The Heretic (4 page)

White, like in the stories?

Yes, lad. At least for a day. Then the dust settles in and browns it down.

Behold Orash, Progar District,
said Center.
Behold the gateway of the Blood Wind.

2

Observe:

The Redlanders flooded down the Escarpment toward the forts at the choke point of the River. The donts they rode upon were Valley stock sold to them by the very villagers they were now attacking. It didn’t matter. The Redlanders cut through the villagers like a scythe.

Time to go down,
said Raj, and abruptly Abel found himself off the flyer and standing in a village street.

The principle street of Orash in a not-distant future. Observe:

Screaming people were running past him. Babies were crying. Children were yelling for their parents, for their brothers and sisters.

Nobody knew where to go or what to do.

Because there wasn’t anywhere to go.

The rumble of massed riding donts in the distance. Men on dontback. Abel recognized the sound well enough without Center’s data planting.

Screams that were screams of pain.

A single villager charging down the street straight at Abel, a wild look on his face and insanity in his eyes.

It was the eyes that frightened Abel the most.

He’s seen something,
Abel thought to himself.
Something horrible.

Their eyes locked, and the man headed directly toward Abel at a quick pace, as if tugged by a lanyard.

Abel flinched. The man with the crazy eyes was going to run right over him. There was no time to dodge, no time to jump away.

But then the man stumbled. Slowed.

Still his eyes remained locked with Abel’s.

And then he keeled over and fell on his face at Abel’s feet.

The man’s back was pierced with arrows as if he were a human pincushion. And there was a gunshot to the left shoulder blade. Meat and muscle hung loose, and the ball had wreaked terrible damage to the bone.

It looks like a ragged, bloody cave,
Abel thought. Bone glinted within torn skin.

Enough,
said Raj.

Abel was back in the storehouse in Hestinga. He stumbled back from the upended flyer he’d been touching. He gasped for air.

“That man—” Abel managed to wheeze.

—one of many,
said Raj.
Many thousands who will die.

The Redlanders will sweep down Valley. The Second Cataract forts were designed as bases for forays into the surrounding desert, not north-south defense bastions. Their rear works are practically nonexistent. Most of them are unwalled and back up to the River. The Central Granary on Montag Island will burn. Rotten Bruneberg will crumble. Lindron will fall. The priesthood will flee to Mims. Mims will burn along with the priests. Thousands more will die from famine.

How do you know?
Abel asked.

I am a fifth-generation artificial intelligence running on a one hundred gigacubit quantum superimposition engine. I complete more calculations per one of your eyeblinks than all the computers of the first millennium of the Information Age could produce together if all of them ran at full power for each of those one thousand years.

Huh?

Trust me, Abel. I know.

Zentrum will reach an accommodation with the Redlanders,
said Raj.
As always, Zentrum believes he is taking the long view.

There is a tactical purity to the scheme,
said Center.
If one’s time horizon does not extend beyond a century or two.

Bloody hell, you sound like you agree with him!
Raj practically shouted in Abel’s still spinning mind.
Have we not seen this before? Have we not seen where it leads?

Merely tactical,
not
strategic,
Center replied without missing a beat.
There is an enormous error at the heart of Zentrum’s calculations. Stasis is error.

Abel pulled himself upright. He started to back away, to back out of the room, but something stopped him. He had another question. More to learn. Even after all this, after seeing the crazy-eyed man and his ripped apart back, Abel still felt—

Curious.

“H-how?” he said aloud.

How what?
said Raj brusquely.

Abel experimented with keeping his thoughts to himself.

Ask. Ask the question. Just because you want to know.
Maybe they
had
heard. Were these his own thoughts, or Center’s, somehow beaten into his mind?

No. No, they weren’t.

Mamma liked it when I was curious. Mamma liked it that I wanted to know everything.

“How is Stasis wrong?” Abel asked.

