Lawrence Watt-Evans - War Surplus 02 - The Wizard and the War Machine

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 349.94KB 98 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
the wizard and the war
machine
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Copyright © 1987 by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91228
ISBN 0-345-33459-0
Cover Art by Darrell K. Sweet
e-book ver.1.0
Dedicated to Lester del Rey
Chapter One
BRIGHT DAYLIGHT SPILLED THROUGH THE CHUNKS of colored glass set into the windows,
striping the fur carpets with bands of red and green and blue. The children were using the slowly shifting
streaks of colored light in a complicated game of their own devis-ing; Sam Turner watched for a moment,
standing in the kitchen doorway, but could make no sense of it. The only rule he could see was that when
the daylight's movement caused any particular stripe to touch a new rug, everybody screamed with
excitement and ran about wildly.
Perhaps, he thought with a smile, that was really the only rule there was.
Back on Old Earth or Mars the sun's movement would have been too slow to use in a children's game;
even here on Dest, in the deep of winter, when the elongated stripes made its motion more obvious, he was
surprised to see it involved.
"Daddy!" little Zhrellia called. "Daddy, Daddy, you play!"
He shook his head. "No, I don't know how. Be-sides, I should get to the market before all the good stuff
is gone." He gestured at the folded linen sack he had tucked under one arm.
All three children expressed polite dismay, Zhrellia pouting, Debovar downcast, and Ket impassive. Ket
added, "Will you bring us some honey? It was all gone at breakfast."
"I'll see." He smiled fondly. "You just go on with your game. If you need anything, shout; your mother will
hear you."
He was lucky, he told himself as he crossed the room, to have three such children, all healthy, without a
visible mutation amongst them. He was lucky to have the wife he did, and his position in the community.
Most of all, he was lucky to be alive, after what he had been through in his younger days. Back then, when
he was traveling through space with a bomb in his head, fighting under the direction of an irrational
computer a war that was long over, he would never have believed he would someday have children and a
comfortable home.
He paused at the threshold to wave a farewell, then stepped through the door to the little platform beyond,
leaving the luxuries of his family's apartments behind.
Around him were four bare wooden walls, and two floors above him was a patchwork of metal, wood,
and concrete that served as a ceiling. The wooden platform on which he stood was secured to only two of
the walls, forming a triangle across one corner of the chamber. Other doors opened onto similar platforms
from other walls and on other levels, but most of the area that should have been floor was simply open
space over a hundred-meter drop.
He glanced over the edge, gathered his concentra-tion, and stepped off.
At first he hung suspended in midair, but then he allowed himself to sink slowly but steadily downward.
He looked about casually, watching the walls slide up past him; the rusty, blast-twisted steel frame of the
ancient skyscraper showed plainly through the cobbled-on walls of glass and wood. When he had first
settled in Praunce, eleven years earlier, he had worried that the damaged metal structure might not be
sound, that his cozy new home might someday fall, brought down by high winds or ground tremors, killing
him in its collapse.
He smiled to himself at the memory.
Later, as an apprentice wizard, he had also been frightened by the necessity of levitating himself up and
down the central shaft. His master, however, had in-sisted. Wizards lived in the towers; that was the way it
was done in Praunce. It always had been the way, ever since the first wizard arrived there not long after
the Bad Times, and it presumably always would be. As an apprentice, Turner had lived in his master
Arrelis's tower, and he had levitated up and down the central shaft. Since by then he had already survived
any number of things that should have killed him, he had ignored his nervousness.
Now a master wizard himself, albeit not a particu-larly good one, Turner knew that his fears for the
building's safety had been groundless; he could per-ceive the strengths and weaknesses of the structure,
could feel the stress upon it, and knew that despite rust, despite the damage done by the nuclear blast that
had destroyed the city on whose ruins Praunce had been built, despite everything, the tower could easily
stand for another century or two.
The drop down the shaft, however, still worried him on occasion, and when his children had been
younger, the thought that one of them might somehow open a wrong door and fall off the platform had
terrified him. Even now, at times, he still worried about Zhrellia, despite locks and warnings. Like any
two-year-old, she had more curiosity than caution.
