'We will do our best not to let you down. Sleep well, Merlin. We will take care of you and your ship, no matter what happens.'
Merlin said farewell to Malkoha. When the ship was sealed up he settled himself into the frostwatch casket and commanded Tyrant to put him to sleep.
He didn't dream.
Nobody he recognised was there to greet Merlin when he returned to consciousness. Were it not for their uniforms, which still carried a recognisable form of the Skylanders' crescent emblem, he could easily believe that he had been abducted by forces from the surface. His visitors crowded around his open casket, faces difficult to make out, his eyes watering against the sudden intrusion of light.
'Can you understand me, Merlin?' asked a woman, with a firm clear voice.
'Yes,' he said, after a moment in which it seemed as if his mouth was still frozen. 'I understand you. How long have I--'
'Twenty years, just as you instructed. We had no cause to wake you.'
He pushed himself from the casket, muscles screaming into his brain with the effort. His vision sharpened by degrees. The woman studied him with a cool detachment. She snapped her fingers at someone standing behind her and then passed Merlin a blanket. 'Put this around you,' she said.
The blanket had been warmed. He wrapped it around himself with gratitude, and felt some of the heat seep into his old bones. 'That was a long one,' he said, his tongue moving sluggishly, making him slur his words. 'We don't usually spend so long in frostwatch.'
'But you're alive and well.'
'So it would seem.'
'We've prepared a reception area in the compound. There's food and drink, a medical team waiting to look at you. Can you walk?'
'I can try.'
Merlin tried. His legs buckled under him before he reached the door. They would regain strength in time, but for now he needed help. They must have anticipated his difficulties, because a wheelchair was waiting at the base of Tyrant's boarding ramp, accompanied by an orderly to push it.
'Before you ask,' the woman said, 'Malkoha is dead. I'm sorry to have to tell you this.'
Merlin had grown to think of the old man as his only adult friend on Lecythus, and had been counting on his being there when he returned from frostwatch. 'When did he die?'
'Fourteen years ago.'
'Force and wisdom. It must be like ancient history to you.'
'Not to all of us,' the woman said sternly. 'I am Minla, Merlin. It may be fourteen years ago, but there isn't a day when I don't remember my father and wish he was still with us.'
As he was being propelled across the apron, Merlin looked up at the woman's face and compared it against his memories of the little girl he had known twenty years ago. At once he saw the similarity and knew that she was telling the truth. In that moment he felt the first visceral sense of the time that had passed.
'You can't imagine how odd this makes me feel, Minla. Do you remember me?'
'I remember a man I used to talk to in a room. It was a long time ago.'
'Not to me. Do you remember the stone?'
She looked at him oddly. 'The stone?'
'You asked your father to give it to me, when I was due to leave Lecythus.'
'Oh, that thing,' Minla said. 'Yes, I remember it now. It was the one that belonged to Dowitcher.'
'It's very pretty. You can have it back if you like.'
'Keep it, Merlin. It doesn't mean anything to me now, just as it shouldn't have meant anything to my father. I'm embarrassed to have given it to you.'
'I'm sorry about Malkoha.'
'He died well, Merlin. Flying another hazardous mission for us, in very bad weather. This time it was our turn to deliver medicine to our allies. We were now making antibiotics for all the land masses in the Skyland Alliance, thanks to the process you gave us. My father flew one of the last consignments. He made it to the other land mass, but his plane was lost on the return trip.'
'He was a good man. I only knew him a short while, but I think it was enough to tell.'
'He often spoke of you, Merlin. I think he hoped you might teach him more than you did.'
'I did what I could. Too much knowledge would have overwhelmed you: you wouldn't have known where to start, or how to put the pieces together.'
'Perhaps you should have trusted us more.'
'You said you had no cause to wake me. Does that mean you made progress?'
'Decide for yourself.'
He followed Minla's instruction. The area around Tyrant was still recognisable as the old military compound, with many of the original buildings still present, albeit enlarged and adapted. But most of the dirigible docking towers were gone, as had most of the dirigibles themselves. Ranks of new aircraft now occupied the area where the towers and airships had been, bigger and heavier than anything Merlin had seen before. The swept-back geometry of their wings, the angle of the leading edge, the rakish curve of their tailplanes all owed something to the shape of Tyrant in atmospheric-entry mode. Clearly the natives had been more observant than he'd given them credit for. Merlin knew he shouldn't have been surprised; he'd given them the blueprints for the jet turbine, after all. But it was still something of a shock to see his plans made concrete, so closely to the way he had imagined it.
'Fuel is always a problem,' Minla said. 'We have the advantage of height, but little else. We rely on our scattered allies on the ground, together with raiding expeditions to Shadowland fuel bunkers.' She pointed to one of the remaining airships. 'Our cargo dirigibles can lift fuel all the way back to the Skylands.'
