The Wizard and the War Machine

  The Wizard And The

  War Machine

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Copyright © 1987

  ISBN 0-345-33459-0

  Cover Art by Darrell K. Sweet

  e-book ver.1.1

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Dedicated to Lester del Rey

  Chapter One

  BRIGHT DAYLIGHT SPILLED THROUGH THE CHUNKS of colored glass set into the windows, striping the fur carpets with bands of red and green and blue. The children were using the slowly shifting streaks of colored light in a complicated game of their own devising; Sam Turner watched for a moment, standing in the kitchen doorway, but could make no sense of it. The only rule he could see was that when the daylight's movement caused any particular stripe to touch a new rug, everybody screamed with excitement and ran about wildly.

  Perhaps, he thought with a smile, that was really the only rule there was.

  Back on Old Earth or Mars the sun's movement would have been too slow to use in a children's game; even here on Dest, in the deep of winter, when the elongated stripes made its motion more obvious, he was surprised to see it involved.

  "Daddy!" little Zhrellia called. "Daddy, Daddy, you play!"

  He shook his head. "No, I don't know how. Besides, I should get to the market before all the good stuff is gone." He gestured at the folded linen sack he had tucked under one arm.

  All three children expressed polite dismay, Zhrellia pouting, Debovar downcast, and Ket impassive. Ket added, "Will you bring us some honey? It was all gone at breakfast."

  "I'll see." He smiled fondly. "You just go on with your game. If you need anything, shout; your mother will hear you."

  He was lucky, he told himself as he crossed the room, to have three such children, all healthy, without a visible mutation amongst them. He was lucky to have the wife he did, and his position in the community. Most of all, he was lucky to be alive, after what he had been through in his younger days. Back then, when he was traveling through space with a bomb in his head, fighting under the direction of an irrational computer a war that was long over, he would never have believed he would someday have children and a comfortable home.

  He paused at the threshold to wave a farewell, then stepped through the door to the little platform beyond, leaving the luxuries of his family's apartments behind.

  Around him were four bare wooden walls, and two floors above him was a patchwork of metal, wood, and concrete that served as a ceiling. The wooden platform on which he stood was secured to only two of the walls, forming a triangle across one corner of the chamber. Other doors opened onto similar platforms from other walls and on other levels, but most of the area that should have been floor was simply open space over a hundred-meter drop.

  He glanced over the edge, gathered his concentration, and stepped off.

  At first he hung suspended in midair, but then he allowed himself to sink slowly but steadily downward.

  He looked about casually, watching the walls slide up past him; the rusty, blast-twisted steel frame of the ancient skyscraper showed plainly through the cobbled-on walls of glass and wood. When he had first settled in Praunce, eleven years earlier, he had worried that the damaged metal structure might not be sound, that his cozy new home might someday fall, brought down by high winds or ground tremors, killing him in its collapse.

  He smiled to himself at the memory.

  Later, as an apprentice wizard, he had also been frightened by the necessity of levitating himself up and down the central shaft. His master, however, had insisted. Wizards lived in the towers; that was the way it was done in Praunce. It always had been the way, ever since the first wizard arrived there not long after the Bad Times, and it presumably always would be. As an apprentice, Turner had lived in his master Arrelis's tower, and he had levitated up and down the central shaft. Since by then he had already survived any number of things that should have killed him, he had ignored his nervousness.

  Now a master wizard himself, albeit not a particularly good one, Turner knew that his fears for the building's safety had been groundless; he could perceive the strengths and weaknesses of the structure, could feel the stress upon it, and knew that despite rust, despite the damage done by the nuclear blast that had destroyed the city on whose ruins Praunce had been built, despite everything, the tower could easily stand for another century or two.

  The drop down the shaft, however, still worried him on occasion, and when his children had been younger, the thought that one of them might somehow open a wrong door and fall off the platform had terrified him. Even now, at times, he still worried about Zhrellia, despite locks and warnings. Like any two-year-old, she had more curiosity than caution.

  He smiled anew when he thought of her.

  He looked down; he had made more than half the descent. He could see clearly, despite the dim light and drifting dust, the stacked sacks of grain that covered the floor to a depth of a dozen meters or so. The piles had been shrinking since the onset of winter, but they were still substantial. The city was well supplied this year, as it usually was.

  He sneezed and fell a meter or so before he caught himself. The dust had tickled his nose. The hollow centers of the towers were always drab and dirty, because nobody could be bothered to clean them; the stored grain inevitably left behind dust and grit that drifted about and slowly encrusted every surface, including, whenever he passed through, his skin and the inside of his nose.