For many reasons. On a mere physical level, consider: Duisberg has three moons. The gravitational tides created by their interactions have created an enormous debris field in a nearby orbit. The very rotation of the planet, opposite that of the rotational momentum of the system as a whole, speaks to this fact, as well. There have been cataclysmic strikes in the past, and a future meteor strike is a virtual certainty, geologically speaking.

Each unfamiliar word lit up with a definition as Center spoke it. Didn’t help. This was the way all adults were, explaining things that had no earthly use right now.

So what?

I don’t understand your response.

I
said
, so what?

Rephrase, please.

Am I going to get hit by a giant rock from space?

Unlikely that you yourself will be hit.

Is my father?

Again, unlikely.

You’re stupid, then. And I don’t care.

Human cognitive integration error. Due to your limited experience, you will require time to process.

Raj laughed heartily. It was not a pleasant laugh, either.

There’s no error. He may be six, but he gets it well enough, don’t you, lad? Your mother—there’s the key. Was she not going to always be there for you? Where is she, Abel?

Mamma.

Not fair.

It was one thing to fight, even to get beaten up. He was tough, and, even if he cried, he knew he didn’t really care. But to have a presence in your head that knew the places that
really
hurt—that wasn’t shy about touching those places if it served a purpose…

Mamma. Sunken eyes. Gurgling breath that smelled like pus. Face twisted in pain at something inside that was eating her, killing her.

That
did
kill her.

It had only been a toothache.

Only a stupid toothache the week before. And then she left me.

Lad, I’m sorry.

“Not fair,” he whispered. “It was just a bad tooth. She had it out. That was supposed to cure her.”

Bacterial sepsis, no doubt.

I know it’s not fair, lad. It’s not. But there’s your answer. Nothing stays the same.

Zentrum has fallen into a logical trap of his own creation.

“Not. Fair.”

Something heavy in his hands. Abel glanced down. It was the rock, the door stop. He was still clutching it. He’d been clutching it all along.

See there in the corner? See the cone-shaped thing?

Abel looked around. He had to step past the upturned flyer to see what Raj was talking about. It was indeed a cone shape, white with black markings upon it, as if it had survived a terrible fire.

“I see it,” Abel said. “What is it?”

Another laugh, this one not so unsettling.

Why, it’s the spaceship we came in, lad, Center and me.

And Abel understood—because he was made to understand. The capsule speeding through hyperspace in a tunnel of stars, their light extended into lines about the spaceship. This capsule. Hundreds of others on their way to different worlds, other fallen human worlds.

Like puffer-rod seeds, when you blew them, flying every which direction.

“I don’t get it,” Abel said. “I mean, I know what a spaceship is, you just showed me. But why? Why’d you come here?”

Change
, replied Center.
Change
will
occur, and if all upward change is blocked, what eventually occurs will be downward. Another Collapse. And this one longer and more complete than any other. Maybe final. This world must be readied to rejoin the awakened Republic. Those ships will come. And when they do, if they find nothing but primitives crawling among the ruins, they will pass by. There is much else to do.

“So what?”

Things can get worse,
Raj said.
Like they got worse for your mother.

“Leave my mother alone!”

If this society had the most basic antibiotics, your mother would still be alive,
said Center.
We could have helped her.

“You’re gods from the heavens! If you want to help me, bring her back!”

We can’t do that, Abel. We’re not gods.

“But you
are
. I know what you say, but you have to be to show me all this. I’ll do whatever you say. Whatever it is you want.” Tears were streaming down Abel’s face. “Just bring Mamma back.”

You don’t understand, Abel Dashian
, Center calmly replied.
It is
we
who need you.

He gripped the rock tighter. “Then what good are you?” With all his might, Abel raised the rock over his head. He stepped toward the capsule. “Get out.”

You can’t harm the capsule,
said Center.
Not with a simple stone, Abel.

“Get out of
me
.”