'Are you still at war?' Merlin asked, though her statement rather confirmed it.
'There was a ceasefire shortly after my father's death. It didn't last long.'
'You people could achieve a lot more if you pooled your efforts,' Merlin said. 'In seventy - make that fifty - years, you'll be facing collective annihilation. It isn't going to make a damned bit of difference what flag you're saluting.'
'Thank you for the lecture. If it means so much to you, why don't you fly down to the other side and talk to them?'
'I'm an explorer, not a diplomat.'
'You could always try.'
Merlin sighed heavily. 'I did try once. Not long after I left the Cohort . . . there was a world named Exoletus, about the same size as Lecythus. I thought there might be something on Exoletus connected with my quest. I was wrong, but it was reason enough to land and try to talk to the locals.'
'Were they at war?'
'Just like you lot. Two massive power blocs, chemical weapons, the works. I hopped from hemisphere to hemisphere, trying to play the peacemaker, trying to knock their heads together to make them see sense. I laid the whole cosmic perspective angle on them: how there was a bigger universe out there, one they could be a part of if they only stopped squabbling. How they were going to have to be a part of it whether they liked it or not when the Huskers came calling, but if they could only be ready for that--'
'It didn't work.'
'I made things twenty times worse. I caught them at a time when they were inching towards some kind of ceasefire. By the time I left, they were going at it again hell for leather. Taught me a valuable lesson, Minla. It isn't my job to sprinkle fairy dust on a planet and get everyone to live happily ever after. No one gave me the toolkit for that. You have to work these things out for yourselves.'
She looked only slightly disappointed. 'So you'll never try again?'
'Burn your fingers once, you don't put them into the fire twice.'
'Well,' Minla said, 'before you think too harshly of us, it was the Skylands that took the peace initiative in the last ceasefire.'
'So what went wrong?'
'The Shadowlands invaded one of our allied surface territories. They were interested in mining a particular ore, known to be abundant in that area.'
Depressed as he was by news that the war was still rumbling on, Merlin forced his concentration back onto the larger matter of preparations for the catastrophe. 'You've done well with
these aircraft. Doubtless you'll have gained expertise in high-altitude flight. Have you gone transonic yet?'
'In prototypes. We'll have an operational squadron of supersonic aircraft in the air within two years, subject to fuel supplies.'
'Rocketry?'
'That too. It's probably easier if I show you.'
Minla let the orderly wheel him into one of the compound buildings. A long window ran along one wall, overlooking a larger space. Though the interior had been enlarged and re-partitioned, Merlin still recognised the tactical room. The old wall-map, with its cumbersome push-around plaques, had been replaced by a clattering electromechanical display board. Operators wore headsets and sat at desks behind huge streamlined machines, their grey metal cases ribbed with cooling flanges. They were staring at small flickering slate-blue screens, whispering into microphones.
Minla removed a tranche of photographs from a desk and passed them to Merlin for his inspection. They were black and white images of the Skyland air mass, shot from increasing altitude, until the curve of Lecythus's horizon became pronounced.
'Our sounding rockets have penetrated to the very edge of the atmosphere, ' Minla said. 'Our three-stage units now have the potential to deliver a tactical payload to any unobstructed point on the surface.'
'What would count as a "tactical payload"?' Merlin asked warily.
'It's academic. I'm merely illustrating the progress we've made in your absence.'
'I'm cheered.'
'You encouraged us to make these improvements,' Minla said, chidingly. 'You can hardly blame us if we put them to military use in the meantime. The catastrophe - as you've so helpfully pointed out - is still fifty years in the future. We have our own affairs to deal with in the meantime.'
'I wasn't trying to create a war machine. I was just giving you the stepping stones you needed to get into space.'
'Well, as you can doubtless judge for yourself, we still have some distance to go. Our analysts say that we'll have a natural satellite in orbit within fifteen years, maybe ten. Definitely so by the time you wake from your next bout of sleep. But that's still not the same as moving fifty thousand people out of the system, or however many it needs to be. For that we're going to need more guidance from you, Merlin.'
'You seem to be doing very well with what I've already given you.'
Minla's tone, cold until then, softened perceptibly. 'We'll get you fed. Then the doctors would like to look you over, if only for their own notebooks. We're glad to have you back with us, Merlin. My father would have been so happy to see you again.'
'I'd like to have spoken with him again.'
After a moment, Minla said: 'How long will you stay with us, before you go back to sleep again?
'Months, at least. Maybe a year. Long enough to be sure that you're on the right track, and that I can trust you to make your own progress until I'm awake again.'
'There's a lot we need to talk about. I hope you have a strong appetite for questions.'
'I have a stronger appetite for breakfast.'