  At least, he thought, it was reasonably warm in here. He could have gone out a window and down the outside of the building, but the outside air was freezing cold, and as a wizard he was expected to generate his own heat-field rather than wear a coat—it helped maintain the impression that wizards were not subject to the weaknesses that troubled lesser breeds of humanity.

  Generating heat could get tiring, though; better to put up with a little dirt than to exhaust himself for no reason, he told himself as he settled onto the trapdoor that led into the tower's eight lowest floors. Ordinary men and women lived in the base of the tower—along with a good many mutants, sports, and other nonordinary men and women, most of them the result of the lingering radiation and chemical contamination in the area.

  No wizards lived below him, though. Wizards, and only wizards and their families, lived in the tops of the towers. The rest of the populace stayed close to the ground. Even after eleven years, Turner had not quite decided whether he approved of this division between the city's elite and the common masses. It was certainly undemocratic, and Turner's parents had brought him up as a believer in democracy, but on the other hand, wizards really were different from other people, and to pretend otherwise would be hypocritical.

  Besides, the wizardly elite was by no means a closed society. Anyone could apply for an apprenticeship and stand a reasonable chance of being accepted, virtually every apprentice became a wi
zard, and all wizards were accepted as equals, regardless of whether they had been born to princes, peasants, or even other wizards. Minor distinctions might be made on the basis of seniority or ability, but never on the basis of birth. Turner himself, after all, had been as complete an outsider as anyone might imagine, and yet he had been fully accepted.

  Few people did apply for apprenticeships, though, which puzzled him. He preferred to attribute it to a combination of laziness and mistrust. Wizardry was mysterious, Turner thought, and probably looked a good bit harder than it actually was.

  Still, he reluctantly admitted to himself that the wizards did discourage would-be apprentices. Apprentices meant work and responsibility, and more wizards meant a wider distribution of the powers and privileges they enjoyed.

  But anyone could apply. Turner soothed his egalitarian instincts with that reminder.

  He opened the trapdoor without touching it, lifting himself up out of the way as it swung back. When it had fallen back as far as the hinges would allow, he let himself sink slowly downward through the opening.

  He paused a few centimeters off the floor of the corridor below the trap, aware of an odd, unfamiliar sensation, the sort of sensation that he would once have described as "feeling as if he were being watched." Oddly, the phrase came to him in his native tongue rather than the Prauncer dialect of Anglo-Spanish that he had spoken and thought in for the past decade.

  Nobody, though, should be able to watch an alert wizard without the wizard knowing it. Turner had accepted that as fact for several years now. He rotated slowly in midair, looking with both his eyes and his psychic senses, but could neither see nor feel anyone paying any attention to him. A few people were in the rooms along the corridor, behind their closed doors, but none showed any sign that they were aware of his presence. He sensed their auras as calm and blue.

  With the mental equivalent of a shrug he dropped to the floor and began walking toward the stairs. He was imagining things, he told himself; either that or some of the circuitry in his body was acting up. Perhaps some obscure component, a chip or a bit of wiring somewhere inside him, was reacting to static electricity built up in the cold air or to sunspots—or starspots, if that was the word, since Dest's primary was not Old Earth's sun. Perhaps, he theorized, some mechanism in his body was breaking down from age and lack of maintenance and was disturbing the equilibrium of his senses.

  The latter was not a particularly pleasant possibility to dwell on, with all it implied for future breakdowns. He pushed it aside.

  He was halfway down the second flight when he again thought he sensed something; this time it seemed to be a sound he didn't quite hear. He slowed his pace, then paused at the bottom of the staircase, listening intently.

  His ears caught nothing but the distant sounds of the city going about its business. His psychic senses detected nothing but casual disinterest. Nonetheless, he was uneasily certain that he did hear something—he knew he did. He tried to remember how to listen to the electronics wired into his nervous system, but it had been so long that he struggled for several seconds before he again picked up a faint tremor of something.

  He concentrated, willed himself to hear it, and began to pick up something too faint to be considered a sound but with a distinct rhythm. He recognized it as speech, but the rhythm did not fit any dialect he had heard on Dest.

  It did, however, fit Old Earth's polyglot common language, the language used in government, trade, and the military, the language he had, as the child of a bureaucrat and a corporate executive in urban North America, spoken as his own until reaching Praunce. The mysterious speech fit the rhythms of polyglot, and it was growing steadily louder and clearer.

  "Oh, my God," he said aloud in his childhood tongue, the years of practice in using Prauncer terms, swearing by the three Prauncer gods, forgotten for the moment. He could make out the words now. He stood motionless in the corridor at the foot of the stairs, staring at nothing and listening to the barely audible voice in his head endlessly repeating in his native language, in a distant monotone, "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond. Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond. Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond …"

  "I'm here!" he shouted silently, reacting automatically, without any thought of what it might mean. "I'm here!"

