The Last Ringbearer (11 page)

“I never confuse anything,” the nazgúl snapped coldly. “That little paper is the best work you have done and will ever do; at the very least, you’ve immortalized your name. I say this not because I believe it, but because I know it. We have some ways to see the future, and use them sometimes.”

“Well, sure, you must be interested in the future of science.”

“In this particular case our interest was you rather than science.”

“Me?!”

“Yes, you. Still, not everything is clear, which is why I’m here to ask a few questions. Most of them will be … rather personal, and I only ask for one thing: please answer as honestly as you find acceptable, but don’t invent anything; that’d be useless anyway. And please stop looking around all the time already! There are no other people for …” – the nazgúl paused for a moment – “at least twenty-three miles in any direction from your camp, and your friends will sleep soundly until we’re done here. So – are you ready to answer under those conditions?”

“As I understand it,” Haladdin smiled crookedly, “you can obtain my answers without my consent.”

“Yes, I can,” the nazgúl nodded, “but I will not. Not with you, anyway. The thing is, I have a certain proposition for you, so we must at least trust each other … Wait, do you think I’m here to buy your immortal soul?” Haladdin mumbled something unintelligible. “Oh, please – that’s complete nonsense!”

“What’s nonsense?”

“Buying a soul, that’s what. Be it known to you that a soul can be obtained as a gift, as a sacrifice, it can be lost – but it can be neither bought nor sold. It’s like love: there’s no give-and-take, otherwise it’s just not love. Besides, I’m really not that interested in your soul, to be honest.”

“Really?“ Strangely, that stung. “So what interests you, then?”

“To begin with, I’m interested in finding out why a brilliant scientist would quit the job which was the meaning of his life rather than just a livelihood, and volunteer as an army field medic.”

“Well, for example, he was interested in verifying some of his ideas about how poisons work in practice. Such a wealth of data was being lost, you know …”

“So the Elf-wounded soldiers of the South Army were nothing but guinea pigs to you? That’s a lie! I know you like my own two hands, from your idiotic experiments on yourself to … Why the hell are you trying to seem more cynical than you are?”

“But the practice of medicine does predispose one to certain cynicism, especially military medicine. You know, they give this test to all novice field medics. Say that you get three wounded men: one with a belly wound, one with a serious thigh wound – open break, blood loss, shock, the works – and one with a glancing shoulder wound. You can only operate on one at a time, so where do you start? Surely, all the novices say, it’s the belly wound. Bad guess, says the examiner. While you’re busy with him, and it’s nine out of ten that he’s going to die anyway, the guy with the thigh wound will get complications and will at least lose his leg, and most likely die, too. So you have to start with the most serious wound among those with a decent chance of survival – in our case, the thigh wound. As for the belly wound, well … give the man an analgesic and leave him to the One’s will. To a normal person this must seem the height of cynicism and cruelty, but in war you can only choose between bad and worse, so this is the only way. It was only in Barad-dúr that we could talk nicely, over tea and jam, about how every human life is invaluable …”

“Something doesn’t add up here. If all your considerations are based on pure expediency, why did you lug the baron on your back and risk your whole team, rather than administer the ‘strike of mercy’?”

“Where’s the contradiction? It’s plainly obvious that you have to help your comrade to the utmost, even at the greatest risk: you save him today, he’ll save you tomorrow. As for the ‘strike of mercy,’ don’t worry – were it necessary, we would’ve done it in the best form … It used to be better in the old times, when wars were declared in advance, didn’t involve peasants, and a wounded man could simply surrender. Too bad that we weren’t born then, but no inhabitant of those glass-house times can cast a stone at us.”

“A beautiful exposition, Field Medic, sir, but I suspect that you’d have asked the sergeant to perform the ‘strike of mercy’. No? All right, another question then, again about expediency. Has it occurred to you that a leading physiologist sitting in Barad-dúr and studying antidotes professionally could save a lot more lives than a field medic with the skills of a nurse?”

“Of course it has. It’s just that – sometimes there are situations when a man has to do an obviously stupid thing just to retain his self-respect.”