Minla had him wheeled out of the room into another part of the compound. There he was examined by Skyland medical officials, a process that involved much poking and prodding and whispered consultation. They were interested in Merlin not just because he was a human who had been born on another planet, but because they hoped to learn some secret of frostwatch from his metabolism. Eventually they were done and Merlin was allowed to wash, clothe himself and finally eat. Skyland food was austere compared to what he was used to aboard Tyrant, but in his present state he would have wolfed down anything.
There was to be no rest for him that day. More medical examinations followed, including some that were clearly designed to test the functioning of his nervous system. They poured cold water into his ears, shone lights into his eyes and tapped him with various small hammers. Merlin endured it all with stoic good grace. They would find nothing odd about him because in all significant respects he was biologically identical to the people administering the examinations. But he imagined the tests would give the medical staff much to write about in the coming months.
Minla was waiting for him afterwards, together with a roomful of Skyland officials. He recognised two or three of them as older versions of people he had already met, greyed and lined by twenty years of war - there was Triller, Jacana and Sibia, Triller now missing an eye - but most of the faces were new to him. Merlin took careful note of the newcomers: those would be the people he'd be dealing with next time.
'Perhaps we should get to business,' Minla said, with crisp authority. She was easily the youngest person in the room, but if she didn't outrank everyone present, she at least had their tacit respect. 'Merlin, welcome back to the Skylands. You've learned something of what has happened in your absence: the advances we've made, the ongoing condition of war. Now we must talk about the future.'
Merlin nodded agreeably. 'I'm all for the future.'
'Sibia?' Minla asked, directing a glance at the older woman.
'The industrial capacity of the Skylands, even when our surface allies are taken into account, is insufficient for the higher purpose of safeguarding the survival of our planetary culture,' Sibia answered, sounding exactly as if she was reading from a strategy document, even though she was looking Merlin straight in the eye. 'As such, it is our military duty - our moral imperative - to bring all of Lecythus under one authority, a single Planetary Government. Only then will we have the means to save more than a handful of souls.'
'I agree wholeheartedly,' Merlin said. 'That's why I applaud your earlier ceasefire. It's just a pity it didn't last.'
'The ceasefire was always fragile,' Jacana said. 'The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did. That's why we need something more permanent.'
Merlin felt a prickling sensation under his collar. 'I guess you have something in mind.'
'Complete military and political control of the Shadowlands,' Sibia replied. 'They will never work with us, unless they become us.'
'You can't believe how frightening that sounds.'
'It's the only way,' Minla said. 'My father's regime explored all possible avenues to find a peaceful settlement, one that would allow our two blocs to work in unison. He failed.'
'So instead you want to crush them into submission.'
'If that's what it takes,' Minla said. 'Our view is that the Shadowland administration is vulnerable to collapse. It would only take a single clear-cut demonstration of our capability to bring about a coup, followed by a negotiated surrender.'
'And this clear-cut demonstration?'
'That's why we need your assistance, Merlin. Twenty years ago, you revealed certain truths to my father.' Before he could say anything, Minla produced one of the sheets Merlin had given to Malkoha and his colleagues. 'It's all here in black and white. The equivalence of mass and energy. The constancy of the speed of light. The interior structure of the atom. Your remark that our sun contains a "nuclear-burning core". All these things were a spur to us. Our best minds have grappled with the implications of these ideas for twenty years. We see how the energy of the atom could carry us into space, and beyond range of our sun. We now have an inkling of what else that implies.'
'Do tell,' Merlin said, an ominous feeling in his belly.
'If mass can be converted into energy, then the military implications are startling. By splitting the atom, or even forcing atoms to merge, we believe that we can construct weapons of almost incalculable destructive force. The demonstration of one of these devices would surely be enough to collapse the Shadowland administration.'
Merlin shook his head slowly. 'You're heading up a blind alley. It isn't possible to make practical weapons using atomic energy. There are too many difficulties.'
Minla studied him with an attentiveness that Merlin found quite unsettling. 'I don't believe you,' she said.
'Believe me or don't believe me, it's up to you.'
'We are certain that these weapons can be made. Our own research lines will g
ive them to us sooner or later.'
Merlin leaned back in his seat. He knew when there was no point in maintaining a bluff.
'Then you don't need me.'
'But we do. Most urgently. The Shadowland administration also has its bright minds, Merlin. Their interest in those ore reserves I mentioned earlier . . . either there have been intelligence leaks, or they have independently arrived at similar conclusions to us. They are trying to make a weapon.'
'You can't be sure of that.'
'We can't afford to be wrong. We may own the sky, but our situation is dependent upon access to those fuel reserves. If one of our allies was targeted with an atomic weapon . . .' Minla left the sentence unfinished, her point adequately made.