Raymond. Bearing a tray.
“You’re already sitting up!” he cried in his high, fussy voice, unchanged over the centuries, “I was going to help you up. I brought tea and cookies!”
“Cookies?” She croaked through years’ dryness in her throat, years’ dust in her nose, a lifetime’s worth of dead skin, coating her everywhere like crumpled paper.
“Well, something like. I made them yesterday, and I heated them up, and they’re not bad. Here, take a sip before you try to talk.” He held the cup to her lips, two vertical wrinkles between his sleekly curved eyebrows, rosebud lips pursed, still smooth-skinned after all this time, looking half his age, concentrating fully on the task at hand.
Nell sipped. Hot. Fragrant. It burned going down, but that was momentary, as was the sudden spasm when it hit the inert gastro-pac that had kept her internal systems from collapsing during sleep. Wake-up tea had a necessary solvent in it, and the only possible course of action was to drink more, little by little. After a bit, the sensation became one of pleasure, of real stuff in her stomach, of thirst quenched, of dry throat and mouth moistened. Why they should feel so dry when they had been fluid-filled for almost a century, God only knew. One of these wakes she was going to read up on cryo-suspension.
When she could hold the cup herself, Raymond left her to it, returning to the workbench where he gathered together the parts of a ping and began fitting the carapace on it as he waited for her to get to the next stage, whatever that might be. For most wakers, there was an almost equal balance between the desire to find out what had happened during null time and a determination to go back into null time. In the latter case, intervention was needed. Chosen as first wakers were those whose curiosity outweighed their languor, as with Raymond and Nell. She sipped and nibbled and finally set the cup down, demanding, “Help me out of this thing.”
He returned to lower the coffin to a height she could get out of easily. All the coffins were installed at the same level, but those who slept in them were of widely varying heights, and it rather ruined a wakening—as Nell herself had experienced during briefing sleep—to collapse in a screaming heap because the floor was six inches lower than it should be. They had lost some good people, too, people who wouldn’t wake up. Some of them had wakened once or twice, or even three times, but stopped at that. The people who had stopped waking were still alive in their coffins. Perhaps, Nell thought, their waking dreams were so seductive, they could not leave them. Perhaps when a certain time came, they simply had had enough.
Whichever it might be, she sympathized with them as she teetered on wooden legs that were suddenly becoming electric flesh. Tottering was next, to the nearby chair, where she flexed and stretched. By the time she could actually feel her body, Raymond had gone away, leaving her to stagger to cubicle B of the staff quarters, where she shed her sleep suit and got into the shower. At the first touch of water, all the outer skin that was already dead when she was frozen came away in sheets, sodden wads sloshing into the drain like wet tissue paper. The disposal unit came on with a whir to break up the sludge and send it into the recycling chute. An assortment of soft, whirling brushes and a liberal application of resinous smelling foamy stuff rid her of a suddenly overwhelming, all-over itch, and clothes were ready in her stasis locker when she had dried herself: underwear, dark trousers, dark shirt, lightweight lab coat. Everything soft, not to abrade the sensitive skin. Socks, soft shoes. The back of her locker door bore pictures of Michelle and Tony before the Happening. Of Tony’s great granddaughter, Texy, a hundred years later, along with her four brothers and two sisters. Of assorted great to the nth grandchildren in century three, and more in century four. She had a folder thick with them. Nell was lucky in that regard. Raymond had been, as they used to say, a GASP, that is, gay and sans progeny, though he thought he had located a nephew line, somewhere south. It had become a hobby to keep track of descendants, to get ping pictures and make notes. Nell had descendants among the Spared Ones, too, and Bastion lay just over the mountain from the redoubt.
Suddenly ravenously hungry, she made her way to the kitchen, where Raymond was already poised at the cooker.
“Better?” he asked, plopping an aromatic bowl of soup onto the table before her.
“Um,” she remarked, already busy with the spoon. “I forget who we’re replacing?”
“Bonheur, Markle, Stetson, and John Third Jones. Blaine Markle woke me and stayed up a couple of days to get me current.”
“On what?”
“Everything. The generators were out, said Blaine, because we had no fuel…”
“What did he mean we had no…” she cried.
He held up his hand, forestalling her. “…and it wasn’t worth trying to fix it, said Blaine in a just-shoot-me-and-get-it-over-with voice, because it was inevitable that things would run out. Supplies were low, said Blaine. The embryos had spoiled, said Blaine. Everything was finite. Cleanliness. Order. Beauty. Time. Fuel. He woke a melancholy man.”
“What happened to him? He used to be cheery?”
“Something happened to him during his wakening. He called it the horrors. He told me it wasn’t like a regular dream, because when he was finally completely awake, he could remember every bit of it. People dying all around him. Monsters coming out of the shrubbery, up out of the earth, infecting people he loved, and he had to stand there, watching them die horribly.”
“He’s dreaming about the Bitch hitting earth!”
“Oh, very definitely, and not just him, apparently. His dream was odd enough to make him curious, and he started asking the pings to look for the same kind of thing outside. On the surface they call it the Terrors. Not everybody gets it. It doesn’t kill anyone, though some of those who have it wake up fighting, which may be fatal for anyone within reach.”