“Even if this self-respect is ultimately bought with others’ lives?”

“Well … I don’t know. After all, the One may have His own ideas about that.”

“So you make the decision, but the One bears responsibility for it? Neat deal! Haven’t you told the same thing to Kumai in almost the exact same words I’ve just used? Remember? You had no chance, of course – once a Troll decides something, that’s the end of it. ‘We may not sit out the battle which will decide the fate of the Motherland’ – and so an excellent mechanical engineer becomes an army engineer, Second Class. A truly priceless acquisition for the South Army! In the meantime it seems to you that Sonya is looking at you strangely: sure, her brother is fighting at the front lines while her bridegroom is cutting up rabbits at the University like there’s not a war on. So then you can think of nothing smarter to do than to follow Kumai’s example (truly it is said that stupidity is contagious), so that the girl is bereft of both brother and bridegroom. Am I right?”

For some time Haladdin stared at the flames dancing over the coals (strange thing: the fire keeps burning, although the nazgúl doesn’t seem to be adding any wood). He had the distinct feeling of having been exposed in something unbecoming. What the hell! …

“In other words, doctor, your head is a total mess, if you pardon the expression. You can make decisions, no question about that, but can’t complete a single logical construct; rather, you slide into emotionalism. However, in our case this is actually not bad.”

“What’s not bad?”

“You see, should you decide to accept my proposition, you will thereby take on an opponent that is immeasurably more powerful than you are. However, your actions are frequently totally irrational, so he’ll have a hell of a time predicting what you’ll do. It is quite possible that this is our only hope.”

CHAPTER 16

T 
hat’s interesting,” Haladdin said after some thought. “Go ahead, tell me your proposition, I’m intrigued.”

“Wait a bit, all in good time. First of all, be aware that your Sonya is alive and well, and even relatively safe. So you can actually take her and go to Umbar or Khand to continue your studies; after all, it is precisely the accumulation and preservation of knowledge that …”

“Enough already!” Haladdin grimaced. “I’m not leaving here for anywhere … that’s what you wanted to hear, right?”

“Right,” Sharya-Rana nodded. “However, a person should have a choice, and for people like you it’s especially important.”

“Ri–i-i-ight, just so that later you can shrug and say: ‘You got into this crap all by yourself, buddy – no one was prodding you with a sharp stick!’ What if I do, indeed, tell you to get lost and beat it to Umbar – what then?”

“Well, you won’t! … Haladdin, please don’t think that I’m daring you. There will be plenty of work to be done here, very hard and mortally dangerous work, so we will need everybody: soldiers, mechanics, poets …”

“Poets? Why them?”

“They will be needed, perhaps, more than all the rest. We will have to save everything that can still be saved on this Earth, but first and foremost, the memory of who we are and who we were. We must preserve it like embers under the ashes – in the catacombs or in the diaspora – and poets are indispensable for that.”

“So I will take part in those rescues?”

“No, not you. I have to tell you a sad secret: all our current activity in Mordor can’t really change anything. We have lost the most important battle in the history of Arda – the magic of the White Council and the Elves overcame the magic of the Nazgúl – and now the green shoots of reason and progress, bereft of our protection, will be weeded out mercilessly throughout Middle Earth. The forces of magic will reconfigure this world to their liking, and henceforth it will have no room for technological civilizations like that of Mordor. The three-dimensional spiral of history will lose its vertical component and collapse into a closed cycle; centuries and ages will pass, but the only things to change will be the names of the kings and the battles they win. As for Men … Men will forever remain pitiful deficient creatures who will not dare raise their eyes to look at the masters of the world – the Elves; it is only in a changing world that a mortal can turn his curse into a blessing and rise above the Immortals through generational improvement. In two or three decades the Elves will turn Middle Earth into a well-trimmed tidy lawn, and Men into cute pets; they will deprive Man of a very small thing – his right to Create, and grant him a myriad of plain and simple pleasures instead … Actually, Haladdin, I can assure you that the vast majority of people will make this trade without remorse.”