He smiled anew when he thought of her.
He looked down; he had made more than half the descent. He could see clearly, despite the dim light and
drifting dust, the stacked sacks of grain that covered the floor to a depth of a dozen meters or so. The piles
had been shrinking since the onset of winter, but they were still substantial. The city was well supplied this
year, as it usually was.
He sneezed and fell a meter or so before he caught himself. The dust had tickled his nose. The hollow
centers of the towers were always drab and dirty, be-cause nobody could be bothered to clean them; the
stored grain inevitably left behind dust and grit that drifted about and slowly encrusted every surface,
in-cluding, whenever he passed through, his skin and the inside of his nose.
At least, he thought, it was reasonably warm in here. He could have gone out a window and down the
outside of the building, but the outside air was freezing cold, and as a wizard he was expected to generate
his own heat-field rather than wear a coat—it helped maintain the impression that wizards were not subject
to the weaknesses that troubled lesser breeds of hu-manity.
Generating heat could get tiring, though; better to put up with a little dirt than to exhaust himself for no
reason, he told himself as he settled onto the trapdoor that led into the tower's eight lowest floors. Ordinary
men and women lived in the base of the tower—along with a good many mutants, sports, and other
nonordinary men and women, most of them the result of the lingering radiation and chemical contamination
in the area.
No wizards lived below him, though. Wizards, and only wizards and their families, lived in the tops of the
towers. The rest of the populace stayed close to the ground. Even after eleven years, Turner had not quite
decided whether he approved of this division between the city's elite and the common masses. It was
certainly undemocratic, and Turner's parents had brought him up as a believer in democracy, but on the
other hand, wizards really were different from other people, and to pretend otherwise would be hypocritical.
Besides, the wizardly elite was by no means a closed society. Anyone could apply for an apprenticeship
and stand a reasonable chance of being accepted, virtually every apprentice became a wizard, and all
wizards were accepted as equals, regardless of whether they had been born to princes, peasants, or even
other wiz-ards. Minor distinctions might be made on the basis of seniority or ability, but never on the basis
of birth. Turner himself, after all, had been as complete an out-sider as anyone might imagine, and yet he
had been fully accepted.
Few people did apply for apprenticeships, though, which puzzled him. He preferred to attribute it to a
combination of laziness and mistrust. Wizardry was mysterious, Turner thought, and probably looked a good
bit harder than it actually was.
Still, he reluctantly admitted to himself that the wiz-ards did discourage would-be apprentices.
Apprentices meant work and responsibility, and more wizards meant a wider distribution of the powers and
privileges they enjoyed.
But anyone could apply. Turner soothed his egali-tarian instincts with that reminder.
He opened the trapdoor without touching it, lifting himself up out of the way as it swung back. When it
had fallen back as far as the hinges would allow, he let himself sink slowly downward through the opening.
He paused a few centimeters off the floor of the corridor below the trap, aware of an odd, unfamiliar
sensation, the sort of sensation that he would once have described as "feeling as if he were being watched."
Oddly, the phrase came to him in his native tongue rather than the Prauncer dialect of Anglo-Spanish that
he had spoken and thought in for the past decade.
Nobody, though, should be able to watch an alert wizard without the wizard knowing it. Turner had
ac-cepted that as fact for several years now. He rotated slowly in midair, looking with both his eyes and his
psychic senses, but could neither see nor feel anyone paying any attention to him. A few people were in the
rooms along the corridor, behind their closed doors, but none showed any sign that they were aware of his
presence. He sensed their auras as calm and blue.
With the mental equivalent of a shrug he dropped to the floor and began walking toward the stairs. He
was imagining things, he told himself; either that or some of the circuitry in his body was acting up.
Per-haps some obscure component, a chip or a bit of wir-ing somewhere inside him, was reacting to static
electricity built up in the cold air or to sunspots—or starspots, if that was the word, since Dest's primary
was not Old Earth's sun. Perhaps, he theorized, some mechanism in his body was breaking down from age
and lack of maintenance and was disturbing the equi-librium of his senses.
The latter was not a particularly pleasant possibility to dwell on, with all it implied for future breakdowns.
