this is due to
the heat of the flames surrounding her home.

“
There is a village at the foot of her mountain,
a large and prosperous village, and Leila looks after the people
there. When one falls ill she comes to his bedside and touches him,
and five times out of six he is well again the next day. When the
crops fail or the hunters return empty-handed, Leila’s creatures
bring baskets of strange food and leave them in the village square,
for the Elders to distribute to those who need it most. Storms
always pass by the village without harming it, yet there is never a
drought.

“
This might be paradise, save that Leila asks a
price for her protection; once a year she chooses a handsome young
man from the village who must come alone to her home atop the
mountain. This man knows he has been chosen when a voice calls him
by name, a voice that speaks from the air.

“
If the chosen one refuses, then Leila’s
protection is withdrawn from the village; no baskets of food are
brought when supplies run low, the ill are left to recover or die
on their own, storms no longer pass by, and a thousand lesser evils
go unhindered. Leila takes no vengeance, she merely withdraws her
aid.

“
But that is enough; in all the memories of the
villagers, and in all the tales going back many generations, no
chosen one has held out against the summons for more than a
season.

“
And what becomes of the chosen ones, the
sacrifices? No one knows. Some have returned alive, after a season
or a year or ten years, but these fortunate ones never remember
anything that happened after they passed the rim of the crater.
Most never return at all. None have ever been found dead—if they
return, they return alive and well, and usually live long, happy
lives, troubled only by their inability to recall what befell
them...”

—
from the tales of Atheron the
Storyteller

Bredon paused, hesitantly glancing up and down the
slick grey walls of the passage. He had counted four doors in the
left-hand wall of this corridor, two of the regular large ones, and
two wide, low ones intended for service machines, so that the next
would be the fifth. Aulden had said to take the fifth door on the
left.

The door, of course, was closed. That was
not the problem. Getting through doors was easy. All he had to do
was yell, “Emergency override! Human in danger!” and the doors
would slide out of his way. That was a safety feature that Aulden
said had been built into every hold on Denner’s Wreck, back when
they were first erected by the automated equipment Mother—the
mother ship—had provided.

Of course, some of the Powers had removed
safety features, or altered them, or tampered with them in various
ways. Thaddeus certainly had. However, he had apparently not known
about this one. At least so far, the command had worked on every
door Bredon had shouted at in Fortress Holding, allowing him to
roam freely.

No, the problem was not that the door was
closed, nor even that he was unsure whether it was the right
door.

He
was
unsure, he admitted to
himself. The Fortress was a maze, with rooms and corridors
criss-crossing apparently at random, almost all of them a dismal,
uniform grey. It made the colorful and variform chambers of Arcade,
which had utterly baffled Bredon at first, seem simple.

Aulden had given him instructions for
reaching Thaddeus’ war room, which Aulden had provided unwilling
assistance in building, but the directions were hard to follow in
the face of the endless corridors and the frequent encounters with
patrolling machines. He could easily have miscounted somewhere, or
turned the wrong way.

But it was not the chance that he faced the
wrong door that worried him. It was the patrolling machines that
caused him to hesitate. What if one was just behind the door? What
if this one was not as cooperative as the others? After all, this
would be the very heart of the Fortress, and it might be more
carefully guarded than the corridors.

The first patrol machine had terrified him.
A low, boxlike silver affair with several jointed appendages, it
had stopped suddenly, pointed something at him, and demanded,
“State your business.”

Bredon had mouthed the meaningless syllables
Aulden had taught him, hoping he pronounced them correctly.

“Acknowledged,” the machine replied.

“Abort all programming and await orders,”
Bredon told it, his voice unsteady.

“Acknowledged,” the machine said again. It
stood, silently waiting, completely harmless, while Bredon walked
on.

That was no standard safety feature, of
course; the universal password was something Aulden had done his
best to infiltrate into every system in the fortress when he first
began to distrust Thaddeus, decades earlier. He was unsure how
successful he had been.

Bredon knew that it had not worked
everywhere; the doors, for example, were too simple to be tampered
with subtly, but those still had the original safety overrides.
Other machines Thaddeus had programmed entirely by himself, in
careful isolation, so Aulden had never gotten a chance at those.
Those would be the most dangerous, should Bredon encounter any,
even though they were generally stupid.

Even with the ones Aulden had tampered with,
there were ways Thaddeus could overrule Aulden’s gimmick, without
necessarily even realizing the password existed. He had hit on one
quite by accident. Thaddeus had programmed his machines to
literally not hear Aulden’s voice, either spoken or
transmitted.

It was a simple enough procedure, really,
but not something Aulden had ever thought of. He grudgingly admired
Thaddeus for coming up with it.

Even when the other captives had told him
what Thaddeus had said about it, Aulden had had trouble believing
it could work completely. It was a simple concept, but Thaddeus was
so technically inept that Aulden had hoped for some loophole.

Aulden had tried to use his secret password
to force the machines to free him and the other prisoners, but
without success. Monitor heard him, but simply didn’t react to the
password at all; Monitor was apparently an independent entity of
Thaddeus’s own creation, not linked in any vital way to the rest of
the fortress, and not built to any of Aulden’s own designs.

Most of the other machines did not
acknowledge Aulden’s existence at all.

Aulden had always thought that he would be
safe, that his mastery of the machines would allow him to resist
any sort of coercion Thaddeus—or Brenner, or any other potential
troublemaker on Denner’s Wreck—might apply. He knew that he, or his
built-in equipment, could dominate almost any program.

