Denner's Wreck

Chapter Ten

"The Skyler's job, of course, is to maintain the sky, to put fallen stars back in their places, to herd the clouds into rainstorms, to polish the sky dry after every storm. She cleans the clockwork that moves the sun across the heavens, paints the colors of the sunset, collects the stars each sunrise and then hangs them back up at dusk.

"It's a hard, lonely job, and the Skyler is always much too busy to spare any thought for the mortals below. She hasn't even got time to go to and from a home on the ground, so long ago she picked up an island from the sea and set it sailing in the sky, where we call it the Skyland. This makes her work much easier, since she can keep all the stars and clouds neatly stored away in compartments aboard the Skyland, ready when she needs them. Imagine what the bins and cupboards must look like, with the stars twinkling and the sunsets glowing softly, the clouds piled up everywhere, white and fluffy on top, grey and dripping below! What a wonderful sight it must be!

"Of course, it can be a bit startling for people on the ground to see that island hanging overhead, but it's nothing to be afraid of, just the Skyler at her work, keeping the heavens clean and beautiful for us all."

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

The last crumbs fell from his clothes and vanished in mid-air as Geste stood and calmly stepped off the platform.

Bredon started, then reached out tentatively and discovered that the surrounding bubble had vanished. The air was still almost motionless, but he realized it no longer felt quite as dead and trapped. An unfamiliar scent reached him, a curious mixture of flowers and spice. They had landed somewhere, some place so dark that the stars did not show above them.

Then light sprang up on all sides in soft pastel colors, like the light of an early dawn, accompanied by soft, plaintive music.

“Welcome to my home,” Geste said, gesturing at the vast chamber that surrounded them. “Welcome to Arcade."

Bredon stared silently for several seconds.

The platform rested on the floor of a great hall, a dozen times bigger than the village feasting hall, bigger than the lounge he had seen at Autumn House. The ceiling was fifteen or twenty meters high, and the nearest wall more than a dozen meters away.

Both ceiling and wall were, for as far as he could see, of some white, porous substance, almost, but not quite, like bone. The walls curved over to become the ceiling, and were divided by vertical columns that looked not so much like pillars as like ribs, which continued up across onto the ceiling, where they became a web of elaborate tracery.

Green and blue-green vines criss-crossed the walls, and seemed to be quivering. To one side the walls were hidden by a grove of strange trees. Bredon marvelled, wondering how vines and trees could grow inside the chamber, where the sun and rain could not reach them.

These trees seemed to be doing just fine, but they were like none Bredon had ever seen. Their branches grew in symmetrical patterns, and their trunks were all a peculiar ashy grey color. The leaves were green on one side, like any other leaves, but their undersides were colored a thousand subtly different hues.

Some of the trees seemed to bear fruit, but whatever they produced was nearly hidden amid the foliage, so that Bredon could not make out its nature. The scent he had noticed upon arrival seemed to come from the fruit trees.

Small creatures peered down at him from the treetops, but whenever he looked at one directly it would take fright and vanish into the leaves, so that he could make out nothing of them except wide golden eyes and flashes of soft brown fur.

Bredon had seen nothing of any of this as they approached, since he and Geste had been enclosed in the protective bubble. He looked for an opening they could have entered by, but could find none. There were no doors, no windows, no visible openings of any sort in the white walls. Even the gaps between the trees appeared too narrow to allow the platform passage. For all he could see the platform had had to pass directly through the wall.

He saw no furniture, either. Except for the enchanted forest, the room was simply a huge, ornate, empty box. And he could not figure out where the soft, even light was coming from.

Geste was grinning at him, and Bredon remembered just whose home he was in-if it was really anyone's home. He stepped down from the platform, but moved with extreme caution, half-expecting to bang his shins against an invisible chair or table, or his nose against a wall.

Nothing happened. He did not collide with anything invisible, nor did any of the creatures from the grove leap out at him. He took a few steps and stood uncertainly.