He pushed it aside.
He was halfway down the second flight when he again thought he sensed something; this time it seemed
to be a sound he didn't quite hear. He slowed his pace, then paused at the bottom of the staircase, listening
intently.
His ears caught nothing but the distant sounds of the city going about its business. His psychic senses
detected nothing but casual disinterest. Nonetheless, he was uneasily certain that he did hear something—
he knew he did. He tried to remember how to listen to the electronics wired into his nervous system, but it
had been so long that he struggled for several seconds before he again picked up a faint tremor of
something.
He concentrated, willed himself to hear it, and began to pick up something too faint to be considered a
sound but with a distinct rhythm. He recognized it as speech, but the rhythm did not fit any dialect he had
heard on Dest.
It did, however, fit Old Earth's polyglot common language, the language used in government, trade, and
the military, the language he had, as the child of a bureaucrat and a corporate executive in urban North
America, spoken as his own until reaching Praunce. The mysterious speech fit the rhythms of polyglot, and
it was growing steadily louder and clearer.
"Oh, my God," he said aloud in his childhood tongue, the years of practice in using Prauncer terms,
swearing by the three Prauncer gods, forgotten for the moment. He could make out the words now. He
stood motionless in the corridor at the foot of the stairs, staring at nothing and listening to the barely audible
voice in his head endlessly repeating in his native language, in a distant monotone, ". . . Anyone loyal to Old
Earth, please respond. Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond. Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please
respond . . ."
"I'm here!" he shouted silently, reacting automati-cally, without any thought of what it might mean. "I'm
here!"
Chapter Two
FOR ELEVEN LOCAL YEARS, THE COMMUNICATIONS equipment that had been built into his
skull back at the training base on Mars had not been used, sim-ply because he had had no one in Dest's
entire star system to talk to with it. For eleven years he had done nothing to maintain any of the artificial
systems in his body and had not been bothered on occasions when a psionic self-inspection revealed that
some minor device had failed. He had had little use for any of his internal technology, and his computer,
which the system de-signers had made responsible for checking and main-taining both his natural and his
cyborg parts, had been shut down permanently shortly after his arrival on the planet. Before that arrival he
and his computer had been gradually deteriorating together for fourteen ter-restrial years of subjective time
as they wandered aim-lessly through interstellar space.
It was therefore almost as surprising that his trans-ceiver could still receive, he decided after the initial
shock and confusion wore off, as it was that there was something for it to receive.
As the message ". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond . . ." continued to repeat for long minutes
after his unthinking mental shout, Turner realized that his response had not reached whoever was
trans-mitting. The transmitter in his skull, powered by his own body's electricity, had a useful range of no
more than a light-minute or two, and while the sender of the message might not have a ready answer, he or
she—or it—would surely have stopped the endless repetition immediately upon getting a response.
Turner had no way of knowing whether something was wrong with his transmitter or with the other
party's receiver, or whether the distance was simply too great. He guessed the last was most likely but
knew that neither of the other possibilities should sur-prise him.
Whatever the reason, the transmission droned on endlessly. ". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please
re-spond . . ."
And whatever the reason, he told himself, it was probably a very good thing indeed that his answer had
not been heard. He did not know who or what was out there or whether it had any direct connection with
his own presence on Dest. He could only guess what other natives of Old Earth might still be wandering
among the stars.
He sat down on the dusty floor of the corridor to think, trying to ignore the constant faint repetition of ". . .
Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond. . ." that muttered in the back of his head.
He had been on Dest for eleven years of local time —that would be, he estimated, a little over ten years
on Old Earth, since the shorter days on Dest more than made up for the four hundred and two of them in a
year. That meant he had left Mars three hundred and fourteen years ago by Old Earth time, three hundred
and thirty-eight years ago by Dest time, ignoring, as he always did, the fact that it was virtually meaningless
to speak of simultaneity on two planets so far apart in a relativistic universe.
Of course, in his own subjective time it was twenty-five personal years, fourteen measured by shipboard
clocks and eleven by Dest's seasons. He had never worked out the conversion necessary to express it
en-tirely in terms of one planet or the other; he had had no reason to.
