Wyrms

Chapter 14. VIGILANT

PATIENCE KNEW THAT THE SCENERY UPRIVER OF Heffiji's house was identical to the scenery they had already passed.

The same massive oaks, the same beech and maple, ash and pine. But she knew more now. She was more. She could remember some of the earliest Heptarchs as little children, learning long catalogues of flora and fauna, all neatly split between native and Earthborn.

Oak and maple are Earthborn, so are ash and pine.

Beech and palm and fern are native, but were named for similar Earth species. Scrubnut, hotberry, glassfruit, and web are native; walnut is from Earth.

Like many of her earliest ancestors, Patience now saw clear divisions between Imakulata's native life and the life brought in the starship, and she began to understand the origin of the ancient enmity between humans and the intelligent natives they despised. They were ugly, strange, dangerous from the human point of view, while humans and the plants they had brought with them were safe and beautiful.

Yet Patience could also see what none of her ancestors had seen. Even though she could remember the world as it was seen by the fifth Heptarch, she had no memory of an alien world. The forests of Imakulata, by the fifth generation, had become exactly as they were today, almost entirely Earthborn.

And yet not Earthborn at all. The native species had not been replaced. They had merely put on disguises and become, in appearance, the Earthborn plants that the humans nurtured. What was the oak before? A little flying bug, a worm, a seaweed, an airborne virus on a fleck of dust? The whole world was in disguise, every living thing pretending to be homely and comfortable for the humans who supposed themselves masters of the world. Everything that truly belonged to human beings had been kidnapped, murdered, and replaced with mocks and moles. Patience imagined she could see through the disguise of the deer that drank at water's edge and bounded lightly away at their noisy approach. She pictured the secret self of an oak as a hideous, deformed baby leering wickedly at her from the heart of the tree. Changelings, a world of changelings, all conspiring against us, lulling us into complacency, until the moment that they finally begin to replace us, too.

She shuddered. And she imagined that Unwyrm whispered to her with the desires of her body. Come to me, come and bear my children, my children, my changelings, we'll steal into every house in the world, you and I, and creep to the children's beds. We'll lay our little wyrmling into the cradle, and watch as it changes shapes to look just like the human baby lying there. Then we'll take the human baby, carry it outside, slit its throat and toss it in my bag.

A thousand bags, each emptied into a garden, where the leering oaks suck the last dregs of life from the desiccated flesh. Patience thought she walked through the garden, brittle bones crackling under her feet, watching where her husband emptied another bag, then looked at her with his tiny wyrm's head and said, "The last. That's the last of them. There's only one human child left in all the world." He took a living baby out of his bag, its terrified eyes looking hopelessly up at her, and graciously offered to let her dine.

Instead, she ran away, to a place where the ground was soft and forgiving to her feet; to a small hut in the forest, where she could hear a mother crooning to her child. Here is a place we missed, she thought. A child that lives on. I'll protect it, I'll hide it from Unwyrm, and he'll grow up and thrive and kill the changelings-

She peered into the window and saw the baby, and he was beautiful, his delicate fingers wrapped around his mother's thumb, his mouth making sweet sucking motions.

Live, she said silently to the child. Live and be strong, for you are the last.

Then the child winked at her and leered.

Angel shook her awake. "You screamed," he said.

"Sorry," she whispered. She held to the gunnel and looked across the water at the trees. None of them seemed any different. Her dream had been nonsense. If it looks like an oak, if it cuts like an oak, if you can build with it like an oak, what does it matter that it has one immense genetic molecule, instead of many small ones? What does it matter if the deer is only half deer, and the other half of its bloodline is some strange creature of Imakulata?

Life is life, form is form.

Except my life. My form. That must be preserved.

Unwyrm's improved version of humanity is the death of the old, flawed, lonely, but beautiful Earthborn people.

My people.

Come, hurry, hurry, come, spoke Unwyrm's passion.

"Look," said Angel. "River sent Ruin up the mast, and he saw it at the last bend of the river. Skyfoot. For a few minutes, we can see it even from the deck."

Patience got up. Despite what she'd been through on this journey, her body still responded quickly. She was alert and strong in a moment. My body doesn't know I'm three hundred generations old, she thought. My body thinks that I'm a young woman. My body still thinks I have a future of my own.