“How long had he known about this?”
“Too long. He didn’t even tell me until I dragged it out of him.”
“What did you do?”
“Put sedatives in the sleep juice, hoping that would stop his nightmares. Then I cleaned out the store room so I could see what we had, found the parts for the generator, pulled the pump out of tank number nine and fixed it, switched it over to tank number ten, and got the generator going again. Blaine had let all the chickens die. I took a few dozen eggs from deep storage and put them in the incubator to start a new flock.”
She smiled into the teacup he’d filled from the pot on the stove. “And it took you…how long?”
“Two days,” he said grumpily. “Blaine could perfectly well have done it, if he hadn’t been completely out of it.”
She stopped sipping, remembering something Raymond had said. “What did he mean, the embryos had spoiled?”
Raymond frowned at the floor. “Somewhere along the line, some one or several of our colleagues emptied the gamete storage. It’s been obvious since early on that there are plenty of survivors, so we haven’t paid much attention to the storage. The last routine check I could find recorded was over ninety years ago. I’m assuming there was spoilage, and whoever noticed it just did what was necessary. Blaine himself only noticed the monitor lights were off because they were near the generator cutout.”
She tried to decide how she felt. Rather as she had felt when she’d miscarried that time, between Michy and Tony. A pang, not quite grief but almost. All those little possibilities, gone. “Have you searched the log?”
“Well of course. Nothing under gametes, wombs, embryos, ova, sperm; nothing under the storage bay number or the monitor number; nothing under any other remotely pertinent designator I could come up with. I’ve done everything but a line-by-line read through of the last century, because if it was logged at all, which it might not have been, whoever logged it managed to do it without using any pertinent vocabulary whatsoever!”
“So what else has happened out there?” She gestured, her fingers encompassing the world outside.
“Were the Spared Ones sending out missionaries-cum-spies-cum-bottling
teams when we were awake last?”
“No! They were staying at home, minding their own business, and keeping their covenants with the demons.”
“Well, they’ve got some new bone in their craw. They’ve got teams fanning out putting in time as missionary-spy-bottlers. From the conversation we’ve picked up, it seems that General Gowl recently received a visitation from a Rebel Angel who told the general to add as many to the Spared as possible by forcibly converting anyone convertible. They’ve got muggers out there, knocking passers-by on the heads, sneaking into rooms where people are sick or dying and making off with bits and pieces of them.”
“That’s against their religion! Their Dicta said that everyone who’s Spared is already in Bastion!”
Raymond sat down opposite her, swirling tea in his half-empty cup. “That’s what they used to believe. Their belief now includes conquest and ruling the world. It also includes bottling a lot of their own people for no particular reason except that they’re considered supernumerary.”
“Are they still searching for magic?”
“I hate to tell you, Nell, but they’ve probably found it, or something like it. God knows how long they’ve had it, but what’s going on is serious stuff. Raising the dead. Making zombie workers. No more sweet little fire-starting spells, now they’re casting curses on people.”
She gaped at him. “You’re not saying it works? How?”
“Wouldn’t we love to know. Crazy part is, along with the…well, what would you call it? Black magic? Along with that, there’s a good deal of innocent stuff. Real levitators. Real firestarters. Some pretty good clairvoyants. Plus a guy who evokes animals out of thin air.”
“You’re joking!”
“Why would I joke about it? It’s real enough. Guy they call Befun the Lonely. He conjures up creatures that look like animals, act like animals, eat and excrete like animals. When was the last time you saw a tiger? Or an elephant? We now have tigers and elephants, small ones, because the tropical rain forest they live in is where part of Texas used to be, and it isn’t all that big. Whether it’s hypnotism, telekinesis, manifestation, or translocation, we don’t know. And we didn’t do it. Hell, we couldn’t do it.”
“We had animal embryos. Including wild animals.”
“I know, but everything spoiled, I just told you.”
“Then who…how…?”
“For all we know, he draws them from some trans-dimensional world. Quien sabe. Oh, one more thing. The visitor on top of the world has become a traveler.”
“It’s what?” she cried, disbelieving. “The Bitch part moved? And that wasn’t at the top of your list?”
“Well, who knows.” He tipped his hand: mebbe, mebbe not. “It’s moved a hell of a way from the Arctic Circle. Right now it’s oozing ashore about where Arizona used to be. South of Henceforth.”
“Henceforth is still there?”
“The same cities as when you went to sleep last. Four along the New West Coast, north to south, Mungria, Secours, New Salt Lake, and Henceforth. Several dozen small communities in the Sierra Madre Islands. North of the Yellowstone Sea, a kingdom called Everday, quite civilized.”
“And east of us, New Kansas and New Chicago.”
“Both still dictatorships, but not particularly repressive as we would understand repression from our own time. More on the Singapore model. Traffic back and forth is fairly constant. Around Bastion the farms and ranches are getting more numerous, people who’ve moved over the hills. And there’s a survivor group we didn’t know about, a technological enclave, maybe scientific as well, a good way south of Bastion. Place called Chasm. They’re hidden and secretive, but during the last decade the pings have spotted a couple of gateway trading communities out in the open. Evidently they’ve been there all along, but we didn’t have any pings in that area, never thought to send any until we overheard talk about the place.”