At first thought it seemed that after three centuries there could be no more survivors of the war he had
fought in, the war the people of Dest called "The Bad Times," still roaming around out there, but after an
instant's consideration he knew that was wrong. After all, he himself had wandered through space for over
three hundred years; what was another ten or eleven on top of that? Relativistic time dilation effects on
near-light-speed space travel had a way of making "common sense" not work. He had never worried about
why that should be, never tried to understand the nature of relativity; he had simply accepted it as fact, as
he had accepted so many things throughout his life. Now, again, he accepted it and knew that the new
arrival could have left Old Earth at almost any time since the development of interstellar travel, two
cen-turies before he himself had been born.
". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond . . ." the voice repeated, each repetition almost
impercepti-bly louder and clearer than the one before.
Whatever was transmitting the signal could easily be a surviving unit of Old Earth's military, just as he
was himself. Depending on its flight path, it could be any-where from a decade to a few centuries out from
base by shipboard time. The crew aboard, if any were still alive, surely knew that the war was long since
lost and both Old Earth and Mars blasted by the enemy's D-series. The news had been broadcast
throughout known space.
". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond . . ." What, he asked himself bitterly, was left for anyone
to be loyal to?
Of course, if the transmitter was military, knowl-edge of Old Earth's destruction didn't necessarily mean
that the signaler or signalers would be ready to surrender peacefully. For himself, he had certainly been
eager enough to give up his mission once he knew he had nothing left to fight for, but he guessed that not
everyone would have felt that way. Some peo-ple, he supposed, would seek revenge for Old Earth's
obliteration. Some would carry on out of a sense of duty, even when that duty was obviously meaningless
—or perhaps not a sense of duty but simply a lack of anything better to do.
". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond . . ." repeated endlessly, mechanically, in his head.
And, of course, some survivors would be forced by their machines to carry on, as he had been.
The very thought of that still induced an almost physical pain; the memories of those wasted years still
hurt. He had signed up to fight when he was eighteen and studying art in college, with no clear idea of what
he wanted from life, no real conception of what he was getting into. Volunteering for the military had
seemed brave and patriotic and no worse, no more frightening, than any other available course of action. To
the young man he had once been, the prospect of flying off into space to fight had seemed no more
terrifying, and a good bit more romantic, than going out to find a job and support himself.
And in a way he had made the right choice. He was still alive, at a physiological age of forty-three, or
forty-four, or whatever it was, while if he had stayed on Old Earth he would probably have died a good bit
younger when the D-series hit.
He certainly would have been dead by now, three centuries later.
When he had been wandering through space after the war ended, he had often thought he would have
preferred death.
He stared at the blank wall of the corridor as he remembered, absently adjusting the cyborged lenses of
his eyes, zooming in and then back as he studied the grain of the wood. At any rate, he told himself with
mild satisfaction, that particular modification to his body had not yet deteriorated. His eyesight was quite
literally superhuman. He could also shift to sensing with his psychic abilities, the psionic "magic" that made
him a wizard, the underlying energies of the wood; viewed that way, the wall was overlaid with a delicate
tracery of golden light that showed him every point where the material was stressed, every place that still
held traces of sap, and a mosaic of other informa-tion. As he stared at the wood without really seeing it, the
soundless voice in his head spoke its message over and over.
He had always been a loner when he was young— quiet, self-contained, with no strong interests, no great
passions, no close relationships, not given much to ei-ther introspection or interaction with others. That, it
turned out, was a personality type that the military needed very badly for one of their programs. After
signing up to fight he had volunteered once again, though they probably would have taken him in any case,
and he had been shipped to Mars, where he was systematically rebuilt, physically and mentally, until he was
no longer Samuel Turner, a nondescript art stu-dent who had grown up in a dozen cities scattered all over
eastern North America, but Independent Recon-naissance Unit Cyborg 205, code-named Slant, with
superhuman speed and strength, with innumerable de-vices built into his body, including an elaborate
com-munications system in his skull that linked him tightly to his one-man starship's computer.