Skyfoot was a shadow just topping the distant trees on a long, straight stretch of river.

"If the forest weren't so tall," said Angel, "we would have seen it a week before we reached Heffiji's house, instead of three days after leaving it."

"It's very close," said Patience.

"Not really. Just very high. Seven kilometers from base to ridge."

"And now hidden again."

It was too brief a glimpse, and too far away to make out any features. But each sight of it seemed longer than the one before. Two days later they dropped anchor in another bend, and as the dusk hid the mountain itself, the lights of Cranning began to dot the sky like a low-hung galaxy.

The lights went as far from east to west as they could see through their alley between the shores of tall timber.

That night Reck and Ruin climbed the rigging in the darkness, to perch together on the mast and watch their patrimony come alive with light.

River grew surly. Cranning meant nothing to him but the end of the voyage. It was the journey that he lived for, and each arrival was like a little death.

The next day the river began to break up into many wide and slow-flowing streams passing among wooded islands. "What we have here," said Angel, "is an ancient tectonic collision of massive proportions. We are on a plate that once was sliding down under the huge upthrust of Skyfoot. Now the two have joined, and the ground is stable, but once there must have been terrible earthquakes. From here on, the land actually falls toward the base of Skyfoot. The water from the melting glaciers atop the mountain piles up in the sunken area, making a lake that runs along the entire base of the mountain. The original colonists saw it and wrote that there was nothing like it on any habitable planet in the universe."

"So far," said Patience.

"Well, one assumes that anything that can happen once, can and will happen again, eventually, on some other world."

They could make out clusters of buildings on the mountain's face now. All day Ruin clung to the mast or sat in the bow, rapt, watching the face of the mountain as though it were a beloved supplicant coming to him.

"He's useless to anyone," Sken complained. "We ought to tie a rope on him and throw him overboard as an anchor."

Reek's reaction to the mountain was the opposite of Ruin's. While he grew silent, she became talkative.

"I've heard the stories since I was little," she said.

"The soil and water of the ten thousand cavern mouths of Cranning are so rich that never a stick of wood or morsel of food has ever been imported here. The foot of Cranning is a moist and humid rain forest. The mountain rises through all the weathers of the world. Anything that can live and grow anywhere in the world grows here."

She told of the kingdoms of men that had risen and fallen on the mountain's face, some of them only three kilometers wide, fifty meters deep, and twenty meters high, yet with their own dialects, armies, cultures. "And behind them all, in the deepest caverns, in utter darkness, we geblings carry on our lives. Ten million geblings, more than half the geblings in the world. While men and dwelfs and gaunts have their wars and intrigues on the face of Skyfoot, we hold its heart. They build their boundaries and walls, so that none can pass-but the geblings pass, because we know all the hidden ways."

"Don't you rule on the surface, too?" asked Patience.

"When we want to," she said, smiling. "When we decide to rule, then we rule. Everyone there knows that.

We don't have to be officious about it."

Patience felt no rapture at the sight of the mountain.

Somewhere near the top he was waiting for her, sensing her coming closer, getting more eager for her arrival. She found herself longing to turn the boat around, drift downstream and never think of Cranning or the Heptarchy or anything else again. She dreamed more often, and woke up sweating in the night, trembling from the desire that ruled her sleep.

One such night she got up from her bed and left the cabin. Ruin was keeping his watch toward the bow, but she moved quietly and if he noticed her, he did not show any sign of it. He faced the mountain lights, now dying out one by one as the hour grew later. She went to the stern of the boat and curled up beside a thick rope coiled on the deck. River was asleep in his jar, swaying gently as the current rocked the boat. The air was cold, but she liked the discomfort; it distracted her from the Cranning call.

She wasn't aware of having been asleep, but when she opened her eyes, Ruin was not at the bow. Someone else's watch, then. Whose turn was it? There was no light yet in the sky. Sken? Will?

She heard splashing in the water near the boat. Immediately she became alert. She knew all about the river pirates on the lower reaches of Cranwater; she had never heard of any this near Skyfoot, but it was possible. She silently withdrew the glass blowgun from her cross and eased herself to a sitting position. The splashing moved along the port side of the boat, and sure enough, a hand reached up onto the gunnel. As the other hand appeared, the boat dipped slightly, for now it was taking the weight of a very large man.

