Ascent of the Aliomenti (16 page)

Will grimaced. “That’s my largest concern. We’re going to have heat leaking out the entire length of the ducts, and it’s likely that it will run out before it hits the end. But,” he added, grinning, “if the process works other than the heat fading before it reaches the ends, we can always build additional underground kilns at strategic points. That will give us more fires to maintain, but it’s still far fewer than we would need to maintain in everyone’s individual room.”

They lit the fire and after removing the seal blocking the heat from heading away from the residence hall, enabling the warmth to spread. To Will’s surprise, they were able to feel the warmth beneath their feet to an appreciable level nearly 30 yards away, and to a minimal degree to the Shops. As expected, they noticed little or no change in temperature at the far ends.

“Still,” Arielle said, “that’s better than what we had before. I think people are going to be very happy when the snows come this year.” As one of the best metalworkers in the village, Arielle had created much of the ductwork now running under the village. She and Will had discussed creating a manual seal that could halt the walkway heat and pipe all of the warmth from the furnace to the residence hall if necessary.

“I agree,” Will replied. “And they’ll be extremely happy when we’re able to sell a huge inventory of finished goods we’ve completed during the winter to all of the cities and towns that spent the time indoors and away from their crafts. But we’ll need to keep track of the impact of the heat levels in the residence hall when winter arrives. People will be OK with snow by the gates, but they won’t be okay shivering in their rooms when they were complaining of excessive heat last year. That’s when that seal will become important.”

Will then focused on the next part of the project, which involved setting up miniature gardens throughout the village, leveraging the new heat system to enable an extended growing system. Since the greatest amount of heat would come from directly above the underground furnace, he’d recommend growing their most critical vegetation there: morange and zirple, supplemented with fragrant fruit trees to provide decoration. Little would the others know the importance that fruit would play in their lives, for he would circulate the idea that the fruit was likely poisonous, something they could only verify if someone would volunteer to take a bite. The experience with Elizabeth told him that was highly unlikely to ever occur, and that was fine with him. He had no interest in enlightening any of them to the truth until it was necessary.

There was no reason to help Arthur start growing his immortal army before it was time.

XII

Bunker

1029 A.D.

Four years later.

Will teleported into the cave. To the best of his knowledge, it remained undiscovered, surprising given the relative longevity of the current incarnation of Aliomenti. Then again, even the most senior Aliomenti had only modest capabilities in the area of teleportation. None of them had any reason to practice Energy-based spelunking, either, since they weren’t trying to hide their actual skill level from the other Aliomenti as Will continually did. Will needed to keep the actual extent of his skills a closely guarded secret, for he’d learned that too many in this era didn’t handle power well.

In the twenty-third century, Adam had been stunned at Will’s technique for rapid Energy growth, using a feedback effect generated by willingly giving Energy to other living things and receiving a greater quantity of Energy back in return. He had elected not to share the technique in this time for that reason; if Adam didn’t know about it by then, then nobody else did either, except for Hope. No one had told him of the technique; giving without concern of getting something in return was simply in his nature. You couldn’t be told that you should choose to share your gifts; being told that giving would result in getting more than you gave meant people would engage in the activity with an expectation of payback, not for the good it could do. It wasn’t an attitude you could teach; it was something you were.

His own growth in Energy had been matched, thousands of miles away, by a similar growth in Hope’s skills. They had grown stronger in their ability to communicate telepathically, and at this point it was nearly effortless, much like dialing a mobile phone. The most demonstrable benefit of their rapidly growing Energy stores was their ability to teleport extensive distances, enabling them to cover the distances between them in far fewer hops, with far less fatigue, than when they’d started their respective paths to the future. They had located a city between their current homes where they could meet, face-to-face, for short periods of time. They would both teleport and meet outside the city, before entering together in Energy-supplied disguises. Will’s teleportation journey would begin with several short range hops first, before the longer hops needed to reach their joint destination; he had to concern himself with the possibility that someone – Adam, Arthur, or any of the others – might detect the huge bursts of Energy that arose from such travel, and take steps to mitigate that risk. They’d find a tavern and sit down for a long meal together, sharing stories of their time apart, reveling in each new breakthrough, and simply enjoying each other’s presence.

Those times were difficult, though. They both recognized the other as their spouse, not some random stranger, or someone they were dating or courting. Both wished to marry, to simply refuse to wait the thousand years until a younger, naive Will Stark would meet Hope. But they’d agreed after much discussion to postpone that next step lest the future be irrevocably altered, and through the years it had become a painful subject for discussion, one they’d finally agreed to keep off-limits until the time was right.

Hope reported that she and Eva were working to gradually age themselves. Hope was, now, in her mid-twenties, and she looked more like his twenty-first century memories of her each time they met. She’d officially been twenty-eight at the time of the fire that had destroyed their home and initiated the entire adventure through time he was presently living, and her actual age and visible age were coming into closer proximity.

“We’re starting to scout out cities several hundred miles away,” Hope told him. “In a few years, we need to move on, before people start to wonder why we age so slowly.” They wanted to be far enough away that none of the people in Healf would have a chance to run into them. That would prove disastrous, for Eva and Hope would need to youthen their appearances upon arriving at the new city, and then allow themselves to visibly age again. If a resident of Healf saw them looking younger than they did at the time the two women left the city, they would find their anonymity and secret very much at risk of exposure.

Likewise, they didn’t want to move closer to the Aliomenti village, for if their healing exploits became well-known, word might well reach back to Arthur. They still had no interest in alerting the man that two of the women he had thought dead still lived and thrived thousands of miles away. As the Aliomenti prospered and grew their wealth and power, they’d start to expand their trading territory. It was best for the two of them to move further east. She promised to send “pictures” telepathically of the new cities they scouted. After their meal, they left the city together, found a secluded spot, and reminded each other to eliminate their respective disguises. After a warm embrace, they each returned home.