His memories of the period following his arrival on Mars were oddly fractured, because one part of his
reconditioning had been the artificial division of his mind into eighteen separate personalities, each
special-ized in various ways. Some had been trained and con-ditioned for specific functions, such as combat
or piloting, with all irrelevant knowledge and emotion suppressed; others had given the outward appearance
of normality and were intended to serve as cover iden-tities should he ever undertake any active spying or
sabotage. His superiors had also suppressed his civilian identity and all its memories, lest some childhood
trauma or personal idealism somehow interfere with his duties, so in a way he had not even existed during
his body's service as an IRU cyborg. He tended to identify himself most strongly with the default
person-ality, the passive, generalized individual that domi-nated when no particular talent or identity was
called for. The default identity had been made up of what was left of his personality after the other
seventeen were formed and his memories suppressed, so it had been the most similar to his original self in
many ways, but all eighteen personalities had really been parts of himself. When he had finally been
reintegrated into the original Samuel Turner, he had kept the memories of all eighteen—not really as a
continuous whole but as a sort of mental patchwork, eighteen separate pieces tied loosely together by a
shared chronology. He could remember times when he had been the de-fault personality one second and his
ruthlessly efficient warrior self the next, and he knew, intellectually, that the change had been virtually
instantaneous, but the two personalities had been so different that the gap seemed years long, as wide as
the disparity between his naive trust and innocence at the age of four and the core of insecurity he had
disguised with carefully con-trived cynicism at the age of fourteen.
The gap actually seemed even wider than that, for when he tried he could remember the intermediate
stages between being a child of four and being a lad of fourteen, but no intermediate stages had ever
existed between his default personality and his combat self.
The sort of induced insanity he had lived with as an IRU cyborg was very effective for military purposes
over the short run, allowing a single cyborg to serve an assortment of functions and to travel interstellar
dis-tances alone without breaking down mentally or emo-tionally. It had never been intended to last
indefinitely.
When his conditioning, mental and physical, was complete, they had given him his ship—it had had no
special name but was just called IRU Vessel 205. It was controlled by Computer Control Complex IRU 205
and equipped with a wide variety of weapons and other equipment.
One of his personalities was programmed to pilot the ship as effectively as the computer could, just in
case that should become necessary, but ordinarily run-ning the ship was the computer's job. In theory the
computer was to serve almost as an extension of his own brain, but in practice it had never worked that
way; the computer's programming was too different from any of his own personalities. Even when
hard-wired together, with the computer's control cable se-cured in its socket in the back of his neck, they
had always remained separate and not particularly compat-ible intelligences.
It occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, whether that control cable had been intended to allow him
to control the computer or to help the computer to control him. The technicians had never specified, and his
other superiors had never mentioned it at all.
He had been dominant in most matters by virtue of being the more complex and creative of the pair, but
the computer, CCC-IRU 205, had always held the trump cards of being able to override his control of all
their equipment, including the modifications to his own body, and of having sole control of the thermite
charge in the base of his skull that would blow his head off if he attempted to surrender or to otherwise
seri-ously disobey the orders of the Command.
Removing that explosive charge had been an obses-sion for years.
He reached up and idly fingered the bent and cor-roded remains of the socket in his neck. His skin had
grown in over most of the edges now, reducing the opening to perhaps half its original size. Even without
that, though, the socket had long ago been ruined, twisted out of shape and unusable. The wizards of
Praunce—his friends and teachers, and his compa-triots now—had removed the thermite from his skull, but
the computer had detonated it before it could be safely disposed of. The explosion had scorched and
deformed the socket as well as burning off hair and skin and giving him a concussion. He had been cut off
from full contact with the computer after that, limited to reception over a simple verbal communication
cir-cuit. The computer had still been able to receive almost as much of his sensory input as did his own
brain, but the two of them had never again been in full, di-rect communication.
Of course, they had not really communicated all that well to begin with, even with the control cable in
place.
Back on Mars the Command had told him that his failure to meld properly with the computer would not
matter. Like his own mental restructuring, his ship and its computer were designed and programmed with
the idea that they would return within a few years of sub-jective time, before any subtle flaws that might
exist could develop into anything serious. The two of them, he was told, should be able to get along well
enough until the war ended.