Then Patience relaxed a little. She knew those hands, knew only one man that large. Will slowly lifted himself waist-high above the gunnel. Then he swung his legs one at a time onto the deck, stood up, and began to walk toward the stern. He was naked. And Patience, perpetually aroused from the passion of her unendingly erotic dreams, gasped in spite of herself.

He froze immediately. Patience was ashamed of having so little self-control that she would make an involuntary sound; Will showed no shame about his nakedness.

He saw her, shook his head, and then walked toward her a few steps before rounding the cabin wall to where his clothes were waiting.

In the moonlight, Patience clearly saw the wide white hairless scar tissue that formed a dimpled and puckered cross from his navel to the root of his groin, and from stern to stern of his hips. From the width of the scars, it was plain he had been branded long ago, as a child. But it was still a shock to her. Only one sect chose to disfigure themselves with the sign of the cross in the hidden places of their bodies. Will was a Vigilant.

He did not try to conceal it. He faced her as he pulled on his shirt first, then his trousers. His hair still dripped with water; he left his stockings and boots aside. In two steps he was before her, as tall as Skyfoot from her perspective. Then in a single swift motion he sat down and looked in her eyes. "A Vigilant was once my master," he said softly.

She did not know why she was afraid of him now.

When she had served Oruc, the Vigilants were dangerous because they paid no heed at all to law or government, and when they spoke there was revolution in their words and the courage of madness in their eyes. They were dangerous because the common people believed that they held some special power from God, and came to visit them in their solitary huts, bringing food, clothing, and above all, an eager audience for their sedition.

That was no risk to her now. With what the Vigilants believed about her, she was in less danger from a Vigilant than anyone alive.

But she was afraid.

"Vigilants don't brand their slaves," she said. "Not against their will."

Will nodded. "I was a Vigilant, too. As a child."

"Did you renounce the vows?"

"No."

"Then you're a Vigilant still?"

"I think of my life-as a vigil. But most of the hermits in their little huts would think I am a blasphemer."

"And why is that?"

"Because I don't believe that Kristos will come to unite all humans to rule the world in perfect peace and harmony."

Already this morning he had said more to her than in all the weeks before. Yet his speech was as simple as his silence had been, as if speech or silence made no difference to him. She could have asked him these questions at any time, and he would have answered. "What is your vigil, then?"

"What all vigils are-for the coming of Kristos."

"You go in circles."

"In spirals. Closer to the truth on each pass."

She thought again about what he had said, trying to figure out the answer to the problem he had posed. Then she realized that he was testing her, just as Father and Angel had always tested her. She shook her head. "Just tell me. Or don't tell me. I don't care."

"I believe that Kristos will come to unite geblings, dwelfs, and gaunts. And humans, too, if they can humble themselves enough."

"Vigilants don't believe that geblings have souls."

"I told you I was a blasphemer."

"And what of me?" she asked.

Will shook his head and looked down at the deck. She studied his face, the open simplicity of his look. She had once thought him stupid, from this visage. Now she saw him as a man at peace with himself, open-faced not because he was naive and trusting, but rather because he was wise and trustworthy. A man without guile. If he did not want to answer, he did not lie; he simply said nothing.

It was the only situation her diplomatic training had never prepared her for: an honest man.

Finally he lifted his gaze to her face. His expression changed again. What was it? Despair and hope, struggling together?

"What do you hope for?" she whispered.

He did not speak. Instead, he reached out his massive hand and brushed the backs of his fingers against her lips. It was the gesture of obeisance to the Heptarch. She went cold inside. Another one who had plans for her.

But then he shook his head. "It's a lie," he said.

"Once that was all I wanted for you."

"And now?"

His hand passed behind her head, covering the stubble of the part of her hair that had been shaved, gripping her firmly and yet without violence. He leaned his face toward hers, kissed her on the cheek, and pressed his cheek to hers for a long moment.

No one had ever embraced her like this. Since her mother died she could not remember anyone really embracing her at all. Her control slipped away, and she trembled. After all the pent-up yearning of the Cranning call, she could not help but know that this was what her body wanted. She turned her face, kissed his cheek.