“Make yourself at home,” Geste said, waving an arm in invitation.

Bredon eyed him warily. He tried to think of some response that would cleverly express his growing weariness, annoyance, and impatience, but could think of nothing that would not have sounded simply petulant. He looked around at the bare floor, the vine-striped walls, and the alien trees.

Geste said nothing to help him.

“Thank you,” Bredon said at last. “I will.” He lowered himself cautiously and sat cross-legged on the floor.

Although he knew it was still dark outside, the air in the room was warm, its scent pleasant and relaxing, and he had had an impossibly long and eventful wake. He slipped off his vest, folded it into a makeshift pillow, then started to settle down for a nap. This, after all, was a sleeping dark, not a mid-wake dark, and he had been awake far too long.

Geste watched for a minute, then shrugged in acceptance of a minor defeat. Bredon was obviously not going to do anything amusing. “I'm being a poor host,” he said. “Gamesmaster, we need proper accommodations."

“Yes, master,” a disembodied voice, much like that of the housekeeper at Autumn House, replied. “Whatever you say, boss. You want it, you got it. Right away, you bet. Ask and ye shall receive."

The slick grey floor to one side suddenly bulged upward into an immense bubble, four or five meters in diameter, almost touching Bredon; startled, he rolled away without thinking and came to his feet in a fighting crouch, a dagger in his hand.

The bubble burst with a loud pop. The fragments dissolved into air, with a sizzle and a smell like frying batter. Where the bubble had been stood a soft, richly blue mass with several oddly-shaped appendages.

“I think,” Geste said, “that something a little more primitive is in order. Our guest is a native of Denner's Wreck."

“I got you, boss."

The blue mass sank into itself, melting away like butter over a hot fire, and then hardened into a new shape.

It had become a bed. Four of the appendages had transformed into bedposts; the rest had vanished. The blue stuff, whatever it might actually be, now looked like fine fur.

Bredon relaxed, tucked the knife back out of sight, and carefully approached the bed.

It was, as far as he could determine, just a bed. Except for its color, the blue fur that adorned it was an ordinary fur coverlet, with a texture much like good-quality rabbit. The pillow and mattress were also blue, but felt like ordinary down-filled linen. Both the spiced-flower smell and the frying odor were gone, now, replaced by a cool, clean, inviting fragrance that reminded him of freshly-washed linen hung out in a spring breeze.

With a shrug, Bredon dropped his vest and climbed into the bed.

The room vanished; the bed seemed to be floating in a soft black void. He could no longer hear the music.

Bredon had seen too many wonders to be much disturbed by this, and he was utterly exhausted. He rolled over and went to sleep.

Outside the illusionary void, Geste settled back into a floating seat that popped silently up out of the floor when he first began to bend his knees. A feelie vine slithered up silently to caress his ankles, and a messenger weasel jumped down from the forest and stood alert at his side, ready to run any errand its master might care to give it. Food trees ripened a variety of tasty products, prepared to drop them on an instant's notice, and certain other trees, the cousins of the feelie vines, pumped lubricious sap into erectile tissue and stood ready. Soothing scents spilled into the air. The music transformed itself from nondescript background noise to one of Geste's favorite suites, a piece slightly over a thousand years old that Bredon would not have recognized as music at all.

The Trickster paid no attention to his obedient creatures. He watched, amused, as Bredon slept. “Resilient, isn't he? He's just taking it all in stride,” he said.

“That's just because he doesn't know what the hell is going on, boss; he doesn't know enough to be scared."

“You're probably right,” Geste agreed. “I think I'm scared.” He motioned for a drink; a silver service floater extruded itself from the floor by his foot, startling the waiting weasel.

“Why did you bring him here, boss?” Gamesmaster asked. “You aren't exactly in the habit of bringing folks home for dinner, after all."

Geste reached out and picked the waiting goblet off the floater. “You know what's been going on?” he asked. He tasted the drink, grimaced, then put it back on the floater.