Sure enough, the war had been over within six months of subjective time after his departure.
Unfor-tunately," Old Earth lost, a possibility that had not been covered in his design. The rebellious colonies
had somehow gotten their D-series weapons, whatever they were, through the defenses guarding Mars and
Old Earth.
The computer that had controlled his ship and his life had not been programmed to acknowledge defeat or
surrender; Slant and his machines were to conquer or die. At most, CCC-IRU 205 might tolerate a
strate-gic retreat at times, but anything that might have meant a peaceful end to the mission was out of the
question once Mars and Old Earth had been fried. IRU 205's assignment had been vague and open-ended,
to be terminated by the transmission of Slant's release code or the ship's recall code, and his superiors on
Mars had all died so quickly that they had never had a chance to send any release or recall codes even if
they had wanted to—and Turner doubted very much that the hard-line military thinkers of the Command
would have wanted to.
Without his release code he had been condemned to wander on through space, fighting a war that was
al-ready lost.
He had accepted that, thanks to the passivity of his splintered personality and to the thermite charge in his
head. He had had no other choice he could think of but death, and whatever he might have done in other
circumstances, in his fractured and heavily conditioned mental state suicide had not been possible. At least,
it had not been possible for him; as the computer's pro-gramming deteriorated through the random loss of
oc-casional bits to stray electromagnetic impulses or wear on overused memory systems, and as more and
more negative data were compiled, the computer had gradu-ally developed suicidal tendencies of its own.
CCC-IRU 205 had wanted to fulfill its programming, and that programming had been designed to culminate
in either a recall to base or the ship's destruction in ac-tion. Although it was not able to act appropriately on
the information, the computer had known that it would never be recalled, which left its own termination as
its only long-term goal. It had used that in making decisions; whenever it was offered a choice with no other
reason to prefer one alternative over another, it chose the option most likely to result in its own even-tual
destruction. That had made Slant's life difficult, since he had not shared the computer's death wish.
Once Turner, as Slant, had known that the war was lost and that the damage he and his ship did to other
people they encountered could do no one any good, he had always done what he could to keep the damage
to a minimum. He had tried his best to keep the ship away from inhabited worlds entirely, since the
computer had picked up and understood enough to assume that no place outside the solar system remained
loyal to Old Earth after the D-series hit; humans, unlike computers, saw no point in remaining loyal to a
burnt-out ruin.
At least, rational humans who knew what had hap-pened, such as those who inhabited most colony
planets, had seen no point in such loyalty. On Dest, no one had had any idea what was going on, so the
ques-tion had never come up. Elsewhere, anyone who might still have possessed starships or any sort of
long-range telecommunications surely knew that nothing was left on Old Earth to fight for.
Someone, though, was out there now, calling, ". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond . . ."
He thrust that thought aside for the moment as he continued reviewing what he knew.
The computer had, despite Slant's best efforts, forced him to land on a few inhabited planets, and one of
them, the last, had been Dest. The computer, hav-ing detected anomalies in the planet's gravitational field,
as if the natives here had invented antigravity, quite logically had interpreted this as enemy weapons
research.
Turner shook his head. Even now he could not un-derstand why the anomalies had shown up on the ship's
sensors as antigravity. The actual cause had been the psionic abilities known to the natives as "wizardry" or
"magic." These abilities had apparently originated as a chance mutation after an Old Earth fleet, for
rea-sons Turner could only guess at, had been sent out here and had bombed Dest back to barbarism; the
re-sulting radiation was still, centuries later, causing mu-tations, most of which were far less favorable. His
computer had had records of the fleet being sent, but no records of why it had been sent, and so far as
Turner knew, no one on Dest had even realized the fleet was human in origin. The ships had suddenly
ap-peared above them, and their cities had vanished, and knowing nothing of the rebellion against Old Earth,
most of them had naturally assumed the attackers to be hostile extraterrestrials. Some might have realized
what was happening, but when Slant had arrived in Praunce three hundred years after the attack, his
state-ment that Old Earth had sent the fleet had come as a shock to the wizards there.
