Mark that. That is the real enemy of Viriconium. I am sorry, Lord Cromis: I did not intend to cause Her Majesty so much distress. We will dispense with the fourth screen, my lady, and move on to the most important. This is taking place now, in Lendalfoot, the town you have just left Night. The unsteady flare and flicker of torches in the main street of the town. Their light outlines a group of fishermen, bending over something laid out on the cobbles. The scene jerks. An overhead view; a white, shocked face; tears; a woman in a shawl. There on the cobbles, a child, dead, the top of its head cut neatly away, its skull empty…
Finally, let us examine the history of what you know as the chemosit, and discuss my purpose in inviting you here. No, Lord Grif, I will be finished shortly. Please hear me out.
During a period of severe internal strife towards the end of the Middle Period, the last of the Afternoon Cultures developed a technique whereby a soldier, however hurt or physically damaged his corpse be, could be resurrected- as long as his brain remained intact.
Immersed in a tank of nutrient, his cortex could be used as a seed from which to “grow” a new body. How this was done, I have no idea. It seems monstrous to me.
The geteit chemosit were a result of escalation. They were built not only to kill, but also to prevent resurrection of the victim by destroying his brain tissue. As you remark, it is horrifying. But not a bad dream, those are not words I would use: it is a reality with which, a millennium later, we have to deal.
It is evident that Canna Moidart discovered a regiment of these automata in the north of the Great Brown Waste, dormant in some subterranean barracks. I became aware of this some years ago, when certain elements of my equipment detected their awakening. (At that time, I was unsure precisely what it was that the detectors were registering-a decade passed before I solved the problem; by that time, the war was inevitable.)
Now, Lord Cromis.
My tower’s records are clear on one point, and that is this: once awakened, those automata have only one in-built directive To kill.
Should Canna Moidart be unable to shut them down at the end of her campaign, they will continue to kill, regardless of the political alignment of their victims.
The Old Queen may very well find herself in full possession of the Empire of Viriconium.
But as soon as that happens, as soon as the last pocket of resistance is finished, and the geteit chemosit run out of wars to fight, they will turn on her. All weapons are two-edged: it is the nature of weapons to be deadly to both user and victim-but these were the final weapon, the absolute product of a technology dedicated to exploitation of its environment and violent solution of political problems. They hate life. That is the way they were built.
9
Silence reigned in the tower room. The five false windows continued to flicker through the green twilight, dumbly repeating their messages of distant atrocity and pain. The Birdmaker’s ancient yellow face was expressionless; his hands trembled; he seemed to be drained by his own prophecy.
“That is a black picture-” Tomb the Dwarf drank wine and smacked his lips. He was the least affected of them. “But I would guess that you have a solution. Old man, you would not have brought us here otherwise.”
Cellur smiled thinly.
“That is true,” he said.
Tomb made a chopping gesture with one hand.
“Let’s get to the meat of it then. I feel like killing something.”
Cellur winced.
“My tower has a long memory; much information is stored there. Deciphering it, I discover that the geteit chemosit are controlled by a single artificial brain, a complex the size of a small town.
“The records are ambiguous when discussing its whereabouts, but I have narrowed its location down to two points south of the Monadliath Mountains. It remains for someone to go there-”
“And?”
“And perform certain simple operations that I will teach him.”
Cellur stepped into a drifting column of magenta light, passed his palms over a convoluted mechanism. One by one, the false windows died, taking their agony with them. He turned to tegeus-Cromis.
“I am asking one or all of you to do that. My origin and queer life aside, I am an old man. I would not survive out there now that she has passed beyond the Pastel City.”
Numbed by what he had witnessed, Cromis nodded his head. He gazed at the empty windows, obsessed by the face of the dead Lendalfoot child.
“We will go,” he said. “I had expected nothing like this. Tomb will learn faster than Grif or I; you had better teach him.
“How much grace have we?”
“A week, perhaps. The South resists, but she will have no trouble. You must be ready to leave before the week is out.”
During the Birdmaker’s monologue, Methvet Nian had wept openly. Now, she rose to her feet and said:
“This horror. We have always regarded the Afternoon Cultures as a high point in the history of mankind. Theirs was a state to be striven for, despite the mistakes that marred it.
“How could they have constructed such things? Why, when they had the stars beneath their hands?”
The Birdmaker shrugged. The geometries of his robe shifted and stretched like restless alien animals.
“Are you bidding me remember, madam? I fear I cannot.”
“They were stupid,” said Birkin Grif, his fat, honest face puzzled and hurt. It was his way to feel things personally. “They were fools.”
“They were insane towards the end,” said Cellur. “That I know.”
Lord tegeus-Cromis wandered the Birdmaker’s tower alone, filled his time by staring out of upper windows at the rain and the estuary, making sad and shabby verses out of the continual wild crying of the fish eagles and the creaking of the dead white pines. His hand never left the hilt of the nameless sword, but it brought him no comfort.
Tomb the Dwarf was exclusively occupied by machinery-he and Cellur rarely left the workshop on the fifth floor. They took their meals there, if at all. Birkin Grif became sullen and silent, and experienced a resurgence of pain from his damaged leg. Methvet Nian stayed in the room set aside for her, mourning her people and attempting to forgive the monstrousness to which she was heiress.
Inaction bored the soldier; moroseness overcame the poet; a wholly misplaced sense of responsibility possessed the Queen: in their separate ways they tried to meet and overcome the feeling of impotence instilled in them by what they had learned from the Lord of the Birds, and by the enigma he represented.
To a certain extent, each one succeeded: but Cellur ended all that when he called them to the topmost room of the tower on the afternoon of the fifth day since their coming.
They arrived separately, Cromis last.
“I wanted you to see this,” Cellur was saying as he entered the room.
The old man was tired; the skin was stretched tight across the bones of his face like oiled paper over a lamp; his eyes were hooded. Abruptly, he seemed less human, and Cromis came to accept the fact that, at some time in the remote past, he might have crossed immense voids to reach the earth.
How much sympathy could he feel for purely human problems, if that were so? He might involve himself, but he would never understand. Cromis thought of the monitor lizard he had seen in the waste, and its fascination with the fire.
“We are all here then,” murmured the Birdmaker.
Birkin Grif scowled and grunted.
“Where is Tomb? I don’t see him.”
“The dwarf must work. In five days, he has absorbed the governing principles of an entire technology. He is amazing. But I would prefer him to continue working. He knows of this already.”
“Show us your moving pictures,” said Grif.
Ancient hands moved in a column of light. Cellur bent his head, and the windows flickered behind him.