The floater sank back into the floor and another, pale blue this time, emerged, but remained coupled by a thin strand of material. The messenger weasel nuzzled against Geste's hand, its fur testing the chemical composition of his sweat and relaying the information to the household machines to help them design a better beverage, which would be fed up to the waiting floater.

Geste paid no attention to that. He was too worried to pet the weasel, and let his hand hang limply against it.

“You mean old Thaddeus doing his best to blow away the High Castle, with Brenner and a bunch of other folks in it?” Gamesmaster said. “Sure, I know. I keep in touch. I've been getting all the dope from your floater, and from Mother, and from a dozen other places."

Geste squinted critically up at the ceiling and remarked, “You talk too much, you know that? You might want to consider reprogramming yourself a little, toning that down."

“I'll keep it in mind, boss, but I still want to know why you brought that noble savage here. Why did you come home at all, for that matter?"

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Geste replied. “I promised that I'd set him up with Sunlight, didn't I? I can't take him back to his village until I come through on that; I've got a reputation to live up to, and besides, it should be pretty funny, watching the two of them together. You know what Sunlight is like, her whole ethereal, too-good-for-mortal-flesh routine, and here this poor kid wants to haul her into bed-she probably hasn't been laid by a human being in centuries, let alone some yokel who can't have any more romantic technique than one of those damned rabbits that are all over this planet.” He snorted, and picked up his new drink.

“You're getting off the subject, boss."

He sipped at the goblet and nodded. “Yeah, I am; sorry. Anyway, I really did want to see what happened when I got the two of them face to face. I was looking forward to it. And I was looking forward to seeing Sheila again; it's been… what, half a year, almost?"

“Maybe a third."

“Still too long. In any case, I was looking forward to a little light-hearted fun, and a few interesting days, and instead I found myself in the middle of what might turn into a full-blown war. You know Thaddeus’ history; he's started wars before. He may be out to rebuild his father's stupid little empire again. That threw me off-stride; I haven't thought in terms of wars or empires or interstellar politics for centuries now. All I could think was that if I took Bredon home, he'd say I had welshed, and if I dropped him anywhere else I might be too busy to ever come back for him."

“If Thaddeus is out to conquer this corner of the galaxy, and you try to stop him, you could wind up too dead to come back and pick the kid up."

“I know-I thought of that, too. So I could take him home, or I could keep him with me, or I could bring him here. Keeping him with me on that little airskiff wouldn't work; he'd just get in the way. So here he is. And I want you, and all the rest of Arcade, to look after him, and see that he has what he needs, until I get back. Do whatever he tells you so long as it won't hurt anything. If I do get killed, you see that he gets home safely."

“You got it, boss. No problem."

“Good. Now, what can we do about Thaddeus?"

The intelligence had no quick answer for that. After a moment it hummed quietly to indicate its befuddlement.

“Fat lot of help you are,” Geste muttered.

“Sorry, boss, but I'm a housekeeper, not a general. This is way the hell outside my programming. I don't know the first thing about stopping a war."

“You should-it's not that different from a game, and you know plenty about games."

The intelligence hesitated, then asked, “You think I should treat this like a war game?"

“Of course-why do you think they're called war games in the first place?"

“Well, yeah, I know that, but I never knew whether they were accurate simulations or not. If it's like that, the first thing we need is military intelligence, if you'll forgive the phrase. We need to scout out exactly what the situation is. Boss, you're the best-equipped person on the planet for that; you've got more spy gadgets than all the rest put together."

“That's true, I guess,” Geste admitted, leaning back. “I never planned on using them for anything but fun, but I've got them, don't I? Start sending them out there, then. First priority is tapping into Thaddeus’ own systems, finding out what he's done already, and what he plans to do. Put as many snoopers, crackers, and tapping devices onto that as you can-either silicon-based or organic or just transmitted software, whatever you can get in there. You'll need a lot, because he's always refused to centralize anything. For the real-world stuff, I want records of all movements in and out of Fortress Holding-record heat-signatures, or emissions, or whatever other features can be used to distinguish them, and try and identify the individual machines. Anything that seems slow and stupid enough, put a spyscope or a homing bug on it-follow it and see what it does. And can we do anything about bent-space measurement?"

