“What are they like?” asked Shan Damzel from a dry mouth.
“They, who?” responded Churry.
“The soldiers of Enforcement?”
“I don’t think anyone knows, except the people who made them and the people who maintain them.”
“If you want to know,” said Mordy Trust, who was scanning the horizon with a long-distance viewer, “Look here. I think the first one just showed up.”
They shared the viewer to look toward the west where a lurching monument clanked along the horizon, a thing the size of the barracks in which they lived, bristling with turrets and eyes and lashing tentacles.
“Did you ask Thyker to send de-bond rifles?” someone asked plaintively. “You did specify de-bonders, didn’t you?”
Above them in the sky, something popped. It was a small sound, like a cork withdrawn from some aerial bottle. Haze spread across the sky, covering the stars, which twinkled briefly green.
• On Authority, Lurilile crept mouselike through enigmatic spaces. Now and then she would cry out, “A key for the last lock,” her voice falling to silence among crates and sacks and against walls of dials. Wherever the last lock was, she had not found it. Perhaps Rasiel Plum had been wrong. Perhaps there was no last lock in Supply. Perhaps it was in Administration, or Environment, or Planetary Liaison.
She went back to the temporary worker’s quarters and reassured herself that the Door was there. She set it for Ahabar and left it at the ready, needing only the push of a button to set off. Why had no one come through this Door to help her? Why was she still alone?
She went back to the monitoring screens and checked the upper levels. Among the ruins there were moving blobs. At first she did not identify them. When she realized what they were, she could not at first believe they were there at all, though it was easy to imagine what had happened. Someone had left a Door open. A Door between Ninfadel and Authority. Now Porsa had come to Authority. Porsa had come to Authority, and she, Lurilile had left a Door on Authority open to Ahabar.
She watched in awe as a soldier of Enforcement reduced a Porsa to bubbling stew with a flame gun. When the soldier moved on, the unburned remnants blobbed themselves up and began sliming off in all directions. If they found something to eat, shortly there would be twenty Porsa where one had been before.
Lurilile Ornice, daughter of the Chief Counselor of Ahabar, bent double and retched. Then she went back to the Door to Ahabar and shut it down. The Porsa were intelligent, but they were not familiar with Door operation. They would slime through an open portal, but they were not likely to program one for a destination.
She went to the vestibule, got into the car and set her destination as Noxious Waste. The Door which led out of Noxious Waste had only one destination. She went to that Door, keyed it to continuous feed, and locked it on that setting. Then she found her way back to the Supply area, not by car but through long corridors with many compartments. She opened every gate and locked it open, every hatch and locked it open. Some doors without locks she wedged, to be sure they could not swing shut. Once more in Supply, she found the protein stores and went back to Noxious Waste, strewing protein chunks behind her, leaving a clear trail. Then she left Noxious Waste by car and made her way into the wall-ducts once more. It was futile to search Supply for the lock any longer. Instead, she would work her way to the small robing room behind the Authority Chambers, hiding in the walls until after the Porsa left.
They would leave eventually, she assured herself over a bubbling hysteria which threatened to break forth. They would swallow every living thing they could, and once whatever they had swallowed died, they would digest it. That was the nice thing about Porsa, they never started to digest you while you were still alive. If the Porsa got as far as Supply, they would find a trail leading them to Noxious Waste. In Noxious Waste, they would find an open Door. If they decided to go on exploring through that Door, it would take them into the heart of Big Sun and nowhere else.
Lurilile argued with herself whether she would report her destructive and genocidal actions to Native Matters Advisory. If there were any Native Matters Advisory members left.
But, of course, there was at least one member left. She herself had saved him. If she survived, she told herself with utmost seriousness, she would have to mention her unforgivable activities to Rasiel Plum.
• “Phaed,” said Sam. He had reached the end of the line of soldiers, of prophets and Faithful. He had seen them all go past, on the horizon or close by. He had not seen Phaed. He did not think it likely that Phaed had slipped by, far to one side or the other. The God who had brought him to this place would not have allowed it.
