I thanked him and linked with his mind. Again I cast my probe, shaped to Merret’s mind. I had not extended my reach much more than a furlong or two, yet the probe located. But it was not in the direction of Halfmoon Bay, and the contact was tenuous. Merret understood at once and poured her own energy into strengthening the connection as I told her about the smoke and asked what she knew. She had seen the smoke from inside Halfmoon Bay and had ridden out to investigate.
“So the smoke is not coming from Halfmoon Bay?” I farsent.
“No,” Merret responded. “It is coming from the Suggredoon. In fact, it looks as if it is coming from the other side of the Suggredoon.”
“From Sutrium?!” I was so startled that I almost lost contact.
“I am not there yet, and there is so much smoke that I cannot be sure,” Merret sent. “Many soldierguards have galloped by wearing the colors of different cities, but I can’t probe them because of their demon bands. Some of the gossip on the road says that the Faction has invaded the Land and is fighting with the rebels, but that’s impossible, given what you told us,” Merret observed.
I felt a sick lurch of alarm. “It is not impossible,” I told her. “You see, when Harwood and the others left the Land to board one of the invaders’ ships, there were still hundreds of Hedra at large. Maybe they managed to avoid capture and regroup, or Malik might have had more support than we realized. How close are you to the Suggredoon?” I asked.
“I am within sight of the ramshackle village that has grown up near the barrier the soldierguards set up. But if I go another step nearer, I will lose you. It is taking all my concentration to keep contact.”
“You’d better go nearer, then, and see what you can find out, but first, are there any priests about?”
“I have seen quite a number heading toward the old ferry port, but they all wear demon bands. They look as puzzled as the soldierguards, which makes me think that the fire must be on the other side of the river.
“Oh, there is something else—I met your Iriny! She was dressed exactly as Rolf had described when she left Halfmoon Bay. She felt me enter her mind, and it did not take me long to explain who I was. She repeated what Rolf had told me, that he had used his connections to get her out of the Councilcourt cells before the Herders could make enough fuss to get their hands on her. She said that she wanted to cross the river to give some important information to her brother. She said the smoke would provide the perfect opportunity to cross, and she must act while she had the chance. I bade her—”
Without warning, the probe broke free and rebounded with painful abruptness.
“Are you all right?” Seely asked anxiously as I staggered back.
I opened my eyes, and the radiance of the newly risen sun seemed to claw at the inside of my head. I squinted and looked at Alun, who was pale and sick-looking. He laughed shakily and said, “I hate it when that happens.” I apologized, but he waved away my words, saying that if Merret suddenly moved out of range, there was nothing I could have done. He asked if I really thought that the fire was the result of a Hedra force warring with the rebels across the Suggredoon. Of course, he had heard the whole exchange.
“If it is, then they are clearly winning,” I said grimly. “For rebels would not torch the city.”
“It might be the Raider,” Seely suggested. “Maybe Ariel convinced him to bring some more Hedra from the camp in Norseland, and they sailed across the strait to attack the rebels.”
I considered her suggestion seriously, but at length I shook my head. My instincts told me that Yarrow had been right: Ariel had severed his connection with the Faction when he had abandoned Herder Isle.
“Do you think the gypsy will make it across the river?” Alun asked.
I studied the billows of smoke and envisaged Iriny flitting between the tents and soldierguard patrols to slip silently into the dark water. “If anyone could manage, she will. But my concern is that if she does cross, she might be leaping from the pan into the cook fire if there are Hedra on the other bank, for the Faction has no love for gypsies.”
IT WAS WELL past midday before I returned to the Beforetime complex. Seely had gone back down earlier to let Dell know what I had learned, but I had wanted to try to contact Merret again. I had not managed it, however, even when Kader appeared to take the watch from Alun and allowed me to draw on him.
Puzzled and uneasy about what might be going on over the river, I went below with Alun. As we descended the metal steps, he said with cheerful relish that we ought to arrive in time to sample one of Dell’s delicious midmeal soups. I raised my eyebrows. Many futuretellers at Obernewtyn had chosen domestic tasks to busy their bodies and leave their minds free, but the meals they prepared were invariably bland or peculiarly spiced.
Dell laughed at my expression when I stepped from the elevating chamber into a large, pleasant room that smelled deliciously of the soup she was pouring into a tureen. “I have learned to like cooking and to enjoy doing it well,” she said.
“You have changed,” I could not help saying as she ladled me a bowl of soup and pushed a platter of thickly sliced, fragrant hot bread toward me.
“Our time of exile has changed all of us here,” Dell said seriously. “I think we have become closer than people of different guilds do at Obernewtyn, because danger always seems to stalk us, and we rely on no one but ourselves.” She changed the subject then, questioning me closely about what Merret had told me.
I concluded by saying I would try again to reach Merret in an hour, for surely by then she would have garnered some useful information and be heading back in our direction.