The Bad Times had destroyed Dest's old civilization pretty thoroughly, and only the fabulous good luck
that wizardry had turned up in the aftermath had per-mitted the survivors to rebuild as well, and as quickly,
as they had. However the talent had originated, it could be passed on, and not merely to the mutants' direct
descendants—the psionic ability itself allowed one to telekinetically alter the neurons of the human brain so
as to induce psionic abilities in others. Of course, these psionically created wizards did not breed true, since
only the brain had been changed, and not the genes, but that was enough. In fact, the original mutant strain
had died out, yet wizardry had survived and spread quickly and had become a cornerstone of most postwar
societies on Dest.
Wizards could levitate, either themselves or others or anything else in sight that was not too heavy, but
Turner did not think it was actually antigravity that they used. For one thing, almost all wizardry, not just
levitation but anything that required much energy, had registered as gravitational anomalies, and he simply
didn't see how mind reading or the eerie psionic senses could involve antigravity. He had no idea what they
were, but they seemed more likely to be electromagnetic in nature than anything else. At close range, even
before he became a wizard himself, he had been able to sense when magic was in use because he felt a
sort of electric tingle, like static in the air, which seemed to indicate an electromagnetic nature. Ordinary
people felt no such sensation; it was his cyborg circuitry that registered it somehow. The computer had
been unable to detect or explain the tingling. It had only been able to discern the "gravitational anomalies."
Even now, when he knew exactly what changes were necessary to make a human brain capable of
wiz-ardry, he had no idea how the phenomenon worked, any more than a caveman could have explained a
radio after being taught to wire together the appropriate parts. He only knew that it worked.
His own theory of why wizardry registered as anti-gravity was that all psionic activity somehow created
some sort of interference that had affected the ship's most delicate and sensitive equipment, its gravity
sen-sors, without actually having any connection with grav-ity at all.
Even if they were not antigravity, however, the computer had found these mysterious talents quite
dangerous enough, and it had insisted that Slant learn how this "magic" operated so that the information
could be taken back to Old Earth. Once the secrets were known, as much as possible of the planet's
popu-lation was to be destroyed, to eliminate any future threat to Old Earth's well-being.
It had taken everything he could do, as well as the efforts of a good many wizards and the manipulation
of the computer's own desire for self-destruction, to shut down CCC-IRU 205 for good. He had
uninten-tionally brought down his ship in the process, wrecking it beyond hope of repair.
Once that was done, leaving him permanently stranded on this curious planet, he had accepted an
apprenticeship in this strange psionic wizardry, and thereafter had led the normal life of a wizard in
Praunce. He had married, fathered three healthy chil-dren, served on the wizards' advisory council to
Praunce's government, and done his bit in various ways to help the Prauncer efforts to unite the entire
continent—the only one of Dest's four continents that was known to be inhabited—under a single
govern-ment. He had never been all that enthusiastic about the form of that government, with its patchwork
oli-garchy, but at least a unified planetary government meant there would be no major wars, so he had
always cooperated. With the passage of time and his accept-ance into Prauncer society, he had almost
forgotten that he was the only person on Dest not born there, a war-surplus cyborg centuries out of his own
era.
". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please repond . . ." Well, he told himself, he wasn't loyal to Old Earth. He
hadn't been since the war ended. He would not re-spond. Whoever or whatever was calling, Turner wasn't
what he/she/it wanted.
He stretched out his legs, which had become slightly cramped, and then got slowly and carefully to his
feet.
As he left the corridor and headed down the next flight of stairs, he promised himself that although he
wouldn't answer, he would listen very closely to what-ever he could pick up. If a ship from Old Earth was
approaching Dest, it might well be military and could be just as hostile as his own had been. In that case, he
was undoubtedly the single person on the planet best equipped to deal with such a menace.
Chapter Three
THE MIDWINTER MARKET WAS SOMEWHAT SKIMPY,
without the variety or quality of produce to be found the rest of the year. Even so, Turner man-aged to
fill his shopping bag to overflowing before he headed home. For the past several days he had been putting
off buying a variety of foods; he disliked out-door shopping in cold weather. Maintaining a heat-field took
enough concentration that he carried his groceries in his ordinary linen bag tucked into the curve of his left
arm rather than levitating them, and the sack gave him a rather undignified, unwizardly air. Nobody
commented on this minor breach of custom, though he was sure they noticed. One did not criticize a wizard
to his face unless one was another wizard. Still, Turner felt very slightly embarrassed.