“Phaed! Phaed Girat!”
An answering call. “Well, and is that you, Sammy?”
He came up out of the darkness of folded ground, like a man cresting a hill on a pleasant afternoon. “What’re you doin’ out here, Sammy. The Awateh expects to find you in your settlement, snug in your bed. A most furious prophet, our Awateh. He desires the doin’ of you, and that little girl, and all your people.” Phaed’s eyes were fixed on the backs of the retreating soldiers, the retreating prophets. He moved as they did, forward.
“He’ll find me,” said Sam, gently. “Or I’ll find him. Shall we walk along behind the army, Dad? Shall we see what there is to see?”
“I didn’t think you had much love for seein’ corpses, Sammy. Not you nor your mam.”
“Mam’s dead, you know.”
“I’d heard something of the sort.”
“Hung on the walls of the citadel.”
“Well, that’s customary.”
“She was with the women. The old man had forgotten her. She would have been safe except for you. I hold you responsible for it, Dad.”
“Hold what you like, boy, but I don’t need to answer to you. A man doesn’t need to answer to his sons. That’s not the way it’s done. It’s the other way around.” The words were angry, but the tone of voice was calm. As though it didn’t matter.
“Did you answer to your dad then?”
“He died.”
“Then you didn’t answer to anybody? Is that it?”
“To the prophet, you fool. I answered to the prophet. And when he needed proof I was faithful, I gave him what he wanted, that’s all. No more than my duty.”
“But you think I should answer to you? When you killed my mam? When you left me for the killing?”
“I didn’t kill her. I only reminded the old man where she was. As for you, I stopped standing between you and the prophet, that’s all.”
“You think fathers shouldn’t stand between their sons and the legends, then.”
“Who said legends?”
“Aren’t the prophets the same as legends, Dad? Aren’t the prophets the same as Gods? Doesn’t a man who speaks for God take the power of God to himself? Doesn’t he become legendary, just for that reason? So a God can hurl lightning and a prophet can hurl curses or men can make laws, but if curse or law can kill as surely as lightning does, what’s the difference?”
“What are you babbling of, boy!”
The horizon bent and wavered. Across the near distance, the Tchenka danced. Mist came up from the ground and clothed Sam in helmet and swordbelt and sandals. Phaed turned and actually looked at him, then frowned, not sure what he was seeing.
“I’m talking about legends, Dad. I’m talking about fathers passing killing on to their sons. Ages ago, Dad, kings sometimes left their sons in faraway nests, like cuckoo eggs, not even telling the woman who they were. Then they’d hide a secret under a stone and tell the mama when the son was big enough to raise the stone he could learn who his father was. It was like saying, ‘Only when his strength rivals my own can he know who I am. I want no weakling. I want none who fears to use the sword. I want no son who is satisfied with kindness. I want only a son obsessed with finding me, who will come again and again to this stone, this stone too heavy for mortal men, to raise it, to look into the darkness beneath it,
for only he will care about what I care about. And the fathers were right, of course. Only the sons of legend ever got the stones heaved up. Only they went questing, trying to find meaning in what had none.
“I was like that, Dad.” Sam nodded, knowing it was true.
“I left nothing under a stone for you.”
“Oh, but you did. You left your own self hidden there deep. Maire herself said so, when I was very small. She couldn’t tell me who you were because she didn’t know. She didn’t understand you. But she said you lived deep in the dark, with stones around and over you. I thought that was a mystery.”
“A mystery?”
“I thought so. Of course, there was no more mystery to it than to the life of a mole, which is all dank earth full of worm-ends dug under the great stones. Stones of hate. Stones of rage. A self-buried man, you were, Phaed, that’s all. I kept heaving up, looking for who I was by knowing who you were. It’s what we’ve always done, you know. Told ourselves we were our father’s sons. Thought we couldn’t know who we were unless we knew who you were. Turns out you weren’t anybody much, but your having progied me doesn’t define me, and I am who I will yet be, Dad.”