“Anything else?”
“Travelers have spotted a kind of fortress about midway between here and Henceforth, out on the plains. We can’t get a ping near it, and all we know about it is that it wasn’t there ten years ago. For some reason, the wagoneers call it Goldland.”
“Could it be another religious bunch, like Bastion?”
“We don’t know. Goldland is just what the passing wagoneers call it. It could be called something else.”
She mused for a moment. “I guess the place you call Chasm answers the question about where the demons get their trade technology.”
He smiled. “Probably.”
“They still wearing those crazy horns?”
“They are, and we still don’t know why. And we’re picking up that eerie fog in other places than Bastion, now. Last team said it’s moved into the countryside, and now it’s beginning to show up in the nearer towns. Nobody has a clue as to what it is. It almost acts like something living, but when a ping gets close, nothing!”
“Couldn’t it be some function of the monster on top of the world? Excuse me, monster who used to be on top of the world?”
He took his cup and her bowl to the sterilizer, staring into the screen that substituted for a window. A view of trees, mountains, piled white clouds with stormy bottoms. “Anything could be some function of that. We know nothing, less than nothing about it.”
She sighed and rubbed her neck. “Anything from the Mars colony?”
“Moon base is still in touch with them, and they have a very slightly increasing population. Moon base itself is still teetering. And that’s it.” His tone of voice spoke of finality.
“Which means the human race has at least two chances to survive, maybe three, so what are we still in here for?”
He shrugged again. “We’ve pretty much done what we were supposed to do. Thanks to the stuff sent back by the moon team, before they left for Mars, we’ve been able to make accurate maps of the current surface of the earth. Three or four teams back, we printed the maps, showing the terrain, rivers, mountains and so forth. What survived seems to be anything that was a thousand feet above sea level pre-Happening. That means scattered islands where Australia and New Zealand, Indonesia and the Philippines used to be. Anyhow, we’ve made thousands of map copies available to peddlers and merchants and caravan leaders.”
“What cover did you use?”
“As we agreed, we’ve printed ‘Council of Guardians’ at the bottom, to explain who made them.”
“Right,” she said, distractedly. “I’d forgotten about the ‘Council of Guardians.’”
“That’s our role, Nell. Can’t forget our role. We haven’t had anyone willing to play Allipto Gomator for eight years! Time you got back into your seeress’s garb.”
“Time we got out of this tomb into the fresh air,” she said.
“You still want to emerge,” he said in a defeated tone. “Don’t you?”
“I’ve argued for it the past two wakings,” she snarled, angrily. “I would like to meet my many-greats grandchildren.”
He sighed and patted her shoulder. “Why don’t we put off talking about that until the others are awake?”
“How many others, Raymond?”
“Two in this shift.”
“I didn’t mean just this shift, Ray. Why not wake everyone? Why go on with this?”
He stared at her, his face pale. “If we wake everyone, there’ll be twelve of us, Nell. Just twelve.”
She gasped. That was half as many as there had been last time she’d been awake. “My friend? Alan Block.”
“He’s still alive and waking.”
“We didn’t last as long as they thought we would, did we?”
“Long enough,” he said, patting her shoulder. “We lasted long enough.
25
the fate of an inclusionist
When Rashel first took over the Faience it had been piled high with Inclusionist artifacts, which she had immediately started weeding out, including many things that Ayward had been responsible for collecting. Whenever Ayward and Rashel were toget
her, they argued furiously about her actions.
“The painting you’re talking about shows a sorcerer with his magical staff, summoning the power of the light,” Ayward cried dramatically.
Rashel retorted, “It’s what they used to call art, yes, but it’s not part of The Inexplicable Arts. This painting is simply a piece of Durable Art! It portrays a man leaning on a rake or hoe, staring into the sunset. It’s actually included in an encyclopedia of artworks dating before the Happening. You’ll find it in the C of S library.”
“The College of Sorcery had already declared it part of the Canon of Arcana, Rashel. It was on my Master List.”
“No one refers to your old master list anymore, and I’m certainly not going to call it to their attention.”
Ayward turned white. “Once something is declared part of the Canon, your job should be to find out its meaning.”
“Once something is mistakenly declared part of the Canon of Arcana, it is my job to exclude it. Calling this simple old painting a part of the Canon destroys the integrity of The Art. Can’t you see that?”
“Better a false inclusion than a false exclusion!” he cried.
“Dicta before personality! That’s what the Bureau says!”
“Frash what the Bureau says.”
“Hush,” she sneered. “Someone might be listening.”
Someone was usually listening, at the time and afterward, when Ayward complained to her.
“Everything from the time of the great mages is magical, Dis. People moved without labor, brought forth food without toil, built great structures with The Art. Ah, Dismé, I long for that time.”
His longing did not impress her as once it might have done. Whatever Ayward longed for was no longer Dismé’s concern, still less his marital dispute about the painting. There was nothing unusual about Ayward quarreling with Rashel, except that this was the last quarrel they would have.