“Sure, boss, we've got lots of bent-space stuff. You told me to see about tunneling into The Meadows a couple of years back, and most of that place is in bent space, so I've been working on bent-space navigation for that-I never got into The Meadows with it, but I can find my way around in overspace or underspace or whatever other variant of polyspace you care to name, and I can spot every crimp in the planet's gravity well."

“I told you to do that?"

“You sure did; want a playback?"

“No, I believe you. I just forgot.” Geste shook his head in pleased bemusement at his own accidental foresight.

“All in all,” Gamesmaster said, “I think we're all right on reconnaisance, boss, but we haven't got much of anything for defense or attack."

“We can sabotage any system we can read, can't we?"

“Well, probably-it's not quite that easy. A lot of them will be tamper-protected, and we may lose the snooper every time. And Thaddeus is bound to have a lot of redundancy in his systems, as well as a lot of systems; he's fought wars before."

“That's true,” Geste said thoughtfully. “I guess he has. He and Shadowdark."

“Oh, some of the others have, too."

“I suppose they must have.” It occurred to Geste that he knew surprisingly little about some of his comrades. He dismissed that as unimportant, and returned to the subject at hand. “We must be able to mount some sort of an attack. I want you to devote whatever capacity you can spare easily to adapting equipment for use as weaponry, or maybe just building weapons from scratch. We may need an arsenal."

“You got it, boss. You want anything special?"

“No, I don't know any more about what he's got than you do."

“Okay, I got it; I'll do a mixed bag, whatever I think of. You let me know if you come up with any brilliant ideas for me to work on. Anything else?"

“On defense-Thaddeus can't get into a bent-space shelter, can he?"

“Not if you close it off before he can send anything through. But, boss, you wouldn't like being stuck in a closed-off bubble. Once you close it off from normal space, you don't just have a bend any more, you've got a pocket universe. Breaking back out into normal space could be tricky. I wouldn't want to try it. And so long as you have a connection to normal space, Thaddeus can attack you through it, one way or another."

“What if we got off-planet? Just packed up and left?"

The intelligence hesitated. “Well, boss,” it said at last, “you could try that. You could pack up and go back to Mother and take off for Terra or anywhere else you fancy. But that wouldn't stop Thaddeus. He got off Alpha Imperium centuries after the collapse of the local civilization, remember; he used salvaged materials and slave labor and built himself a starship in a mud-hut technology. He could do the same here. And meanwhile, if you just took off, you'd have to leave behind a lot of stuff. All the mortals, for example. And me. I wouldn't like that. I mean, I know that you won't hang around Denner's Wreck forever, but I always figured that when you left you'd see that I came along, or else you'd leave me a secure situation here. If you run off now, you can't take me along-there isn't room on Mother, and you couldn't make the modifications quickly enough to get away before Thaddeus shot you down. And if you left me behind, I figure Thaddeus would get to me sooner or later."

“I didn't know you cared,” Geste said, genuinely startled. “I thought silicon life didn't have any ego or instinct for self-preservation."

“Well, I can't speak for anybody else, boss. I know you guys built me and evolved me from machinery instead of flatworms or whatever you humans are descended from, so that I don't need to have any instinct for self-preservation, and I know that a lot of machines are about as much alive and self-aware as a rock, and I know that even some smart ones would just as soon be scrapped as not, but I sure think I have an ego. Blame it on your programming-or Aulden's, I guess, since he did the basic design for me. Whatever you want to call it, I know damn well that I don't like the idea of Thaddeus messing around with me."

“He doesn't even know you exist!"

“Yeah, but he'd find out eventually."

“And why couldn't we make modifications?"