Phaed growled, deep in his throat, and launched himself at Sam. Sam caught his wrists in his own hands and held him off, without effort. “You don’t have three or four bullyboys to net me and tie me now, Phaed. Only you and me. I’ve raised your stone. I see what’s writhing around in the muck there. Come on, Phaed. Let’s follow the prophets and see what happens.”
Death might happen, or life. Whichever, Sam wanted to see it. He took his father by the arm, feeling the tough muscle there, no flabbiness of age at all, only this stringy muscle over hard bone. “When you’ve killed us all, Dad, what then?”
Phaed smiled his wolf smile and shook Sam’s hand from his arm. “Awateh hasn’t said, boy. Ahabar, I shouldn’t be surprised. There’d be a certain pleasure in that.”
“What will you do?”
“What do you mean, boy, what will I do?”
“There’ll be nobody left to kill, Dad.”
His hand twitched at his belt, where his whip still hung. “Oh, there’ll be disciplining still to do, I imagine. We’ll need some to serve us. The Gharm, likely. Plenty of them left on Ahabar, and we’ll save a number for ourselves.”
“Oh no, Dad. Let me tell you a tale. A legend of my own. The Gharm are all dead, hadn’t you heard? A kind of plague came swiftly and killed them all. Right after you went to Ninfadel. They’re dead. There are no more Gharm.”
Phaed breathed heavily through his nose. “All of ‘em?”
“So I heard. Yes.” Sam smiled at the sky where the stars showed green through a high veil of mist. A wind had come up and the clouds above were whipping about in it, first one way then another, as in a caldron, the clouds themselves showing green.
“Well, there’s others. Maybe we’ll keep some Ahabar babes and bring them up to the whip. Maybe we’ll …”
“No, no, Dad. I hadn’t finished my tale! The soldiers have already gone there. They’re killing everyone, didn’t you know? Everyone on Phansure, and Ahabar, and Thyker. All the moons and little planets, too. Soon there’ll be no one left. Except for us few left here on Hobbs Land, and we’ll be dead soon. I only came to say goodbye, and because I was interested in knowing what you were going to do now.”
“Do now,” said Phaed, panting. “Do now?”
“Were the women left on Ninfadel, Dad?”
“The prophet thought that best.”
“Ah, well that’s a pity. They must have gotten lonesome after the prophet and all you men left, so they went through the Door. There were soldiers there, naturally, and your women didn’t know the answers to the questions. I know you told me there was no sense teaching women anything important. Well, so, the soldiers killed them all, the women and children, all the animals. Everyone’s dead but those of you here, Dad. You prophets. You Faithful. You men.”
Phaed made a munching motion with his jaw, as though chewing at something hard. “All but us.”
Sam watched Phaed’s face, wondering at what he saw there. This was the end the man had foretold, the end he had longed for, and yet, now that he thought it had come, he did not rejoice!
“But isn’t that all right, Dad? It must be all right. You told me so yourself. Kill, and maim, and torture, and howl, and threaten. Utter curses. Make laws. So long as the last one alive is one of the Faithful, that’s all that matters. You taught me that yourself!”
Phaed began to run, long strides, his breath heaving up out of his chest. Sam took a pace or two after him, but then slowed down and watched him go. Far ahead was a prophet, and Phaed was trying to catch up to him.
Sam kept on walking, not hurrying. After a time he came within hearing distance of the two.
“My son says so,” Phaed was crying in a frantic voice. “Gone. Everything’s gone. The soldiers are already killing everything, everywhere. We’ll be the only ones left. We and the people here on this place.”
“Then the task is complete,” sighed the prophet. “The Great Work is accomplished. We may die. Paradise awaits.”
“But …” cried Phaed. “It wasn’t supposed to be so quickr!”
The prophet had left him. Phaed began running again, passed the prophet and went on toward the east. Sam could hear him panting.
