C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  "What do you mean to do?"

  "Gather survivors. Keep them alive. And when the ondat change this world so that nothing she's loosed will survive, we'll set new makers loose, ones the ondat will approve."

  "The ondat."

  "Her enemies."

  "And our lives?"

  Luz was silent a breath or two, then: "I regret risking them again. But if there's one power that can call the rest to shelter, it won't be a handful of madmen urging the village lord to come here. She can call them. Her priests can. We couldn't make war on her: her hold is too secure. But we can use her influence over her own creation. The god of this world can bring us the people and save their lives. But you're almost too late. if you're not too late already. I can direct you. I can talk to you and I can talk to the ondat and I may secure you a safe course, but not if they know I'm bringing the Ila herself to safety. It's a risk."

  "Then why do you take such a risk?"

  "She's not as innocent as the rest of you-she wasn't the one who poured out makers on an ondat world, not one of that company, but she was part of it. Her worst sin was to save lives. your lives. She took this place for a refuge. But politics-" Luz shook her head. "Five hundred years of argument about your fate, and you've threatened no one. She's threatened no one. She can't leave. We've persuaded the ondat to this compromise: that they may change this world so the makers are forced to change, but we may moderate that change: we can remove the threat and assure the ondat we can stop it. Her cooperation would make our work easier. Say that. Tell her I'll make her welcome. Tell her there is an escape, a narrow one, and the window may close before she can take it, even as it is. We were given thirty years, and those years were up when the Ila sent us this unexpected gift. She knows that we've loosed new makers. Tell her to listen to you, and listen to me, and come to the tower while there's still time."

  "With the mad? The Ila of Oburan, to live with the mad?"

  "Oh, very much so," Luz said. "One needs not erase history. One needs only fail to teach one generation of children. Fail with two, and the destruction widens. She may deserve her damnation for what she has done, but it was done, perhaps, to keep you content with what limited things she could give. To make you her good servants. And keep you alive, for company."

  The land circling a star and wars with some tribe named the ondat, and dots and creatures let loose in their very blood. He had had nature to explain the world that was, but he had never understood why nature was what it was, either. He had never understood the vermin, or where men came from, except what the priests said, that the First Descended dropped down from the heavens and divided beasts from vermin.

  "Where are the ondat?" he asked.

  "Up above, where you can't reach them. Believe this: that you threaten the peace. It's not the land you have. The enemy doesn't care about that. It's that you exist according to the Ila's plan, and that the Mercy of the Ila continues to pour out makers; useless, we say, since you've overburdened the land as it is, and never will be more than you are, but it's your existence, all the same, that prolongs the war. You loosed makers on their world. They don't forget that. They wish you dead."

  He understood everything down to their world. He had no idea where that was. But he understood revenge. He understood it was useless to plead against it, and he knew that survival required allies.

  "They gave us thirty years," Luz said, "to loose our own makers, and to gather our people and our goods and our records, before this world changes into what it will be. Thirty years ago we set to work. Thirty years ago we went out across the Lakht and into the villages, such as we could reach. We loosed new makers, in your blood, and they set to work, and enabled you to hear us, and brought a great many to us. Then the Ila, as you call her, gave us this final gift, in you. So we send you back to her with a message. A last chance. That's all you need to know."

  "To come here. Because you ask her to."

  "I'll give you a word: nanocele. There. Does that tell you all you need?"

  He was stung. He knew when he was being mocked. And when someone he could not fight was waiting for that admission. "It tells me nothing."

  "So I can't tell you more than that, can I? I don't force you to go back. But if you do go, tell her the answers are all here, and refuge is here, for anyone she can bring. We never planned for her to come. But if we had her records, her knowledge, her memory, we could do very much more."

  As if the Ila should come here, and lift one manicured finger to bargain. Norit had put her arms about him. He put his about her.

  "You made us mad," he said to Luz. "You did this. Why should we believe anything? What do we care about nanoceles?"

  Darkness flooded his sight, and an object spinning out of darkness toward a shining distant globe. That object went falling, and falling, in fire, and suddenly he was looking up at that fall, across the blue heavens, and toward the Qarain. Norit cried out. He flinched.

  A star. Was that a falling star?

  "Say that I give you a new vision," Luz said. "And there will be more. The thirty years are up. I would have said there was no hope. That we had gathered all who could survive to reach us. But since you were ours, and since at the last moment we knew you had gone to the Ila, we had far more hope."

  "Who told you?"

  "Your own voice. The things you heard. Oh, we didn't know who Marak Trin was, not until you made war on the Ila. We doubted from the beginning you would succeed. We feared on the other hand you might disrupt everything. We lent you our advantages, still; the makers assured you would heal, and live. We can call in those who hear our voice: but you refused to hear us. So we thought we wouldn't have you, after all. Thanks to her, we do, and we have all of those you brought. But she can send out messengers to the tribes and the villages. She can bring all of Oburan with her, if you can persuade her and bring her here-her, and her records. Bring those."