He had to make himself heard, though, before
he could affect an artificial intelligence. When the metal claws
had reached out for him and he had shouted commands at them, both
orally and through his skull-liner and other internal systems, it
was as though he had simply stood silently. The claws had picked
him up and carried him away.

He had puzzled it out during the hours he
spent in chains. The machines had not heard him. That was the only
explanation.

When Brenner and Sheila and Rawl and Lady
Sunlight had been delivered to the prison they had confirmed his
theory. Thaddeus had told them the machines could not hear
them.

Aulden had tested that. He had had each of
the other prisoners shout coded commands to the machines that
brought food and water, and the commands had been ignored—not
merely refused, but ignored, as if they were not heard at all.

And of course, Thaddeus would have made sure
that his machines could not hear any of the other immortals,
either. He did not have to worry about any sort of infiltration.
Machines could very easily be instructed not to accept orders from
anyone but a human being—in many cases that was standard default
programming—so no machines or artificial creatures could deliver
commands from his enemies. The other immortals would need to give
orders personally, rather than through any sort of inhuman proxy,
and Thaddeus had made sure that such orders would not be heard.

Bredon, though—Thaddeus had had no records
of Bredon’s voice, no reason to blank that voice out of the hearing
of his machines. With Aulden’s passwords, Bredon could override
Thaddeus’s control of any machine that Aulden had ever worked
on.

Aulden was the only real technician on the
planet, and Mother and all her subsidiaries had been built to his
design. Most of Fortress Holding’s machines would now obey Bredon,
if he could get to them.

Fortress Holding had one unfortunate
feature, from Bredon’s point of view. It had no central controlling
intelligence, no equivalent to the Skyland’s mind, or Arcade’s
Gamesmaster, or the housekeeper at Autumn House. A single central
intelligence susceptible to being overridden by Aulden’s universal
password would have been very convenient, but Thaddeus had not been
obliging enough to provide one. Aulden said that Thaddeus had
something called a “frankenstein complex” and refused to trust a
single central intelligence. Instead, he used hundreds of separate
intelligences.

All the major ones, however, could be
commanded from a central control station. That was where Thaddeus
spent most of his time, where he concocted his schemes, where he
had directed the attack on the High Castle. He called it his war
room. If Bredon, or any other mortal who knew Aulden’s password,
could get into that room he could cripple Thaddeus’s entire
fortress in a matter of seconds.

Accordingly, that was where Bredon was
headed, leaving a trail of open doors and blanked machines behind
him, trying unsuccessfully to follow Aulden’s hurried directions,
unaware that he had miscounted doors in the corridor because of
differences in terminology. Bredon, trained to be observant, had
counted access panels. Aulden, trained in remembering details, knew
quite well that the access panels were there, but did not consider
them to be doors, and failed to realize just how spotty Bredon’s
grounding in the culture of the immortals was. To Bredon, anything
a human or machine passed through in going from one chamber to
another was a door; to Aulden, only openings intended to be used by
humans were doors.

The correct door, the door Aulden had meant
to direct him to, was a hundred meters further on.

Bredon hesitated. He was, he believed,
nearing the war room now, with just two more chambers and a short
passageway to pass through. What if, worse than a mere machine,
Thaddeus himself waited on the other side of this door?

Well, he would just have to risk it.
“Emergency override!” he called. “Human in danger! Open up!”

The door slid obediently open, and he found
himself looking into an unlit storeroom lined with dusty, vacant
shelves and smelling of ink. No doors led to the war room
antechamber. No doors led
anywhere
.

“Oh, you stinking demons!” Bredon hissed,
realizing he was lost.

Worse than lost, he was alone in the enemy’s
stronghold, unarmed and virtually defenseless, without even a
symbiote to hold wounds closed or counteract poisons.

No, he corrected himself, he was not unarmed
or defenseless. He had Aulden’s password. He turned and looked back
down the corridor.

No one was coming. His danger, though real,
was not immediate.

He still had no idea why Aulden’s directions
had failed him, but that did not matter. He was a hunter; when one
trap or strategem failed, he devised another instantly.

He turned and headed back for where he had
left one of the machines awaiting orders.

“
I knew a woman once from another village, a
village far from here, on the south coast where the eastern forests
give way to sandy beaches, who claimed that she had once been a
guest of Lord Hollingsworth of the Sea. As she told it, she had
been playing on the beach as a girl, throwing sand out onto the
drifting watersheets and watching as they first tried to eat it,
then spat it back up in hundreds of little spurts that sent it
bouncing around madly—apparently that was a popular game among the
young people around there. As she played, though, something rose up
from the sea, a great black shape that she could never describe
clearly. She once said it looked something like an ear of corn the
size of a house, or perhaps a giant fish, though of course there
are no true fish in salt water.

“
At any rate, a man came out of this thing and
spoke to her, and told her not to fling sand on the watersheets,
because it could kill them. They were delicate, this man told her,
and trying to eat the sand could give them the equivalent of a very
bad stomach-ache, one so bad that it could kill the weaker
ones.

“
She thought this worrying about watersheets was
absurd, and said so, despite her fear and wonder at this person’s
strange appearance and even stranger mode of travel, which she took
for an odd sort of boat. The man retorted that she knew nothing of
the sea or its creatures.

“
She admitted that she knew very little, and
after some further discussion she found that she had agreed to
visit with the man in his home beneath the sea.