And then cried out in pain.

He quickly pulled away from her, studied her face.

Could he see the terrible wave of revulsion that swept over her body?

"I'm sorry," he murmured.

"No," she whispered, struggling to say words at all.

"No, it's Unwyrm, he forbids it, he forbids-" But Patience did not wish to be forbidden. Impulsively she took Will's shirt and pulled herself to him, pressed her face against his shoulders; she felt his tentative hands touch her back, her shoulders, and his breath was warm in her hair.

But the longer he held her, the more agonizing the punishment from Unwyrm. Even though she was breathing, she felt a terrible, urgent need to breathe, as though someone had pressed a pillow over her face. I am breathing, she told herself, but her body panicked in spite of her will. She pushed Will away and hurled herself down to the deck, gasping.

"You are Kristos," Will said. "Don't you see? You're the hero to face the wyrm in his lair. You're the one who will save or destroy us all, man and gebling, dwelf and gaunt."

The punishment eased, now that he wasn't touching her. She began to breathe more calmly.

"He doesn't touch your deepest place," said Will.

"He can only force your passion, not your will. All the Wise who went to him, they were weaker than their passion. They had spent all their lives increasing their understanding, building their stories of the world. Their memory, their identity, that part of the triune soul was honed to perfection, sharper than any sword I ever carried into battle. But when Unwyrm came, he came to their passion. It was unfamiliar territory to them, a place they had not conquered in their soul, and so they went to him, thinking they had no choice."

"He made me think I couldn't breathe, even though I was breathing."

"If you had wanted to stay in my arms," said Will, "you would have stayed."

"I couldn't."

"If you had wanted to, completely, without any reservation of your own, you could have stayed."

"How do you know what I can or cannot do?"

"Because he has called me, and I know the limits of his power."

She studied him as well as she could in the moonlight.

As far as she could tell, he spoke the truth. This hulking giant was one of the Wise? This man who had pulled on his own plow in Reek's field, who never spoke, who had lived as a slave and believed at least some of the doctrine of the Vigilants-was one of the Wise?

"You and I," said Will, "we have learned the same strength. We both grew up under strong masters, and we both obeyed. But we learned to turn our obedience into freedom. We learned how to choose to obey, even when others thought we had no choice. So that even though we gave the appearance of having no will of our own, all our actions all our lives have been free."

She thought of Father's and Angel's tests, me rules of protocol, the rituals of self-denial. Sometimes it was as Will said. Sometimes she chose freely. But other times, no. Other times she was not free at all, and chafed at the bonds of slavery.

"Did he ever take away your breath?" she asked.

"I went into battle one day. My master was the captain general, and his banner drew the enemy to us. I stood between them and him, as I had always done. Only this day, Unwyrm called to me. He put terrible fear in me, but I stood my ground. He made me so thirsty and hungry that my head ached and my mouth went dry, but I stood my ground. He made the need of my bladder and bowel so great that my body released all that it held, but I paid no attention and stood my ground. And then, as the enemy reached me, he made me feel as if I were suffocating. The need to breathe is the one irresistible need, and I knew that I would not find ease from that agony until I left the field of battle and began my trek Cranningward."

"What did you do?"

"What you would have done. I made sure I really was breathing, and then went ahead and did what I wanted, regardless of the pain. I killed forty-nine men that day- the flagbearer kept count of it-and my master offered me my freedom."

"Did you take it?"

"How could he offer me what I already had? I was free. As you are free. If you had not secretly doubted that you wanted to love me, you would have had me here on this deck."

"And would you have given yourself to me?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Because I am Heptarch?"

"Not because you are Heptarch, but because you are Heptarch."

"I'm not as strong as you think."

"On the contrary. You're stronger than you know."

She turned the conversation; she did not believe him, and wanted to, and feared that if she listened any longer he would lead her to overconfidence. "You're one of the Wise? What secrets do you know, which Heffiji could put in her house?"

"She asked me her question, and I gave her my answer," said Will.

From his tone, she knew not to ask directly what the question or the answer might have been. Instead, she asked her own question. "What did you learn, as a slave?"