  Chapter Two

  FOR ELEVEN LOCAL YEARS, THE COMMUNICATIONS equipment that had been built into his skull back at the training base on Mars had not been used, simply because he had had no one in Dest's entire star system to talk to with it. For eleven years he had done nothing to maintain any of the artificial systems in his body and had not been bothered on occasions when a psionic self-inspection revealed that some minor device had failed. He had had little use for any of his internal technology, and his computer, which the system designers had made responsible for checking and maintaining both his natural and his cyborg parts, had been shut down permanently shortly after his arrival on the planet. Before that arrival he and his computer had been gradually deteriorating together for fourteen terrestrial years of subjective time as they wandered aimlessly through interstellar space.

  It was therefore almost as surprising that his transceiver could still receive, he decided after the initial shock and confusion wore off, as it was that there was something for it to receive.

  As the message "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond …" continued to repeat for long minutes after his unthinking mental shout, Turner realized that his response had not reached whoever was transmitting. The transmitter in his skull, powered by his own body's electricity, had a useful range of no more than a light-minute or two, and while the sender of the message might not have a ready answer, he or she—or it—would surely have stopped the endless repetition immediately upon getting a response.

  Turner had no way of knowing whether something was wrong with his transmitter or with the other party's receiver, or whether the distance was simply too great. He guessed the last was most likely but knew that neither of the other possibilities should surprise him.

  Whatever the reason, the transmission droned on endlessly. "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond …"

  And whatever the reason, he told himself, it was probably a very good thing indeed that his answer had not been heard. He did not know who or what was out there or whether it had any direct connection with his own presence on Dest. He could only guess what other natives of Old Earth might still be wandering among the stars.

  He sat down on the dusty floor of the corridor to think, trying to ignore the constant faint repetition of "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond…" that muttered in the back of his head.

  He had been on Dest for eleven years of local time—that would be, he estimated, a little over ten years on Old Earth, since the shorter days on Dest more than made up for the four hundred and two of them in a year. That meant he had left Mars three hundred and fourteen years ago by Old Earth time, three hundred and thirty-eight years ago by Dest time, ignoring, as he always did, the fact that it was virtually meaningless to speak of simultaneity on two planets so far apart in a relativistic universe.

  Of course, in his own subjective time it was twenty-five personal years, fourteen measured by shipboard clocks and eleven by Dest's seasons. He had never worked out the conversion necessary to express it entirely in terms of one planet or the other; he had had no reason to.

  At first thought it seemed that after three centuries there could be no more survivors of the war he had fought in, the war the people of Dest called "The Bad Times," still roaming around out there, but after an instant's consideration he knew that was wrong. After all, he himself had wandered through space for over three hundred years; what was another ten or eleven on top of that? Relativistic time dilation effects on near-light-speed space travel had a way of making "common sense" not work. He had never worried about why that should be, never tried to understand the nature of relativity; he had simply accepted it as fact, as he had accepted so many things throug
hout his life. Now, again, he accepted it and knew that the new arrival could have left Old Earth at almost any time since the development of interstellar travel, two centuries before he himself had been born.

  "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond …" the voice repeated, each repetition almost imperceptibly louder and clearer than the one before.

  Whatever was transmitting the signal could easily be a surviving unit of Old Earth's military, just as he was himself. Depending on its flight path, it could be anywhere from a decade to a few centuries out from base by shipboard time. The crew aboard, if any were still alive, surely knew that the war was long since lost and both Old Earth and Mars blasted by the enemy's D-series. The news had been broadcast throughout known space.

  "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond …" What, he asked himself bitterly, was left for anyone to be loyal to?

  Of course, if the transmitter was military, knowledge of Old Earth's destruction didn't necessarily mean that the signaler or signalers would be ready to surrender peacefully. For himself, he had certainly been eager enough to give up his mission once he knew he had nothing left to fight for, but he guessed that not everyone would have felt that way. Some people, he supposed, would seek revenge for Old Earth's obliteration. Some would carry on out of a sense of duty, even when that duty was obviously meaningless—or perhaps not a sense of duty but simply a lack of anything better to do.

  "… Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond …" repeated endlessly, mechanically, in his head.

  And, of course, some survivors would be forced by their machines to carry on, as he had been.

  The very thought of that still induced an almost physical pain; the memories of those wasted years still hurt. He had signed up to fight when he was eighteen and studying art in college, with no clear idea of what he wanted from life, no real conception of what he was getting into. Volunteering for the military had seemed brave and patriotic and no worse, no more frightening, than any other available course of action. To the young man he had once been, the prospect of flying off into space to fight had seemed no more terrifying, and a good bit more romantic, than going out to find a job and support himself.