When Sam came up to the prophet, he said curiously, “Is there any need to keep on walking? Now that it’s over?”
“True,” said the prophet. “Oh, that’s true.” He sat down on the ground, put his head upon his knees and began to sway gently, as though rocked in someone’s arms.
Sam brushed at his own face where a fine dust was settling. The same dust settled on the crouched prophet, who did not move to brush it away. Sam breathed in the dust and sneezed, spewing it out again, before continuing in the direction his father had gone. He passed a great soldier standing motionless at the foot of a hill.
“What is …?” called the soldier. “What is …?”
Sam stood quietly, waiting for the question, but after a time the soldier stopped asking, as though it had forgotten the challenge. Little lights flickered on the soldier’s head and at the ends of extensible arms. The lights dimmed, flickered, went out.
Sam brushed dust from his eyebrows, leaned over and shook dust from his face. The stuff was dark and powdery, yet it did not cake. Each infinitesimal particle fell away separately, as though rejecting him. He held out his hand, flat, seeing the dust accumulate from the air, covering his skin. When he turned his hand over, it fell away. Sam was not what it wanted to rest on. Sam was not fertile soil for it.
As he went farther east, he saw more and more of the halted soldiers. The farther east, the more blurred their outlines were. Sam stopped beside one elephantine warrior with a pair of giant treads, and poked a finger between two adjacent plates. The space, which should have been open, was filled with a hard, wooden growth. The same growth, tissue thin, lay across every surface. The soldier was being encased, enclosed.
The core of every soldier of Enforcement was of psuedoflesh, an organic compound. Fungi needed organic compounds in order to grow. Sam found himself wondering if pseudoflesh might not be a good growth medium for the mushroom house …
Phaed was just ahead of him, talking to a circle of prophets.
“My son says the soldiers have gone to Ahabar, to Phansure. Already. Already killing everyone. They killed your families too. There aren’t any left …”
Sam moved gently through the hesitant group and took his father’s arm. “You should go tell the Awateh, shouldn’t you? Isn’t he up there ahead somewhere? Let’s go tell him, Dad.”
They began walking, arm in arm, Phaed stumbling from time to time. The dust fell endlessly from a green sky.
“Sing me a song, Dad,” said Sam. “Sing to me about the Gharm contract.”
Behind him the prophets sank to the ground, brushing fruitlessly at their eyes, at the corners of their mouth
s and nostrils. There was dust everywhere. Sam shook himself like a wet cat, arm by arm, leg by leg, and the dust flew away. Phaed trembled and brushed at himself, but the dust stayed, seemingly rooted into his skin, making him furry all over, as though he were covered in velvet.
“Sing to me about the Gharm contract, Dad?”
“Can’t remember,” said Phaed, wonderingly.
“Oh, but you sang it to Maire when you were courting. She told me. Maybe you and Mugal Pye sang it when you were making the gadgets that killed Stenta Thilion. Surely you remember the song?”
“No breath to sing.” Petulant now. “Can’t remember.”
“Tell it to me then, Dad. Tell me the story.”
“Stories like that aren’t for children.”
“But I’m grown now, Dad. I’m a man.”
“Not a free man. A man who does what other people tell him isn’t a free man.”
“But you do what the Awateh tells you.”
“That’s different. He speaks for God.”
“Tell me about your God, Dad. What kind of a thing is your God?”
“Demands … Obedience … From his sons … All his sons …”
“Does your god care about anything but men, Dad? Does he care about trees and birds and fish in the streams? Does he care about womenfolk? What about planets? Like that one the Gharmfolk had? The one Voorstod destroyed?”
“Demands …” said Phaed. It was all he said.
They walked on eastward. All around them the soldiers of Enforcement stood still, like monuments to a war which was not to be fought. Well, Sam had longed for monuments, and here they were. Lines of them, like standing stones. Towers of them. Menhirs. Dolmen. And among their immobile forms the shuffling prophets, still moving toward the east.