"That no one can ever be a slave to another man."

"That is a lie."

"Then I learned a lie."

"But you believe it."

Will nodded.

"There are people who do things for fear of the lash.

There are people who do things for fear they will lose their families or their lives. There are people bought and sold. Are they not slaves?"

"They are slaves to their passion. Their fear rules them. What power do you have over me if I am not afraid of your lash? Am I your slave, if I am not afraid to lose my family? I obey you, faithfully, completely, because I choose to; am I your slave? And when you come to hate me for my freedom, which is greater than yours, and you command me to do what I will not do, then I stand before you in disobedience. Punish me, then; I choose to be punished. And if the punishment is more than I am willing to accept, then I will use such force as is necessary to stop the punishment, and no more. But never, for a moment, have I done anything but what I choose to do."

"Then no one is as strong as you."

"Not so. I've given my obedience to God, and use my best judgment to carry out his purpose, when I have some understanding of it. But those who have chosen to give their obedience to their passion, or to their memory, they freely choose to obey. The glutton freely overfills his belly, the pederast feeds on innocence, and the fearful man obeys his fear-freely."

"You make it sound as if our desires were separate from ourselves."

"They are. And if you don't know that, then you might well become Unwyrm's slave after all."

"I know something of the doctrine of the Vigilants."

"I am not talking about a school of doctrine. I'm talking about the answer I gave Heffiji. The reason Unwyrm calls to me."

Now she could ask him outright. "What question did Heffiji ask?"

"She asked me whether dwelfs have a soul."

"Then it is theology."

"What she really was asking-and it's a question you'd better answer before you face Unwyrm-she was asking what part of her was herself."

Patience studied Will's placid face. How could he have known the question that so haunted her? "My father taught me to listen to everything and believe nothing."

"The dead do that much," said Will.

"The dead don't listen."

"If you believe nothing, then you are listening exactly as much as the dead."

"I'm not dead," Patience whispered.

Will smiled. "I know," he said. He reached out as if to touch her cheek; she recoiled from him and shook her head. So he sat back, making no effort to conceal his disappointment, and began to teach. "Each part of the triune soul has its desires. The passion has the desires of pleasure and survival and the avoidance of pain. Those who are slaves to passion are the ones we see as hedonists or cowards or addicts or drunks, the ones we pity or despise. And these slaves think that their passion is themselves. I want this drink. I want to breathe. Their identity is in their needs. And to control them is easy.

You simply control their pleasure or their pain."

She smiled. "I learned this in the cradle. People who are that easy to control, though, aren't worth controlling."

"So," he said. "They're the weakest. Are you one of them?"

"When he calls me, I can hardly think of anything else but the need for him. Even when I remember what he looks like, from the gebling memories within me, even when I should loathe him, he makes me want him, want his children."

"You came through Tinker's Wood when he didn't want you to."

"If he had really wanted to stop me, he could have."

"I say he couldn't. Because you long ago separated yourself from your body's desires."

She remembered the cold breeze from the unglazed window of her room. She nodded.

"So." He did not teach as Father did; there was no sense of triumph when she bent before his argument. He merely went on. "The second part of the triune soul, the memory-it's more difficult. It has another kind of desire, one that is born in us as surely as the need to breathe, but because it is never satisfied, we don't know that it exists. For a moment, between breaths, we don't need to breathe, so we recognize the need to breathe when it returns."

"But this one is never gone, so we never notice it."

"Yes. Yes, you see-our memory can't hold everything.

Can't hold every vision we see, every sequence of events that happened to us, everything we read, everything we hear about. It's too much. If we actually had to do that, we'd be insane before we left our infancy. So we choose. The things that are important. We remember only what matters. And we remember it in certain orders, in patterns that mean things together. In daytime, the sun is up; and all daytime becomes one day, and all nighttime becomes one night-we don't have to remember every day to remember the idea of day. But we -don't just remember this-we remember the why. It is daytime because the sun is up. Or the sun is up because it is daytime. You see? We don't remember randomly. Everything is connected by threads of cause."

"I'm not one of the Wise," said Patience. "Maybe the Wise understand the cause of everything, but I don't."

"But that's just it, that's just where the hunger comes.

