He told the spirits to stop while he absorbed this, and the image diffused into a soft white glow. He could faintly see the enchanted forest just beyond.
He repeated slowly to himself what he had just been taught. His world was not the only one between the heavens and the world of the dead. According to this spirit, there were hundreds of others, or thousands.
His mind boggled. What a concept! Worlds upon worlds, each with thousands, or millions of people!
And the stars in the darktime sky-each of them was a sun, and each sun had a world beneath it. All his life he had looked up at a thousand other suns, without ever realizing it.
What were all those other worlds like? What would it be like to live in the light of another sun?
He stared into the darkness, trying to imagine an entire different world, fully as big and complex as his own.
He failed. His imagination could not even encompass the totality of his own world; he knew that already.
Other worlds! He shook his head.
But there was no need to try and absorb it all at once. He would have plenty of time to digest this wonder.
“All right,” he said. “Go on."
The spirits, if that was what they were, obliged; the darkness lit up anew with the globe they called Terra, the world where humankind had first developed, and the story rolled on.
The magic called “technology” grew ever more powerful, and under its complex spells humans were transformed from mere mortals into demi-gods, no longer subject to aging, always strong and healthy, able to create almost instantly anything that they might fancy, even living creatures. These latter-day humans could reshape entire worlds at a whim, even bend space itself. Their machines became self-aware intelligences in their own right-not spirits, but living creatures that were built instead of bred.
Bredon was not sure that the distinction really meant anything; whether built or conjured, these things still seemed like spirits to him. He shoved that thought aside as irrelevant.
Naturally, many of the supernal beings that had been born humans grew bored with their world. With centuries of life stretching before them, boredom could be a severe problem. The leading cause of death on Terra was suicide brought on by ennui.
Millions of weapons against boredom were developed. Humans transformed themselves into machines or creatures, transformed machines into humans, plunged themselves into invented realities, and invented entertainments so complex and bizarre that Bredon could not begin to comprehend them, but throughout, one of the most popular ways to avoid boredom was travel. The universe was full of surprises. Artificial entertainments were limited by the imaginations of humans and human-made things, while nature remained unthinkably vast and varied. Whenever life in one spot grew tedious, one could simply pack up and go somewhere else.
In just this manner, twenty-eight bored people took a ship and a handful of ancient, incomplete records and, on a whim, searched out the lost colony of Denner's Wreck. Surprised and pleased by what they found, they settled down for an extended vacation there.
Bredon asked that the story stop again.
The Powers, then, came from Terra, just as his own people had; they were not from the world of the dead at all. Their power came from the magic called “technology."
“This ‘technology’ thing,” he asked. “Is it something that people are born with, or something that they learn?"
The spirits were silent for a moment, trying to devise an answer that would be correct, informative, and intelligible, but finally Gamesmaster settled for saying, “It's something they learn."
“Could I learn it?"
Gamesmaster hesitated. “Some of it,” it said. “Without treatment, you won't live long enough to learn all current technological knowledge. Sorry, kid."
Bredon accepted that.
He reviewed what he had been told, and balked at one detail.
“A vacation? A holiday? But the Powers have been here for centuries!"
“It's been a long vacation. Some of them have wanted to leave, at various times, but there's only one ship, and the rule is that unless there's an emergency of some kind they need a majority vote to go, and so far there have never been more than eleven out of twenty-eight voting for departure at any one time. If somebody wanted off urgently enough he or she could transmit a call for another ship, but so far nobody's bothered to do that. It's a nice planet."
“But hundreds of years?"
“Hey, these people live forever if they want to; they can spare a few hundred years."
Bredon had to chew on that idea for awhile before he was able to shove it into the back of his mind, still undigested.
“So that's who the Powers are, and how they got here? And who my people are, and how they got here?"
“You got it, kid. And you don't know how lucky you are to be here, either. Ordinarily, a shipwreck like the one your ancestors lived through doesn't leave a viable colony behind; either the planet isn't habitable, or it's full of hostile native life, or some other such problem. And when the colony does survive, they usually rebuild a higher technology in order to fight off the indigenous life. Your people hit the jackpot, though; this place had enough sea life to provide an oxygen atmosphere, and no land life at all. No moons to make tidal pools, not much volcanic activity, not much land, for that matter, nothing to help land life along, so the stuff they brought with them had no competition and just dug right in."
Bredon did not really follow that, since as far as he knew there had always been plenty of life on land. He decided that Gamesmaster was trying to explain something about why salt-water fish and other sea creatures weren't edible. It did not seem particularly important. “Is there any more to the story?” he asked.
“Not the mainline history lesson, no. That brings us about up to date on that. But whatever other area you're interested in, I can tell you more."
Bredon blinked, unsure where to begin; he thought for a moment, and then asked, “Why is Thaddeus the Black causing trouble? Why is Geste so worried about him?"
“That's hard to explain without telling you a lot of stuff about just who Thaddeus is."
“Tell me, then,” Bredon said. “I'm listening.” He settled back in his seat, started as it shifted shape to accommodate him, and then relaxed, his eyes and ears open.
Chapter Twelve
"…there before him stood a menacing figure in black robes, fully three meters tall, with eyes of flame and with fangs showing between his lips.
"The apparition spoke, saying, ‘I am Thaddeus the Black, and like your brothers before you, you have dared to defy me. Know, then, the price of defiance!’ And he reached into his cloak and flung something down before Hillowan.
"He looked down, and saw that it was his brother Filowan's head, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth frozen in a scream of terror. He took a step back, and Thaddeus reached again into his cloak, and flung another head.
"This one was Gilloran's, and most horrible of all, the severed head was still alive! It rolled its eyes up at Hillowan, pleading with him, and tried to speak, but of course it had no lungs to give it breath so that no sound came out. Hillowan screamed, and stepped back again.
"And Thaddeus opened his cloak and drew forth a third object, but this time it was no severed head, but something that hung limply in his hand, like a rag; and he flung it down before Hillowan, who saw that it was skin, that it was human skin-that it was the skin of his third and youngest brother, Sherowan, somehow peeled from his body in a single piece…"
– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller
The first known immortal human, Gamesmaster explained, was the man who now called himself Shadowdark. That was not his original name, merely the one he had adopted most recently; it had now lasted a few thousand years, longer than any other he had ever used, including the long-forgotten one his parents had given him.