  He still was shaken, dizzied by the feeling of falling with the star. The things Luz said involved a simple act, but the reason behind it defied understanding, and his suspicion, old as his understanding of the world, said not to trust this.

  "The world's going to end, Marak Trin. But this place will survive." Luz walked to the door. "It's this simple: you can stay here, or you can go back and rescue all you can."

  "To what good?"

  "To all the good there is," Luz said. "Or will ever be. If you choose to go, if the danger becomes too great, you can turn back. We won't refuse you. Understand: you come very late. I'm not sure you'll get there at all, or that you'll get back with anything more than yourselves-if you're very lucky. The ondat have waited thirty passes of this world around its star. I expected the attack to begin twenty days ago."

  "Have we weapons?"

  "No weapons. No fighting. Only a safe place. When people run for their lives, a few more may run here. Pori might make it here, by accident. For the rest. they'll die. And as for the Ila, oh, I assure you your Ila understands what we are. That's why she's sent you. She wants to know what the terms are, whether she can defeat our makers, and by that, whether she has a hope. If you choose to go, tell her we've reached an agreement with the ondat: we may reshape what the hammer fails to break. The world will so change that her design will not survive. But I can save her. She established this as a camp on the way to the ondat world, but she never attacked them. There is forgiveness. We can arrange it."

  It was too vast to understand. There was no reason that this ordinary woman could stand here and convince him of these things. But what was there to believe?

  "Can we save the people with me?"

  "They're already safe, camped outside. We will protect them."

  "And Kais Tain? And the villages?"

  "I've told you. The time is already up. The time you have is what you can steal. Every hour you stand arguing is an hour taken from their survival. If she calls in the villages, can't she call more in her name, than you in yours?"

  It was true.

  But there was no fair
ness about this attack. There was no logic, no reason, no justice in anything she said about the world.

  Yet she said this was the appointed refuge from what was coming, whatever it was.

  "Where's Hati?" he asked her.

  "Nearby. She can go where she wishes. Anyone here can go where he wishes."

  "And the au'it?"

  "May also choose." Luz had her hand on the door, and the door opened. "It's not all darkness. If nothing kills you outright, the makers will help you live long enough to have a fair chance. Go tell the Ila, or stay here while the hammer falls. Take the au'it, or send her alone. It's all your choice."

  "The au'it would never get there by herself."

  "Likely not," Luz said, and walked out, leaving the door open.

  He left Norit and went to the door. Luz was halfway down the metal hall of suns. He knew nothing to say. In just that long, Luz had turned everything upside down, and then begun to reiterate everything she had said, so he knew they were at an end.

  "Hati!" he shouted to that vacancy. His temper had risen. Now his fear did.

  There were other doors all along the hall, all closed.

  Luz opened the door at the end of the hall and went out.

  "Hati!"

  A door opened on its own, far down the hall.

  Hati came through it, clothed in fine cloth as they were. She saw them, and began to run. Marak caught her in his arms, crushed her lean, hard body against him, smelling what was incontrovertibly Hati, and having in his arms all he needed in the world.

  "Where have you been?" he asked.

  "In this place," Hati said. "In this room. The air never moved. And I saw dark, I saw one thing falling into another. I thought I was falling. I met a woman named Luz. She said the world would die, but we could be safe, or we could go back to Oburan and bring the rest here."

  "So she said."

  "You saw her?"

  "Do you trust her?" he asked Hati. Not, Do you believe her? That was one question. But, Do you trust her? That was another. Staying in this claimed safety more than tempted him: it seemed the only sane answer in a mad, death-bound world, the only just answer for Hati, and Norit, and Tofi.

  But not for him. He had a mother, a sister, a father, all resting on his promise to come back. He had the memory of villages, and the people he had known, and no few he had grown up with. And he had the word of a stranger and the promise of an enemy, and he was mad as the rest, but he knew what he could live with, and what he could not, right or wrong or fair to Hati, he could not stay.

  "I don't trust strangers," Hati said. "I don't trust her."

  "I have to go back. I'm supposed to rescue the god-cursed Ila." He had no clear notion in his mind what he would do, or how he would do it, except to retrace their steps, walk into the Ila's hall, and say a woman crazier than he was had sent a message that would not make her happy. Mad as it was, the urgency loomed taller and taller, like the vision of the tower. "I have to. I have to. I said I would come back. She said she'd save my mother and my sister for a year. I don't know if she'll keep her word. But I know I have to."