A moment of silence. Then Raj’s deep voice, now tight with concern.
His plan isn’t to hurt the capsule,
Raj said.
Abel, lad—

“You don’t scare me,” said Abel. Despite himself, he found himself laughing through his tears. “You don’t scare me, I’m the Carnadon Man.”

Then Abel brought the stone down hard upon his own head and fell into darkness.

3

When Abel awoke, he was looking at his reflection in still water. His head ached.

Not still water. Probably blood,
he thought.
My blood. I’m seeing my reflection in my own blood. Must be a lot of it.

He reached for the blood to see if it was still warm. Maybe this was what it was like to be dead.

His hand stopped against the shiny surface. He pushed harder. The water was solid, and it wasn’t water at all. More like stone. Smooth stone.

Abel sat up. He was surrounded by himself. He moved. Many other Abels moved with him.

Reflections. But there were dozens. It was as if he were inside a gem.

Where am I?

Abel stood up. He walked forward. One step, two. He ran into himself, nose to nose. Reached for his face. More smoothness.

Not blood, not reflecting water. This was a room made of looking glass. Mirrors. He’d only seen one once before. His mother’s friend Dagmar in Garangipore had a small glass she used to apply the kohl liner to her eyes. That she could do this without poking her eyes with the liner pencil had fascinated and scared Abel, and he’d liked to watch.

Yet this glass was different. Brighter. Completely reflective. Where did the light come from, anyway?

Suddenly Abel lashed out, swung at a wall as hard as he could with his fist.

Pain shot through his hand.

Ow!

Nothing, not the slightest effect on the wall. A smarting hand. Abel nursed it to his side while considering his next move.

It might help your plans for escape if you had some idea where you are, wouldn’t it, lad? And just who and what you are dealing with.
The gruff voice had returned again. He hadn’t managed to smash it out of his skull after all.

Then, as a man might step through a waterfall at the Second Cataract (Abel had seen it happen once; there were caves behind the falls), a tall man with pale skin, dark hair, and a curly black beard stepped
out
of
one of the mirrored walls and came to stand beside Abel. The man wore strange garb. Abel had never seen fabric so uniformly smooth. His own trousers and tunic were made from beaten flax fiber and always felt scratchy.

In addition to a shirt that covered his arms down to just below the elbow, the man wore not a well-bred man’s muslin trousers but the kind of baggy-legged pants that only beggars and wastelanders wore in the Land. These pants were stuffed into black boots of what looked like the finest herbidak leather Abel had ever seen. He wanted to touch those boots just to see if they were as supple as they looked.

“Hello, lad, I’m Raj Whitehall,” the man said. He gestured at the surrounding mirrored walls. “And this, all around us? This is Center.”

Greetings, Abel.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere in the mirrored room.
We were concerned, but the danger has now passed. I am effecting repairs on the trauma your actions have cause to your brain. My efforts will allow you to avoid a convalescent period and, in fact, keep you from experiencing any ill effects at all, to a ninety-three percent probability.

“This is like the flying, isn’t it?” Abel said to Raj—mostly because he knew where to look when speaking to him. “It’s not really a…a simulation. This is a”—he searched for the new terminology, found it implanted—“mind-space.”

“You’re in the district prelate’s house, lying on his wife’s sleeping pallet,” Raj replied. “Your father and she are watching over you until you wake up. You managed to give yourself a fine concussion.”

Raj smiled. His big white teeth shone brightly in his black beard, making him look less like a wastelander and more like a Redland barbarian.

“Father found me?” Abel asked.

“That he did,” Raj replied. “The high priest was with him, too. It caused quite a stir. You got picked up and taken to Prelate Zilkovsky’s home on a private litter.”

“Father must be worried.”

“He was. And by the sound of his voice, a bit terrified that he would lose you as he did his woman. I would not expect him to be in a happy mood when you wake up.”