“The vast majority doesn’t concern me, they can take care of themselves. So the Elves are our real enemies, not the Gondorians?”

“The Gondorians are victims just as you are, we’re not talking about them here. Strictly speaking, the Elves are not your enemies, either, not in the usual sense; can you call Man the enemy of deer? Certainly Man hunts deer – so what’s the big deal about that? He also guards them in royal forests, sings the majestic strength of the old buck, gets sentimental looking in does’ eyes, feeds an orphaned fawn from his hand … So the current cruelty of the Elves is a temporary measure; in a sense, it’s forced. When the World becomes static, they will for sure tread lighter; after all, the capability to Create is undoubtedly a deviation from the norm, so such people will be treated, rather than killed as they are now. Nor will the Immortals have to get their own hands dirty – there’ll be plenty of human volunteers … there already are … By the way, this future Elvish world will be pretty good in its own way – a stagnant pond is certainly less aesthetically pleasing than a stream, but it grows such wonderful water poppies …”

“I see. So how can we prevent them from turning Middle Earth into this … swamp with beautiful water poppies?”

“I’ll explain, but I have to start at the very beginning. It’s a pity that you’re not a mathematician, the explanation would’ve been easier … just ask me right away if something is unclear, all right? Now: every inhabited World has two components; really, they are two different worlds, which have their own laws but co-exist in a single ‘wrapper.’ They are customarily called ‘physical’ and ‘magical,’ although those designations are rather arbitrary, in that the magical world is quite real and is, in that sense, physical, while the physical one has certain properties which are not reducible to physics and can be considered magical. In the case of Arda these are Middle Earth and Aman, inhabited by their sentient races of Men and Elves. These worlds are parallel, but their inhabitants perceive the boundary between them as a temporal rather than a spatial one: every human knows that there are no wizards, dragons, or goblins now, but his grandparents had surely seen them all – and this persists in every generation. It is not a figment of imagination, as many think, but a natural consequence of the two-part structure of inhabited Worlds. I could show you the appropriate mathematical models, but you won’t be able to make heads or tails out of them. Are you with me so far?”

“Yes, quite.”

“Very well. For some unknown reason (you can think of it as the One’s strange whim), in our Arda, and only in our Arda, there is direct contact between the physical and magical worlds, which allows its inhabitants to interact in real space-time – or, to put it simply, to shoot at each other. The existence of this interspatial ‘corridor’ is provided by the so-called Mirror. Some time ago it had arisen in the magical world – arisen, rather than was made – together with the seven Seeing Stones, the
palantíri
, and can’t exist without them, since both the Mirror and the
palantíri
are the product of separation of the same substance, namely the Eternal Fire …”

“Wait, isn’t a
palantír
a device for long-distance communication?”

“Yes, it can be used for that. You can also drive nails with one … actually, no, that’d be inconvenient, they’re round and slippery. But they’d make great fishing weights! You see, each of those magical objects has innumerable properties and uses, but in this world we don’t even have names for most of them. Which is why they’re used for all sorts of nonsense:
palantíri
for communication, the Mirror for primitive future-telling …”

“Some primitive nonsense!”

“I assure you, this is total nonsense compared to some of its capabilities. Besides, the Mirror portrays not the objective future of Arda, but various alternatives – yes, alternatives – of the individual fate of the gazer. You of all people, being an experimental scientist, should know that any measuring device affects the state of whatever is being measured, and here the ‘device’ is a person, a creature with free will …”

“Well, whatever you say, predicting the future is impressive.”

“You’re so fixated on this prediction business,” Sharya-Rana said in annoyance. “What about violating the law of causality – does that impress you?”

“The law of what?!”

“Of causality – yes, the very one. All right, we’ll get to the law of causality yet. So far, all you need to remember is that in general the
palantíri
control space and the Mirror controls time. Next: the two worlds of Arda are asymmetric in all parameters, so this ‘channel’ between them works very selectively. For example, many magical creatures are quite at home here, but only a few mortals have ever managed to visit Aman, and then for a very short time. These people are called wizards in Middle Earth.”