The elevating chamber doors opened, and Blyss ushered in a flock of boys and girls. Realizing these must be the Misfit children Dell had mentioned earlier, I smiled as they approached and touched their minds lightly to confirm their Talents. The futureteller gave each of them bread and soup and bade Blyss and Alun help themselves. Then she untied her apron and laid it aside, excusing herself and asking me to join her once I had finished my meal. I was puzzled that she had not stayed to eat with us, but then Blyss introduced me to Pellis, who had a startling shock of carrot-colored hair sticking out in all directions. At twelve, he was older than the other children he introduced, who ranged from ten to four.
In normal circumstances, I would have drawn their stories from them, but I was anxious to farseek Merret again, and before I could do that, I would have to see Dell, which made me uneasy. The moment Blyss had finished her soup, I asked her to take me to the futureteller. It was odd, I thought as we entered the elevating chamber. I had felt perfectly comfortable with Dell the cook, but now I feared an interview with Dell the Futuretell guilden.
My discomfort with futuretellers centered upon the fact that, while Atthis had warned me never to speak of my quest, futuretellers often dreamed of it in a fragmentary way, which inevitably led to questions I could not or would not answer. The Futuretell guildmistress, Maryon, had more than once referred obliquely to my quest, but she had never spoken of it outright to me. Indeed, she had seemed to understand the importance of not speaking of it. But Dell was second in rank and skill to the guildmistress, and Maryon might have discussed me with her before Dell had left for the west coast. Perhaps she had made up her mind to abandon any squeamishness about my quest. What would I do, I wondered, if she asked me about it directly? And yet was there any need to remain silent with her when Atthis had drawn Dell into a spirit merge with Maruman, Gahltha, and others in order to save me?
As she led me along a yellow-lit hall on the building’s thirtieth level, Blyss broke into my thoughts. “The Futuretell guilden cooks, but she never eats her meals in the great hall. She prefers to eat alone in Sanctuary. I think you will see why.”
“What is sanctuary?” I asked.
She gave me a shy smile. “It is better for you to see Sanctuary rather than have someone tell you about it. But it is also what we call this complex now. Sanctuary, for it has proven so to us, and it was created in th
e first place to be a sanctuary for the Beforetimers.”
I wanted to say that it had not served them well since almost no one had managed to get there before the Great White destroyed their world, but it would have been harsh to say. I glanced at Blyss again, and she was smiling softly. I contemplated asking about her relationship with Merret but decided it was none of my business and turned my attention to my surroundings.
The corridor we had entered on this level was smooth and bare, like all those I had passed along in the Beforetime complex, but unlike the rest, it curved, and now that I thought about it, there was something odd about the yellowish light flooding the passage.
I had just realized that, instead of coming from both walls, the light here came only from the inside wall of the curving passage, when suddenly that wall became transparent. I stopped abruptly, astonished to see trees growing on the other side of the glass! The more I looked, the more I realized that it was not just a few trees in some sort of underground garden. There were more trees behind the ones I had seen first and more beyond them. I was looking at a forest, and astoundingly, above the trees was a blue sky!
“Come, there is a door just along here,” Blyss urged. She touched the transparent wall, and like the door to the elevating chamber, the glass split open and the intoxicating scent of hot greenery and damp rich earth flowed over me.
“Welcome to Sanctuary,” Blyss said, clearly enjoying my reaction.
“What is this? H-how …?” I stammered.
Blyss shook her head and smiled. “Let Dell explain.” She pointed to a track weaving away from the opening in the glass and through the trees. I followed the empath along it, feeling as if I had stepped into a dream. After we had been walking long enough for me to feel warm, I realized that things were not quite as natural as they seemed. There were no bird or animal cries, nor the sound of insects, and there was not a breath of wind. The light, which seemed at first to be so like sunlight, was too yellow, quite aside from the fact that there was no sun. The light emanated from the blueness, which, I realized after my first shock, must be the blue-painted roof of an immense cavern.
“Here,” said Blyss triumphantly, and I saw that the path ended in a clearing at the open door of a small dome-shaped hut half obscured by foliage. “This is where Dell spends most of her time,” Blyss added.
As we came closer, I saw that the hut was not a rounded dome but merely many sided. It had only two rather small windows, one on either side of the door, and when we entered, I saw why. Shelves that groaned under the weight of hundreds of books covered the other walls, and on a table in the center of the room sat an enormous computermachine. A chair faced it, but Dell sat in a more comfortable-looking chair beside the window.
Hearing us enter, she rose with a smile, saying softly, “Thank you, Blyss.” It was a dismissal, and Blyss smiled at me and withdrew.
“How did you do all this?” I cried the moment we were alone.
The futureteller burst out laughing. “Of course, I did not do this. It was here when we came; it is a living seed store, maintained by Ines. But I should not laugh. My own astonishment was great when I first came here, though Ines had told me what to expect. I thought I was misunderstanding her.”
“Jak told me about you and Ines,” I said.
Again she laughed. “You make it sound like a love affair.”
“You used not to laugh so much,” I said, rather foolishly.
This rendered the futureteller serious. “You spoke before of change, and I have been thinking of your words. True, I have become less … somber than I was at Obernewtyn. I have noticed it in myself. I will not go back, even if that turns out to be possible. I belong here now.”
“Here?” I said in disbelief.