  Hati's embrace tightened, hard, harder. "Do you know a way out of this place?" she asked.

  He thought he knew. It was a sense of direction, like knowing where north was, if he wondered about it. There was a door in the other direction, and he turned toward it, one arm around Hati, the other about Norit. He thought about the au'it, and whether she might join them on their way out, and at a crossing of the next hall, the au'it came out, in her own red robes, but clean, head to toe. She held her book and her writing kit as she joined them, and walked with them quickly as far as the end of the hallway, and another door.

  That door opened without warning. Ian was behind it.

  "Are you looking for the door?" Ian asked. "Follow me."

  It was not a welcome presence. But Ian led them to the next door, and touched it to make it open.

  Outside was the world and the sunlight, a pale blue sky, and red dunes and sandstone, going on forever.

  Outside was a camp of white tents at the foot of the glass-strewn hill on which the tower stood.

  Marak paid no attention to Ian as they left, and Ian said no further word to them. Marak heard the door shut behind them, and he felt the hot familiar wind in their faces as they walked down to the tents, faster and faster, with mounting desire to be there, and not at the tower.

  "It's Tofi," Marak said. He knew the beasts that sat comfortably by those strange white tents: he knew the baggage piled up there. Two tents were pitched, white and looking as if they could have nothing to do with the red rock and the dust.

  And from under those open-sided tents the mad came out to welcome them, all the madmen clothed in gauze robes the same as they were, waving, happy, cheering their safe return.

  "Malin," Hati said in astonishment as they came down the hill. "That's Malin." Kassan and Foragi were there, too, the ex-soldiers. They had made it here, against all expectation.

  Tofi came, running. His robe was green-striped brown, a blue aifad, his own, as every stitch about him was his own: the others, destitute, took gifts, but Tofi put on his best, and Marak was glad at the sight of him.

  "They said you were well," Tofi said, as they met and clasped hands. "But I said they should let you go. This strange man came to us. There's plenty of water here, and people, people from all over."

  The others clustered around them as they came downhill. "Where have you been?" the questions ran. "What have you seen?"

  "Lights," Marak found to say to them. "A woman." There were the new visions, and if the other madmen shared them there was no hint of it. The faces were happy, and their enthusiasm carried them along, all talking at once.

  "We have these clothes, and no end of food and water."

  "We can wash. We can even wash in it."

  "And fruits," the orchardman put in, "with not a blemish on them."

  "The tents cool the air," the stonemason said. "This is the god's paradise."

  They went down among those tents, in this babble of strangers and new clothes, and out from the shade under the white tents flowed an unnaturally cool air. Tables stood within the shade of one tent, the tent wholly devoted to that purpose, and on those tables sat a ravaged wealth of food.

  Wealth and water had poured out on the madmen, the rejected of the world. Their visions had brought them only good, that Marak saw. He looked back and up at the foot of the tower, which was so large, and which to his own observation held only Ian and Luz.

  So much wealth to give away.

  Paradise, the stonemason said.

  But was it? Where was the orchard to provide this? There must be far more to all that tower than they had been allowed to see. There must be answers they had never had, questions they had not had the least idea how to ask.

  And there were the visions, and the explanations that roused more questions. Death, was Luz's message.

  "They gave us food and water at no cost," Tofi exalted their hosts, "and these clothes, and as much food as we want, they give. Eat. Take anything." Tofi took bread from the table to show them. "Whatever we eat, they give us more. It never spoils. No vermin come here."

  "How many of these strangers have you seen?" he asked Tofi.

  "That bring the food and visit us? People like us. They come from all over, from Pori, too, and from the tribes. Malin and Kassan and Foragi are here, did you see them? They don't remember how they found this place. They waked up here, under a white tent."

  All the mad. All those that wandered away from the villages, fed, and clothed, and kept in safety-if they survived the desert.

  He was overwhelmed, surfeited with this babble of good fortune.

  Hati and Norit were beset with questions and details of the wealth here, the au'it sat down and opened her book to record these wonders, and in a sudden need for escape, Marak walked out into the heat of the sun, where their beasts sat, well fed and supplied, by a pool of water that had no right to be where
it was.

  The sun warmed his shoulders. He walked where a multitude of feet had tracked the sand, and he climbed the sandstone slant to gain a vantage and a breath of the world's own sun-heated wind.

  He had to ask himself and his demons what he ought to do with Luz's warning, what was truth, what was safe, what was a mirage that killed the fools that believed it. that was what he sought, simple solitude, on the safety of an often-used trail.

  But as he climbed he saw a gleam of white, and a wider and a wider gleam, the other side of the rise on which the tower sat. A city of white canvas spread across the sand.

  White tents. Shelter. People. A green-bordered river of water, shaded by palms.