The Heretic (3 page)

You either care or you’ll be made to care, lad,
the voice grumbled.
Center, impress upon our young charge what it means that we are
inside
his thoughts.

Are you certain that’s wise?

We have to push now. If the lad’s what we’re looking for, he’ll survive it.

Agreed,
said the high-pitched voice, which must be “Center,” the possessor of the high-pitched voice that the gruff voice was speaking to.
This may prove disorienting.
I will physically alter certain neuronal firing sequences within your brain and impart to you sufficient strata of term denotations to enable you to understand otherwise undefined referents.

Didn’t sound good. Not good at all. Whoever or whatever this Center was, it or he or she was about to alter his thoughts. Could it alter his memories? Everything?

Cause him to forget.

Mamma.

No!

I’m afraid this will be necessary.

I’ll jump. I’ll fall and die.

You are, in actuality, already standing on the floor.

Don’t poke inside me, I mean it!

I will perform only necessary poking.

Please! No!

I’m…sorry, Abel.

“Wait!” Abel screamed, this time sure to do so aloud. Maybe he could summon the priests or a guard. The gruff voice had cautioned him against shouting. Maybe he could use this against them. “I’ll yell!”

No,
said Center,
you won’t.

Abel’s opened his mouth to prove Center wrong. Not a sound came out. He struggled to shout. Nothing, not even a voiceless puff of air.

Okay,
Abel said.
Okay, you win. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt, isn’t it?

Yes,
said Center.

And suddenly his head exploded in pain.

And understanding. Continent. Orbit. Energy. Northern hemisphere. He began to comprehend.

The world is round!

Yes.

And the Land is not all of the world. Not by a long shot.

The Land and its surrounding desert reaches, which stretch to the Schnee Mountains in the east and the Braun Sea to the west, are the only portion of Duisberg inhabited by humans.

You keep saying Duisberg. That’s the name of this…planet?
asked Abel.

Correct.

And there are lots of other planets?

Lots,
said Center.
And other suns.

And he was made to understand.

That’s what the stars are.

Correct.

“Why should I believe you?” said Abel, speaking aloud. The thought was too hard to form completely without hearing it first. “You’re probably lying to get me to do something, like those beggar boys in Lindron who said they’d show me a hardback riverdak out of its shell. What they really wanted was to steal the slingshot Father made me. I had to fight six at once when they chased me to the barracks row.”

And did you win, lad?
asked the gruff voice.

“Nope,” Abel replied. “They got the slingshot. But it took all six of them to lick me.”

Abel leaned hard to the left, then hard to the right. The flyer yawed, and he could feel a buzz as the invisible stabilization fields, whatever they were, gripped him tight. He leaned to the left again, attempting to rock the flyer into capsizing.

If I’m not really flying, then I can turn this over…and fall! I won’t die, because I’m really in the storehouse. But maybe that’ll get them out of my head.

Another gruff laugh.
Good try, lad.

General Whitehall, we have much to accomplish today,
said Center.
Foundations must be laid.
It, he—Abel decided Center sounded more male than female—seemed irritated.

Almost. The flyer was almost tipped over on the right side. One more hard rocking motion and—

Enough!

The flyer froze in place. If he’d been on the edge of a cliff, Abel’s momentum would have made him fall. Instead, the stabilization fields seemed to absorb his motion like a down pillow.

We must decide if this child is the one
, the gruff voice said.
If so, then agreed, we will proceed. If not…
The voice trailed off.

That doesn’t sound good. That’s the kind of voice father uses just before he takes out his sharpening strop.

Abel stopped rocking and ceased trying to end the flying simulation. Besides, he really didn’t want to, not yet. It was time, however, to change the subject. “So you, the squeaky one who sounds like a cross between a three-year-old and a priest, you’re Center?”

Correct.

“And the other, you with the mean voice, you’re General White-something?”

Call me Raj, lad,
the gruff voice replied.
It’s my first name. I have a feeling we’re going to get along fine. May even be friends.

You wish!
But Abel did his best to keep his misgivings to himself and tried not to let them form into a full thought. He found it helped if he considered other things at the same time. Feeling like a flitterdont flapping around. The wind in his face. Clouds.

It did seem that the two voices couldn’t know
exactly
what he was thinking unless a thought was so complete he was on the verge of speaking it out loud.

At least so he hoped.

Well,
Raj
, you can call me Abel
, he said, a
nd I
don’t
think we’re going to be friends.
He hoped the tone of defiance was clear in his thought-speech.

From Raj’s quiet chuckle afterward, he figured it had been.

Abel turned his attention back to flying. He’d now reached the River. He’d approached from the east, and he leaned to his right to tilt the flyer into a north-northwest direction, parallel to the general trend upriver, although the water’s course itself wound back and forth in a completely crazy fashion.

The wind whipped by his ears and caused his hair, plaited by the nanny into a single pigtail, to stick out like a riding dont’s neck plumage. He leaned forward, and, to his delight, this increased the flyer’s speed.

You’ll notice that there are very few clouds to obscure your view of the Valley below,
Center intoned.

Yeah, so?

Precisely,
said Center.
There are
never
many clouds. Due to the extreme height of the Schnee formation—we are still not level with the smallest peaks, even at this altitude—almost all westerly wind current is blocked on the eastern side of the massif. The prevailing winds on this side of the continent are strong northeasterlies, channeling up from the Braun Sea to the wastes above the River’s springs and, ultimately, flowing through the high passes and into Duisberg’s Arctic, where what moisture there is becomes locked up in snowfall and ultimately ice. The northern glaciers calve into the Braun, and the cycle continues, for this geological moment, at least.

Massif.

Continent.

Arctic.