She nodded. “There is enough in this complex to bewitch the mind for several lifetimes. Jak feels the same. For him it is the information and the laboratories, and for me, it is Ines.”
“You speak of a computermachine as a person.”
Dell sat down at the seat behind the computermachine and bade me draw up a chair. “I think of Ines as something that lives. In some way, our relationship has an element of a beastspeaker and beast in that the two communicate but are essentially different kinds. Because of that, there will always be gaps in their understanding of one another. The secret of harmony is to accept those gaps.”
“Jak says you believe that you can make the computermachine let you enter forbidden areas of its …” I stopped, groping for a suitable word.
“Her program,” Dell said. “A computermachine is only a machine. The program is what allows her to think. It is the mind that inhabits the plast and metal body. But as for making Ines tell us the secrets she is keeping, that simply would not be possible. The forbidding is built into her programming just as the instinct not to jump off a cliff is built into us. However, while we could be forced off a cliff, Ines cannot be forced to go against her programming. But she might be brought to reason well enough to see that her program needs to adapt and grow.”
“Do you really think it is possible for a machine to change its mind?”
“What I know,” Dell said, “is that Ines can learn. That is part of her programming. The whole time we have been here, she has been teaching me, but she is also taking in what I tell her as new knowledge, which can be compared to old knowledge. She is changing me, but in a sense, I am also changing her.” Dell lost her lecturing tone and said with a sudden, almost girlish, burst of excitement, “Elspeth, you cannot imagine what Ines knows of the Beforetime.”
“Then she knows about the Great White?” I asked, suddenly aware that Ines might know the location of the computermachines that had caused it.
But Dell shook her head. “I asked about the Great White, but the last thing she remembers before my waking her is the command her human user gave to put herself to sleep. That is not the same as being switched off. All of the lesser computermachines that she can manipulate continued following their programs, but there was no mastermind. Think of our hearts pumping and our lungs breathing while our mind sleeps.” Dell smiled. “Jak accessed the lesser computermachines not long after we arrived, but Ines woke only after I spoke her name and bade her wake.”
“What made you think of doing it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I do not know. The letters scribed upon her formed a name, so I got into the habit of thinking of the computermachine as a female. Then one day I was thinking of that storysong that Miky and Angina made about a sleeping princess, and it suddenly seemed to me that the computer was like a sleeping princess. Some mad impulse made me command her to wake and speak to me. I did not expect her to answer, and when she did, I near fell over with shock.” She chuckled. “Of course, if she had truly been switched off, as the Beforetimers say, it would have been like trying to waken a dead person.”
“Why was she made to sleep? Does she know?”
“She knows that before she was put to sleep, she was cut off from the other Ines programs. There were many computermachines in the Beforetime with the Ines program. Because they could all learn and adapt to what they learned, that might mean they are all different, with different information from different human controllers. But they were all linked as well. Indeed, that was their virtue and their specialty. They linked and were able to share information. So what one knew, all knew. This made them incredibly accurate and knowledgeable, but also identical. Then, just before the Great White, all the Ines programs were isolated from one another. That is when this Ines, and I suppose all the other computers with Ines programs, became unique, for after this time, they learned and thought alone. Ines does not know why the links between them were blocked, but she says that only Govamen had the power to close down their etherlink.”
“Govamen,” I echoed, fascinated.
Dell gave me a quick look. “Interesting, isn’t it? The computermachines with Ines programs were cut off from one another by the very organization that made prisoners of the Beforetime Misfits kidnappe
d from the Reichler Clinic. It is difficult not to see Govamen as a sinister body, and much that Ines has told me confirms this impression. I asked her once if we could reconnect her to the other computermachines, and she said it would be possible but they could only be reconnected by using one of the central Govamen computermachines that control the links, and only three of those existed. I think it unlikely any of them survived, because they would certainly have been targets in whatever conflict led to the Great White. In any case, it would be dangerous to do it, because Ines believes it is likely, given the suddenness of the Great White, that many of the computermachines containing her programming were not put to sleep by their human users. This meant that when their users perished, they remained awake but isolated from their sister units and lacking any contact with their human handlers. Since the Ines program focuses so much on the acquisition and exchange of knowledge with other Ines units and with human users, the isolated programs would have suffered a gradual distortion, a sort of madness that would immediately infect any other computermachine connected to it.”
“Almost like a computermachine plague,” I murmured.
Dell looked startled and nodded. “Being effectively Ines’s human user now, I understand very well how a computermachine program would suffer, for she has an insatiable hunger to know things. Lacking that connection to her sister computermachines, she has no other source of new information but what we give her. Fortunately, that seems to satisfy her. Most fascinating is that when I tell her something that does not agree with the knowledge she possesses, she is able to consider both sets of knowledge and decide which to believe. Sometimes she decides that neither is completely correct, and she formulates a modified or merged version of the information. This capacity for assessing information and discarding those parts she has judged obsolete or irrelevant makes me certain that the right argument or piece of knowledge could make her discard the imperative that requires certain keys and codes before she will allow me to know all that she knows. Then she will simply open her deeper self to me.”