Will smiled as he returned to the cave, as he always did after spending time in her presence. He glanced around, making certain that his most secret supplies were not disturbed, and then he teleported to within a few hundred yards of the village.

Several of the more senior members were outside the village that day, and rather than enter the open gates, he instead walked the path to the Ealdor River, where a massive hole had been dug near the shoreline. The villagers had decided, after many years, to build the underground bunker he’d recommended, a bunker that could be entered in no manner other than teleportation. It would be there that they’d learn and train for their most advanced capabilities, and perform research into technologies heretofore unknown in this era and location in the world.

Arthur was there watching as well, and Will wandered toward him. Arthur noticed Will’s approach and turned toward him.

“Remind me again why we need to have an underground bunker with no actual point of entry?”

“In part, it’s motivation to continue to improve,” Will replied. “Some of the older members have become quite proficient at the most basic skills, like telepathy and telekinesis. They aren’t trying to grow any more. They just make their products, head out to sell and have fun, and return. We know, though, that there are more advanced skills, and among those skills I’d include teleportation. People are often heavily motivated to achieve when they feel they’ll be denied something if they don’t.”

Arthur considered briefly, then nodded. “I’ll grant you that, though it’s hardly a universal motivator. What else?”

“As isolated as we are, people do travel along the rivers. They do ride on and walk along the roads a few miles away. If we have a few residents get into a heated argument, or even decide to engage in some raucous Energy-based fun, the sights and sounds of Energy use might draw unwanted attention. We all have our reasons for wanting to maintain our privacy here, and our people getting aggressive with Energy usage won’t help.”

Arthur nodded, thoughtful. “But if they have a place where they can do that with complete privacy, without having to worry about holding back...”

“Then they’ll be more inclined to try to improve.” Will grinned. “Especially if they have to work hard just to get into that place.”

Arthur looked thoughtful, gave a brief nod to Will, and headed back toward the village.

Arthur had initially been the most vocal opponent of the bunker. In a move that Will considered ironic, the man who had once kept a village inspired by dreams of supernatural abilities now wished to focus on monetary growth. Will suspected that Arthur’s stance was based on something more basic and personal, not a desire for fiscal focus. Arthur feared above all else a loss of control, a personality trait Will had unearthed over the past seven years. The teleportation process included a brief moment in time in which you ceased to exist, in any form or place, and in that instant you had no control over your body or your very existence. Energy skill was something Arthur couldn’t control in others, couldn’t manipulate in them, couldn’t suppress in them. His eyes and demeanor were unchanged from the years in which he tried to destroy the growing influence of Eva’s Traders in the village, seeking to poison the minds of others against those he perceived as personal threats. Yet with Energy, there was no turning back. Once new recruits received their initial allotment of morange berries from him, once they began regular doses of zirple that he supplied, his ability to forever control them and forge them to his will was gone.

Arthur was also beginning to worry about his own mortality. Though he remained in robust health, he was now in his mid-fifties. In Will’s day, a man of Arthur’s years would be considered middle-aged and one in position for prime leadership positions, but in this era he was viewed as an old man. Their recruits were uniformly in their mid-twenties or early thirties, and though they offered Arthur respect due to his stature in the community, none of them resisted the occasional age-related barb. Will, whom they believed to be in his early thirties, was seen as much more of a peer. Will’s obvious prominence was grating to Arthur, and combined with his sense of his impending demise, he realized that his dream of world conquest was one he’d never achieve.

Will dreaded the fact that he’d need to be the one to make the realization of that dream a possibility once more.

He wandered over to the giant Wheel. It was one of the few edifices left unchanged since the days when he’d tried to show a stubborn group of men and women that they could, in fact, do something new, something they believed impossible. The incredulity when he and the Traders had, by themselves, moved the massive wheel up the ramps and onto the support beams was a look he’d never forget, and his satisfaction with the accomplishment was genuine. Today, nearly a decade after he’d arrived in the eleventh century, it was one of the few reminders left of those earliest days.

The Wheel would change as well. Will had plans for it, plans that would enable the Aliomenti to make their next evolutionary step toward financial and technological prominence. Now was not the time for that, however.

He wandered through the forest again, finding it strange that there was so little for him to do, and the sensation of restlessness was growing. Their numbers had grown, and the newcomers earned the right to consume the morange berries only after they’d been part of the village for a year, performing the most grueling and unpleasant of chores, and working the most difficult construction projects. They also watched more senior villagers undergo what Will would come to know as the Purge, though without the internal nanobots used in Will’s case. Still, the formula used to accelerate the elimination of contaminants that blocked the formation, sensation, and control of Energy, was quite effective, far more so than the zirple-only route prescribed years earlier by Roland. Those senior enough to watch the initiation process were given a taste of what that temporary pain and agony would enable them to do, and to date, no one had left after seeing those demonstrations. Arthur had recruited well.

Will moved past the double grave site of Genevieve and Elizabeth, Arthur’s deceased wife and daughter. No one, outside him and Adam, knew that one of those graves was empty. Arthur had watched them lower Elizabeth into the coffin and seal it shut. Will had, with Adam’s assistance, managed to keep Arthur from guessing that he’d been an Energy practitioner since before the men ever met. That was a critical deception, for Arthur was no fool. If he knew Will had been able to teleport dozens of miles away at their first greeting, he might well suspect Will could teleport someone
else
as well. Given that Adam had boasted in the aftermath of his inferno that he’d controlled the dying villagers, putting them into a state of sleep they could not overcome, it wouldn’t be difficult for Arthur to suspect Will might well have done the same with Elizabeth.