Abel winced as each of the unfamiliar words seemed to twist and squirm inside him before they locked on to a set of meanings. Every moment of new knowledge acquisition was also a moment of pain. Center had not lied. It hurt. But in the end, he made sense, or believed he made sense, of what the voice was saying. He understood.

The River itself originates near Chambers Pass in the Schnees and is the sole drainage for the western continent. It flows south-southwest to the Braun Sea. Duisberg is extraordinarily dry as settlement planets go, and there is no comparable hydrological system anywhere else, not in either hemisphere. The terrain created by the River provides the only planetary region capable of feudal-style agriculture such as is practiced in the Land.

Your deserts and scrublands are herder territory,
said Raj.
Fit only for nomads. And the Redlands will only support scraggly grazing animals at that, given the present condition of development. That’s one of the reasons that raiding has become such a way of life for those…what do you call the tribes outside the Land?

“Redlanders,” said Abel. “Even talking to them can get you crucified.”

And yet talking goes on all the time, I’ll wager,
answered Raj.

Correct,
said Center.

“But if you touch a Redlander, you’ll get sick and die!” Abel exclaimed.

You never really believed that, did you, boy?

Raj was right. When Abel mentioned the Redlander curse to his father, his father had nodded, but he’d smiled in the same way he did when Abel asked him if it was true swimming in a temple pool made a baby grow in a mommy’s tummy.

“I guess not.”

In fact, the current aristocracy is made up of Redlander stock,
said Center.
Observe. The Land is merely two to three leagues across roughly east to west, but is over two hundred leagues long north to south. It would take the better part of a Duisberg year to walk its length from the Delta to the upper cataracts.

A strategic weakness,
said Raj.
Would be fatal if the scrub lands weren’t so poor. So it is in the interest of Zentrum to keep them poor or at least to keep them sedated. And he doesn’t care how he does it, either. When the Redlanders have built up to any extent, he doesn’t just allow them to invade. He practically invites them in.

Your people have myths of these nomadic invasions. They are called the Blood Winds.

“I know about that,” said Abel, again returning to the spoken word to expresses a more complicated thought. “Elder Newfeld taught us about it in Thursday school.”

The people of the Land had grown wicked and disobeyed the commandments of God, the elder had said. So Zentrum, God’s voice, allowed their enemies to attack and destroy every other man, woman, and child. Even the donts. That was the part Abel particularly hated.

Zentrum made an accommodation with the invading Redlander tribes. They were given lands, titles, wealth. They stayed, interbred—and were absorbed into the surviving populace. This has happened time and again.

It’s going to happen again, Abel,
Raj said.
Soon
.

What’s going to happen?

Blood Winds. They’re coming.

Abel leaned back, slowed the flyer. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach. In the stories, the Redlanders hadn’t just killed the people of the Land. They’d spitted babies on the ends of their spears. They’d taken kids away to be slaves forever.

And worst of all, they
tortured
the riding donts before they slaughtered them. Cut off their hoofpads. Tied their mouths closed and plugged their blowholes so they couldn’t breathe.

Abel loved riding donts, loved everything about them. It hurt him inside to hear a dont scream in pain. It really bothered him if that pain came from a whip lashing or the kick of a glassrock spur. If he hated one thing more than all else, it was people who were mean to donts.

“They’re going to kill the donts? All of them? They can’t do that!”

Maybe they can and maybe they can’t,
Raj said, his tone softer.
That’s part of why we’re here, Center and me.

You can stop it? But you said God wants them to win, to—

Raj cut him off.
Zentrum. Again, lad, Zentrum is
not
God. God doesn’t care who wins or loses a fight. Well, let’s just say God’s thinking on such matters is a bit hard to figure. Zentrum, on the other hand, has a very simple plan. Keep things the way they’ve always been. Forever. Maintain stasis.

He has achieved this aim on Duisberg for nearly three thousand years by restricting the population to this peculiar blend of Neolithic and early industrial-age technology.

Abel pictured the Land, the rolling fields of barley and flax he’d passed on the way from Lindron to Hestinga. The flitterdonts and the hardbacks and especially Mot, the little riding dont that was his special mount.

“What’s wrong with Stasis? That’s what all the Laws and Edicts are supposed to be for.”

Can’t last,
Raj said.
And there’s no fallback.

Zentrum has made a fundamental miscalculation that will destine this planet to ruin,
said Center.
It was based on insufficient information. After all, when the Collapse came, the slide was rapid due to nannite viral infection of electronica via the Tanachi Net. A secured military or planetary defense computer of some sort, a being such as myself in original configuration, is often the only electronic suite that survived intact. My kind can be an extremely protective, even paranoid, lot.

Creativity, innovation, people having a say in their own governance,
said Raj.
Zentrum hates all that.

The words and their meanings again exploded in Abel’s mind. He closed his eyes against the strain, but it didn’t seem to help. This was not a headache. It was more like a
mind
ache.

And within all the words, one shining, horrible, wondrous, amazing fact stood out.

What the voice said was true.

Zentrum was not God. Not even the voice of God.

Zentrum was a mean Thursday school teacher who wanted you to sit up straight and recite the Law for watch after watch. Who never let you do anything that wasn’t Edict. Who whacked you with the correction stick when you got out of Stasis for even one second.

In the Land, it’s Thursday forever, lad,
said Raj.

When Abel opened his eyes again, he was hovering over the Fourth Cataract near the River’s headwaters as it cascaded out of the Schnee.

A village stretched below him. Its rooftops not flat, as were all roofs Abel had ever seen so far. These were oddly tilted and joined at the center in ridges.

They’re for shedding the autumn rains, lad,
Raj said with a chuckle.
Never seen the like, have you? Not only that, sometimes in midwinter they’re topped with snow.