Observe:

Abel was in the priest’s house. He lay propped up on pillows upon a sleeping pallet. The walls of the room were painted white with a wash that Abel knew had to be very expensive. He smelled the familiar odor of surkrat cooking somewhere, a dish his mother had made. His father paced back and forth, his sandals slapping in rhythm against the ceramic tile floor.

Then Abel was back in the mirrored room.

“I want to wake up. I want to tell Father I’m all right.”

“In good time,” Raj answered. He hunched down to face Abel eye to eye. “Let Center do his work upon you first, lad.” Raj settled into a crisscross position on the floor. He did not fidget, and seemed like a man accustomed to occasionally sitting on floors—or wherever the situation called for.

“You’re Raj.”

“Yes, lad.”

“You dress funny, but you look kind of like a man.”

Raj smiled. His teeth flashed within his dark beard. “That’s right, lad, I’m a simulation,” he said. “But a good one. I even manage to fool myself.”

“You’re not real.”

“I used to be.” Raj nodded as if remembering, though how could a simulation
really
remember anything? “A fighter. Then a soldier. Helped bring a world or two out of darkness.”

“And Center?”

“Center is no simulation. He’s here on Duisberg, contained in that capsule in the storehouse. And, in a way, so am I.”

“Then how come I see you when I’m supposed to be asleep in the prelate’s house?”

Raj nodded, thinking. Then he smiled and spoke. “You know how the Signal Corps has those towers along the road?”

“Those are for wigwag. You can send a message, or get one.”

“Well, think of it like this: there’s a little wigwag tower in your head now, lad. We talk to you that way.”

“And you can change things?”

“What do you mean?”

“In my head. Like make me forget about my mother. Wipe her out. You could do that, couldn’t you? And when you find out I’m not the one you’re looking for, you’re going to wipe her out. Like a rake on sand.”

He felt a sob coming on. How could you sob in simulation? You shouldn’t be able to. It wasn’t fair.

“Lad, we won’t take your mother away.”

Abel felt his teeth clenching, his whole body clenching. He didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to admit it even to himself.

“You won’t?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter anyway.”

“What?” said Raj. “I don’t understand, lad.”

“Because
I’m
forgetting what she looked like,” he said.

Raj’s hard face softened. “So that’s it.”

Interesting.
The room filled with Center’s voice.
Your precipitous action was a distant outlier in my own calculations. It’s not often that I am outthought, especially by a six-year-old.

But now that he had his point, Abel was not going to let go of it. He was being stubborn. He didn’t care. “You
can
wipe my mother away, can’t you?”

Raj nodded. “We could, lad.”

“Leave her alone,” Abel said. “Just leave her alone.”

Raj reached out, touched Abel’s shoulder, but Abel jerked away. “I’ll kill you both if you touch her,” he murmured.

“You have my word, lad,” Raj said. “Wouldn’t serve any purpose.”

“You’re a simulation. You’re just…you’re just a
nothing
. I don’t like you. I don’t trust you.”

Raj shook his head. Abel risked a glance at him. He seemed sad.

“It’s the way of all things,” he said. “Maybe we’ll earn your friendship, Abel. But we’re going to have to stick together anyway.”

“How come you are doing this to me?”

“We have to reach you when you are little, before the Law of Zentrum gets all the way beaten into your brain, that’s why.”

Suddenly, as loud as he could, Abel formed a thought. He wasn’t going to say it. He was going to shout it.
I can get both of you out of my head! Any time, I can!

That is correct, Abel. But at the cost of your own life,
said Center.

I’d rather be dead than a slave.

Raj rose to his knees from the crisscross sitting position. For a moment, he looked Abel straight in the eyes. Abel returned the gaze with a glare.

Raj took Abel by the shoulders. Abel looked down at the backs of Raj’s big hands.

He could shake me to death with those. Well, let him try.

Abel pushed Raj’s hands away, crossed his own arms, and continued to glare.

Then Raj threw his shaggy head back and began to laugh. “Oh, we’ve found the one, all right!”