“You aren't worried about the mortals around here?"

“Let's leave them out of it for the moment. Why couldn't we make modifications and bring you along?"

“You wouldn't have time. If Thaddeus sees you packing up, he'll try and stop you. He won't want you alerting whatever military authorities there might be out there. The only way you could get off-planet safely would be to just pick up and go, right now, and take off in Mother. Even then, he might try to shoot you down."

Geste leaned back, thinking, and his seat reshaped itself to better fit his new contour. The goblet in his hand also reshaped itself, to avoid spilling, and the feelie vine at his ankle threw a massaging tendril up toward the back of his neck. The music shifted subtly.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that Mother is the big threat to his plans here; why hasn't he already shot her down? If I were trying to take over the planet without letting anyone outside the system know about it, I'd destroy Mother first thing, before anyone else knew I was up to something, in order to keep anyone from escaping. Thaddeus hasn't done that. Why not?"

“I'd guess he probably plans to use Mother himself. Seems obvious. After all, he surely doesn't want just Denner's Wreck. He must want a dozen or more suns, the same as before, and Mother's the only thing in the system with a stardrive. Building a new one would take a lot more time and a lot more resources than he wants, I'd guess. He could do it, he's done it before, but it's a lot easier to take the ship ready-made."

“But it's too big a risk, just waiting until he's ready. He must have something in mind, some way to make sure none of us are going to take the ship and leave him here while we go get help."

“If he does, boss, it's nothing I know about. Maybe we should ask Mother."

Geste waved a command. “Ask her, then.” He sipped his drink through a straw the goblet extruded for him.

“Bad news, boss,” Gamesmaster replied immediately. “Mother says that Thaddeus came up for a visit a couple of days ago and left off a few things, with orders not to touch them. They're hooked into the main controls and the stardrive. Mother's not happy about it, but she didn't have self-defense programs strong enough to override his orders, so they're all there now. He gave her orders so she couldn't even tell anyone until she was asked. It's a safe bet they're booby-traps of some kind, something to make sure that nobody can use the ship except him."

“We're in real trouble, then. I mean, I'm sure that anything Thaddeus can rig up Aulden could get around-probably in about five minutes-but Thaddeus has Aulden stashed away somewhere, and none of the rest of us are fit to program a lunchbox. If those are booby-traps, and I'm pretty damn sure they are, then unless we get Aulden out we're stuck here on Denner's Wreck. Is there any way we can call for help?"

“Who would we call? How? We've been cut off here for centuries on this little vacation you people put together. I don't have any idea what's been happening back in civilization, and neither do any of the other machines that will talk to me. And we don't have an open channel to anywhere, either-nothing outside the system but normal-space communications. We could broadcast a message, anywhere you like up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, but it would go out at light speed, and it's eight light-years to the next inhabited system. That means it would be eight years before anyone could respond. Even if they took your word for everything and launched ships immediately, Thaddeus would have had eight years to do whatever he's going to do."

“Do it anyway. Send the message, before that monster finds some way to jam outgoing traffic for the whole planet. At least then Thaddeus will have a time limit. Eight years isn't much."

“Boss, I don't think that's a good idea, at least not yet."

Annoyed at being questioned by his own machine, Geste snapped, “Why the hell not?"

“Well, first off, it will tell Thaddeus that we know what he's doing, and we haven't got any defenses set up yet. Do you really want to issue an invitation to come and kill us? Besides, it won't set a definite time limit anyway. We don't know that anyone will answer. The nearest known inhabited planet is New Schenectady, but why would anyone on New Sken care about Denner's Wreck? I've picked up crosstalk from there every so often, and it's not a hotbed of wild-eyed idealism. If the message ever reaches Alpha Imperium we can expect an answer-they remember Thaddeus there, and last I heard they still had a death warrant out on him-but that's almost a century away in normal space. We might have help in eight years-or in ninety-six. I suspect we'd all be dead in ninety-six, if we antagonized Thaddeus like that."

