'Watch what you're doing, you shitfaced asshole!'
Reave grabbed the stirrup and pushed upward. The move was so unexpected that the man came completely out of his saddle and crashed to the ground. He lay winded for a few moments; then, gasping a string of foul obscenities, he clawed for his sidearm. Reave killed him with one shot, hoping that the flash of his pistol would not be noticed in the general mayhem. He thought he heard a shout as he swung into the saddle, but he did not look back. He had a return of the impulse to charge back through the town and kill Baptiste, but self-preservation prevailed. He put his spurs to the lizard and set it racing up the road to the pass and the nothings beyond it. He reached the pass unscathed. As he hit the stasis controls and plunged into the nothings, he realized that he did not even know the name of the town he had just helped destroy.
As with the nothings, there is still a great deal of speculation and argument regarding the true nature of Stuff Central. The distillation of all the surviving legends is that a place existed somewhere in the Damaged World that was the ultimate source of all material things. Its roots obviously lay in the matter transporters that came into regular use even before the development of the Mahler drive. The matter transporter was capable of moving people and cargoes over short distances in space. Its essential principle was that it disassembled the basic subatomic structure of any solid object in its send chamber and broke it down into a complex microcode. This code was then transmitted to the receiving unit, which, using that code, reassembled a perfect replica of the object from available local matter. Despite the obvious moral and philosophical problems and some sensationally unpleasant early accidents, the matter transporter rapidly become part of human technology and quickly expanded its capabilities in terms of both range and the size of the objects it could handle.
By the start of the Thousand Years War the technology had been perfected whereby, instead of simply transporting matter, the microcodes could be recorded on permanent templates, and multiple facsimiles could be created at will of any object — including animals and living human beings — for which there was such a template.
The constant references to templates in all the hundreds of stories referring to Stuff Central make clear that if it existed at all, it must have employed some advanced form of this technology, and it is probable that much of the hardware, the flora and fauna, and even sections of the human population in the Damaged World were products of these templates. What is not clear is whether Stuff Central directly transmitted the required objects, or whether it only supplied a file of templates for later use. Unless the legends are totally fanciful, it would seem that we have to assume that there was some kind of center that had the capability of transmitting microcode signals with great accuracy through the chaos of nonmatter to the scattered stasis settlements of this strange era.
Unfortunately, much of this will have to remain pure speculation. The hard archaeology for this period is so flimsy that it is unlikely that any of the theories will ever be confirmed. Not one copy of the often-mentioned Stuff Catalogue would seem to have survived the Final Cataclysm and the Reformation.
CHAPTER THREE
Novice Wellblessed sat on the rail of the half bridge,only a matter of feet from the start of the nothings. He was eating a limon and tossing the pieces of green and yellow rind into the shimmering nonmatter, watching the way they smoked and vanished as they touched it. It would take only three steps and that was it. He had no portable stasis generator, and he, too, would be one with the non and all his troubles would be over.
The Half Bridge was one of the most disturbing pieces of architecture in all of the Sanctuary. Its name described it perfectly. It was a simple wooden footbridge that arched — or, more precisely, half arched — across the stream that marked one of the boundaries of the Sanctuary. On one side of the stream there was a serene normality; on the other there was the nothings. The water simply went to the edge of the Sanctuary's stasis field and stopped. The bridge did exactly the same thing. It reached its apex and stopped. Novice Wellblessed had yet to learn the secret of why the bridge did not just topple over with no far bank to support it. As it was, it gave the impression that over in the nothings there was some sort of spectral nonbridge that perfectly complemented it and held it in place. Novice Wellblessed knew that was impossible, but he still could not shake the idea. The novices were supposed to use it as a meditative aid, an idea made solid with which they might contemplate the transitory nature of the material world. All Novice Wellblessed used it for was to sit and stare and contemplate suicide.
Of all the novices in his admission group, Wellblessed had made the slowest progress. He retained little of the instruction that he received, and his masters constantly accused him of resisting enlightenment. He had spent more hours than he could remember assuming the Attitude of Submission and accepting the Penitential Ministry. Lately he had even been cutting classes. It was really no surprise that Wellblessed was doing so badly. He had no vocation. It had been only the direst necessity that had forced him to come begging to the Sanctuary to enroll as a novice. Back in another lifetime he had gone by the name of Billy Oblivion, and he had roamed the Margins and the stasis towns, the kind of footloose rover who managed to stay one step ahead of serious trouble. Eventually, though, serious trouble had caught up with him. Aledya, his longtime traveling companion and probably the only woman he had come close to really loving, was dead from an overdose of cyclatrol, and the Rat Gang had been hard on his heels. Right behind them had been a pair of homicidal treasury agents from the city of Litz called Lenk and Lu Yuan. Billy, in a moment of desperate stupidity, had robbed them of their graft money, and they intended to make an example of him. When, quite by accident, he had crawled on his knees into the reality of the Sanctuary with his SG all but burned out, the life of a novice had seemed the perfect answer. He would get a new name, a new identity, and three squares a day. How hard could it be? But that was before he had discovered the real meaning of soul-sick boredom. In the Sanctuary, all pleasure was canceled.
The gongs and horns had sounded from the onion domes of the minarets for the next task rotation, but Novice Wellblessed did not move. He had been thinking of himself as Billy Oblivion a lot lately. The identity of Novice Wellblessed had never sat well with him. Recently, it had not sat at all. He was supposed to be in the cubicle with his replica, learning to understand and respect himself, but he could no longer face those sessions. Soon after he had arrived at the Sanctuary, he had been templated; and when he had been deemed ready, a walking talking duplicate of himself had been created in the stuff receiver. The idea was that the time spent talking and being with his living double would eventually bring him to a degree of self-awareness that was transcendental. But in Wellblessed's case it had not happened that way. Wellblessed II had all the memories and emotions of the original. During the very first session he had wanted to know what would happen to him when Wellblessed had all the self-awareness he wanted. Wellblessed II becameincreasingly paranoid that he would be killed once he was no longer needed.
'I mean, I don't care how I got here. I'm here, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm alive. They can't just kill me. I'm not a thing, I'm a person.'
Wellblessed had compassion for his double, but there was one overwhelming problem. 'I know you're a person. The trouble is that the person you are happens to be me. The seat's already taken.'