Every shred of experience that we remember comes as a story-a series of events that are connected by the pushes and pulls of cause. And we believe this story, of how everything is causally connected, without questioning it.

I did this because. I did this in order to. And this is the world we live in, this pattern of events that cause each other. It becomes the framework by which we remember everything. But some things come along that don't fit."

"Not just some things."

"The weak-minded never notice it, Lady Patience.

Everything fits for them, because they simply don't remember the things that don't belong. They never happened, the memory is gone. But for those who live in the mind, the places that don't fit, they don't disappear.

They become a terrible hunger in the mind. Why, they shout. Why, why, why. And you can't be content until you know the connection. Even if it means breaking apart all the network that existed before. Once there was a time when mankind was locked on a single planet, and they thought their star circled that planet, because that was all they saw. That was the evidence of their eyes.

But there were some who looked closely, and saw that it didn't fit, and the why pressed upon them until they had an answer. And when it all fit, they were able to send starships to worlds like this."

"Every child asks why," said Patience.

"But most children stop asking," said Will. "They finally get a system that works well enough. They have enough stories to account for everything they care about, and anything their stories can't handle, they ignore."

"The priests say that the self is in the memory-that we are what we remember doing."

"That's what they say."

"But I remember doing the acts of hundreds of Heptarchs, and a few geblings, too. Are they part of myself?"

"You see the problem as few people see it," said Will. "The self isn't in the memory, only the story we believe about ourselves. It can also be revised. It's constantly being revised. We see what it was we did, and we make up a story to account for it, and believe the story, and think that we understand ourself."

"Except the dwelfs, who can't hold long memories in their conscious minds."

"Yes."

"So what did you tell Heffiji-that she had no soul?"

"Only that her soul had no story. Because ourself is something else."

She knew what he would say; it was clear to her now.

"The will, of course. It's strange, Will, that you're named for the thing that you think is most important. Or did you decide it was important because it was your name?

"Will wasn't the name I was born with. I took that name the day Reck looked at me and said, 'Who are you?' "

"What's the desire of the will, then? You said all three parts of the soul had their desire."

"The will makes only a simple choice, and it's already made. Your whole life is nothing but acting out the choice that defines who you really are."

"What's that?"

"The choice between good and evil."

She let him see her disappointment. "All this talk, and we come to that?"

"I'm not talking about the choice between killing people and not killing people, or between stealing and not stealing. Sometimes killing a person is evil. Sometimes killing a person is good. You know that."

"Which is why I decided not to care about good and evil a long time ago."

"No. You decided not to care about legal and illegal."

"I decided there wasn't any absolute good and there wasn't any absolute evil. You just said the same thing."

"No I didn't," said Will.

"You said sometimes killing is good and sometimes it's evil."

"So. Killing isn't absolute. But now, when you go to Unwyrm, what's wrong with doing what he wants? What's wrong with you having his children?"

"Because I don't want to."

"Why? You know he'll give you pleasure. And your children-they'll be human, perfectly human, only stronger and smarter, wiser and quicker, and they'll no doubt have a perfect connection between their minds, all of them like Unwyrm combined with the best human traits.

You'll be the mother of the master race. The most magnificent intelligent beings ever created. The next step in human evolution. Why don't you desire it?"

"I don't know," she said.

"If you don't know, then at the crucial moment, when you are with him, and all your desire is for him, you still won't know. You'll still refuse, but perhaps not with all your strength. And it'll take all your strength to resist him, I promise you."

"Come with me," she said. "Kill him for me."

"I'll come with you, if I can. And I'll kill him, if I can. But I think I won't be able to. I think there's only one person who'll ever come close enough to hurt him, to stop him."

"Then tell me. What is it I need to know?"

"It's simple. Nothing exists except in relation to something else. An atom is not an atom. It doesn't exist, except in relation to other atoms. If it never responded to anything else, it would not exist. All existence is like that-utterly isolated pieces that only come into existence in their interaction with other pieces. Human beings too.

We don't exist except in relation to the other events of the world. Everything we do, everything we are depends on our responses to other events, and other events' responses to us."

"I knew that."