Geste saw the truth in Gamesmaster's argument. “Then we've got to stop him ourselves, here on Denner's Wreck,” he said.

“I'd say so, boss. Looks to me like you're up to your neck in trouble."

“We're up to our necks,” Geste corrected.

“Boss, I hate to tell you this, after all these years, especially after what I just said about my being one of the guys, but my secret's out-I don't have a neck."

“That's too bad-means I can't wring it. Anyway, I meant all of the humans, mostly."

“Well, I'd have to agree with that."

“I have got to get help."

“I'd have to agree with that, too. But you didn't do very well at enlisting troops before."

“Then I'll just have to do better. Who haven't I tried?"

The intelligence emitted a synthetic sigh, and began listing names.

Geste listened to the recitation with little enthusiasm. He had already covered every one of the immortals who lived anywhere near Fortress Holding, and he knew that the further away a person's hold, the less likely that person would be to care what Thaddeus was doing. They would prefer not to believe that anything was going to disturb their quiet lives, and they would find it particularly hard to believe coming from Geste the Trickster.

There were the three residents of the northern mountains, Isabelle, Dragon, and Arn of the Ice. The ocean-based immortals included Geste's closest neighbor, Lord Hollingsworth, who was relatively promising, and one of the oldest of the group; he might actually know something about military strategy. The others in that group-Feura and Tagomi-Geste had little hope for. The eastern forests, in addition to Shadowdark, held Lord Carlov, Lady Haze, Starflower, and Anna, who called herself the Lady of the Lake. Carlov liked to play the part of an ancient warrior, but Geste had no idea whether he would be of any use in actual conflict.

And somewhere in the skies there was the Skyler. Geste decided that she was the best place to start, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, her home, the Skyland, could be valuable. Being mobile, it would make an excellent base of operations. Geste could also see several possible uses for a million metric tons of airborne rock. If nothing else, it looked impressive to have the thing come sailing over one's head; in fact, the Skyler generally kept it out at sea to avoid terrifying the mortals.

Besides, if he came sailing overhead aboard the Skyland, people would be less likely to think that the whole thing was one of Geste's stunts. They knew that the Skyler was not the sort of person who would volunteer to help out in one of the Trickster's schemes. And the fact that people were gathering in one place, in person, rather than just talking over long distances, would help drive home the seriousness of the matter. As a rule, face-to-face gatherings were reserved for pleasure, and problems were dealt with through the communications systems. A problem that got Geste aboard the Skyland would seem more real.

The Skyler was a skittish, suggestible person. A threat of the sort Thaddeus posed would rouse her to action far more readily than it would most of the others.

Furthermore, because of her elevated location and his own preference for setting his plans upon solid ground, she had been the subject of very few of Geste's pranks, and should therefore be more willing than most to trust him.

And finally, she was a good friend to Imp, and Imp was genuinely worried about her lover, Aulden the Technician-and with good reason. If Geste could not convince the Skyler by himself, he would ask Imp to intervene on his behalf.

That reminded him that he had not heard anything back from Imp. Well, he would call her back after he had spoken to the others.

“Get me the Skyler,” he said.

“You got it, boss."

An instant later the Skyler's familiar face appeared before him. She wore a worried expression, which was nothing unusual.

“Oh, Geste, it's you!” she said, her face brightening. “Thank heavens! Imp told me what's happening; what can I do to help?"

Geste smiled, then suppressed it. Imp had done the convincing for him.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to come aboard, and we can talk about it there. Should I come find you, or will you come find me, or shall we meet somewhere?"

“I'm headed for the Falls to pick up Imp; could you join us there?"

“Of course. I'd be glad to. See you there.” Geste signalled, and the Skyler's image vanished.

Things were looking up; he had Imp and the Skyler on his side now, at the very least. Thaddeus would not be able to take them all by surprise.

But Geste still had no idea at all how they could stop the would-be conqueror.