"You didn't know that. It's so obvious that no one knows it. If nothing you did caused any change in the world outside, and nothing in the world outside caused any change in you, then you wouldn't know there was a world outside, and it wouldn't know you existed, and so it would be meaningless to speak of your existence at all.

So your existence, all our existence, depends on every piece, every person in the universe behaving according to certain set patterns. The system. The order in which everything exists. The laws that bind atoms and molecules are very firm. They have no freedom to vary, because as soon as they vary, they cease to be. But life-ah, there the freedom begins. And we who think we are intelligent, we are the freest of all. We make our own patterns and change them as we like. We build systems and orders and tear them down. But you'll notice that none of our choices have any effect whatever on the way that atoms and molecules behave. Just as we have no idea what any particular molecule is doing, they have no notion of what we're doing. We can't change their order at all. We can use it, but we can't break down their system and cause them to wink out of existence."

"I suppose that's true. We can burn wood, but the atoms that are torn from certain molecules combine again with others, and the system hangs together."

"Exactly. So we can't do good or evil to most of the universe. Only to other living things. Mostly to each other. Because the systems of human beings are ours to control. They're every bit as real as the universe itself, and they are what gives us our existence-but we can manipulate them. We can change the systems that create the terms of our life. And we do change those systems, according to the single simple choice of our will."

"What's the choice?"

"It arises from the desire of the will. And the desire of the will is simple. To grow."

"I don't want to grow."

"Every living thing has this same desire. Patience.

Angel touched on it, in his childish way, when he spoke of people who own things. That's the most pathetic way people have of growing. The way Sken makes this boat part of herself-it makes her larger. Eating .also makes her larger."

Patience smiled. "You're being ridiculous now."

"I'm not. Kings also make themselves larger, because their kingdom is part of themselves. Parents make themselves larger through their children. Some few people, though, have such a powerful hunger that they can't be satisfied until their self includes everything alive."

"The King's House is all the world," murmured Patience.

"What did you say?"

"Something my father taught me."

"Oh."

"So, is it good or evil to desire to be larger?"

"Neither. It's how you choose to grow larger. The system lives on sacrifice. No order could exist in which every person in it received everything he desired all the time. The system that gives us our existence depends on people making sacrifices. I give up something I desire, so that others can receive some of what they desire. In turn, they give up something they want, so I can have some of what I want. Every human society depends on that simple principle."

As always, her mind raced ahead, trying to solve the problem before it had to be explained to her. "So you're saying that good people sacrifice everything, and evil people sacrifice nothing."

"Not at all. I'm saying that good people sacrifice anything that is necessary in order to maintain the order that allows all others to exist, even if they have to sacrifice their own life. While evil people manipulate and force the sacrifice of any and every other person in order to wholly gratify their own hunger. Do you see the difference?"

"This is theology. Kristos was good, because he sacrificed his life."

"Don't speak foolishly, Patience, not to me. Everybody dies, and some have been martyrs in stupid causes.

Kristos is Kristos because we believe he sacrificed himself for the whole world. For the largest order of all. He would not have died for anything less. Because his self had grown to include all the systems of mankind, and he acted to protect them all."

"Now I see how you became a heretic."

"Of course you do. These fools who think their Kristos will come to unite humans in perfect peace, without including the millions of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs-it would not be good, because such a Kristos would be forcing the sacrifice of half the people of the world, to serve herself. So if Kristos is to be Kristos, she is willing to sacrifice anything to maintain the order that gives life to all."

"I'm no Kristos. I don't believe any of this."

Will looked sad. "Oh, you believe my story," he said.

"But you won't know that you believe it until after, looking back. If either of us is alive then."

"It's a pretty philosophy," said Patience. "It makes sense within itself. You'd have a sure career in the School."

He let the insult roll off him. "When you face him, Patience, you'll remember. A tiny part of your memory will hold on to my story, and you'll remember who you are, and who he is, and you'll doubt your own desires and believe my story. You'll destroy him, even though at that moment you'll love him more than all the world.

You'll destroy him, because you know he's evil."

"If I can destroy him, it will be to save myself."

"Yourself is the world, and all the worlds. How long before his children, after they've replaced all other intelligent life on this world, build starships and go out to conquer every other world that humanity has visited?

There was once a philosopher who said that there could never be war between the worlds of different stars, because there'd be nothing to gain. But he was a fool.

There is greatness to be gained, largeness of self, to have every world filled with your children. It's the most powerful urge of all life. Questions of profit or politics are trivial beside it."

"When I face Unwyrm," said Patience, "it won't be a grand question of good and evil. It'll be me, my body, my wit, such as it is, against his. Nothing more."

"His house against the King's House. The prize is the world."

"I don't want the world."

"That's why you'll have it."

She laughed in frustration. "Will, what can I do with you? You see me larger than I am. I can never be what you imagine me to be."

Will shook his head. "I imagine you to be a girl, fifteen years old, sometimes frightened, always brave. I imagine you to be unaware of your beauty, which makes you infinitely beautiful; unaware of your power, which makes you dangerously powerful. I have had many masters in my life, but you are the only master I could follow until I die."

"You see? How can I bear that? I can't be perfect."

"If I can be perfect, you can be perfect." He showed no sign that he was aware of how boastful he sounded.

"You're perfect?" she asked.

"I made myself perfect, so I could serve you when you came. You are skilled in all the skills of government but one: war. I made myself perfect in that, so I could serve you in it. My masters were all generals, but I served each one the same-I made them all victorious."

"You? A slave?"

"A trusted slave. They all learned that when they took my counsel, they won. I prepared myself so that you would find me ready when you needed me."

"How did you know that we'd ever meet? There on your farm with Reck and Ruin. What were the chances I'd ever find you?"

"There's no chance in this. From the time I discovered the truth of the soul, the Cranning call was always with me, Lady Patience. Then one day we marched along a road, from Waterkeep to Danswatch, and for a brief moment, as we passed a hut at the north end of the village, the call faded. And was replaced by a repulsion, a powerful desire not to go toward Cranning. And then we went a little way, and the Cranning call returned to me. I knew at once that something in that house-"

"Reck and Ruin."

"I didn't know that geblings lived there. I certainly didn't know they were the gebling king. But I knew that whatever was there, Unwyrm feared it, and if Unwyrm feared it, it was good, and I must ally myself with it. So I escaped and went to Reck. With her and Ruin, the Cranning call disappeared, so I was at peace. But that wasn't why I went to them, and it wasn't why I stayed. I stayed waiting for you."

"How could you possibly know that I would come there?"

"For the same reason that I went there. Because if you didn't, Unwyrm couldn't be defeated."

"That's not the reason."

"Nevertheless, it is the reason."

"You're too mystical for me."

"I don't think so," said Will. "I think I'm exactly mystical enough for you."

"I liked you better when you were silent," she said.

"I know," he said. "Endure me." He reached out his hand. With the tips of his fingers he stroked her cheek, her hair. His fingers traveled down her body, her neck, her shoulder, her breast, her waist. Finally he rested a hand on her thigh. "When you want me to speak again," he said, "I will. As slave to master. As subject to king.

As Vigilant to Kristos. As husband to wife."

Then he leaned down and kissed her lips. Unwyrm again filled her with revulsion at his touch, but this time she ignored it, put it behind her, and accepted the agonizing gift he gave. When the kiss was finished, he stood and walked across the deck to where his boots waited for him. "Time for me to clump around," he said, "and wake the others."

It was true. Light was coming in the east, over the trees; the stars were fading. And the high wall of Skyfoot rose in the northern sky, topped with eternal snow, where Unwyrm waited for her, hungered for her. Will has told me stories, and some of them I believe, but what will it matter when I come to you, Unwyrm? You're the only husband that was prophesied for me.

Even Unwyrm couldn't stop her from wishing for Will's hand to touch her again, his lips to invite her.

After all Will's philosophy, she suspected that the only thing he had given her that might help her at all when she faced Unwyrm at the end would be the dream of a human lover. She could not hold on to a mystic view of good and evil. But she could hold on to the memory of the touch of a living man.

She turned around, just to look downstream, just to be turning, and happened to see River's face. His eyes were open, gazing at her. Tears had tracked their way down his face.

"Did we wake you?" she asked inanely.

His lips answered, silently: The river is all the life I need.

But she knew it was a lie. For a few minutes in this early morning, she and Will had reminded him of life.