At least, he thought, he had not been forced to waste energy floating above mud or slush to keep his feet
clean; the winter had been dry, with no trace of snow, and the ground had remained hard-packed dirt. He
had been able to walk like any ordinary mortal without risking criticism.
Concentrating on restocking the cupboards had been an excellent distraction; rather than simply fretting
about the mysterious message, Turner had in-volved himself in picking out the best of the market's relatively
meager pickings. Well before he left the square he had managed more or less to tune out the constant chant
of ". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth, please respond . . ." reducing it to mere mental back-ground noise.
Nonetheless, to shorten the time before he was free to concentrate on the signal, when he reached his
home tower he ignored the effort involved and lifted himself directly up the outside of the building instead of
following the stairways and corridors up to the tower's hollow center.
A few people on the street below glanced up but quickly ducked their heads back down into their col-lars
to help keep out the cold winter air. Other than that, nobody paid any attention to Turner's ascent. The sight
of a wizard going home by air was common-place in central Praunce.
When he reached his home level, he held his gro-cery sack in both hands while he unlocked a window
telekinetically. As he stepped in, allowing the bag of food to hang unsupported in the cold outside air for a
moment while he slipped through the narrow case-ment, he pondered anew what the repeating message
might signify.
He drifted into the room and settled to the floor, still lost in thought. His son Ket, eldest of his three
offspring, had seen him coming and had rushed to the window to help him in; now the child pulled the sack
inside and closed the window.
Turner thanked the boy absently and ambled to-ward the kitchen, the bag of produce floating along behind
him, as he tried to decide whether there was anything he should do about the signal—anything beyond
listening to it, which he could not avoid.
He did not notice Debovar and Zhrellia wrestling furiously and noisily on a nearby rug in a friendly but
desperately uneven match and did not hear when Ket, after latching the window, called after him, "Did you
get any honey, Daddy?"
When Turner disappeared into the kitchen without replying, Ket stared after him, slightly puzzled. His
fa-ther had not answered a simple question, had not yelled at his sisters to stop fighting, and had not given
him the usual returning-home hug. This sort of neglect happened sometimes, when Daddy was thinking very
hard about something especially important or difficult, but Ket was not aware of anything important or
diffi-cult that had come up lately or anything that might have happened in the public market.
Well, whatever it was, he told himself, it was proba-bly just boring grown-up stuff, like when the other
wiz-ards had asked Daddy to decide what to do with that man who had been caught hurting women. Daddy
would be all right. If it were anything that concerned the rest of the family, Daddy would have said
some-thing. Ket dismissed the matter from his mind and went to pull Debovar off the shrieking Zhrellia;
Debo-var was not hurting Zhrellia, just tickling her, but the shrieking bothered his ears.
In the kitchen Turner began putting his purchases away in the appropriate bins and cupboards,
automati-cally finding most of the correct places despite his preoccupation.
Weapons, he thought as he stacked jars of preserves on a high shelf. He should check out what weapons
he had available. If the message came from an incoming ship rather than a robot probe or some other
possibility he had not yet thought of, he might need to fight whoever was aboard—if anyone was. A ship
from Old Earth might well be hostile and would surely have a full arsenal, with everything from tranquilizer
darts to nuclear missiles.
Or would it? If it had fought enough before reach-ing Dest, its armament might be depleted by use. If it
took three hundred years to reach Dest, then the new-comer had presumably not come directly from
prewar Old Earth by straight-line-course, so it might well have fired off a good bit of its original supply of
ammunition at stops along the way, and so far as he knew, it would not have been able to rearm anywhere.
He could not count on that, though. Until he learned otherwise, he would have to assume that the
stranger's firepower was virtually endless.
His own arsenal was limited. He had salvaged some weapons from his own ship after the crash but had
left behind all the heavier pieces—missiles, particle beams, and so forth. He had not seen any possible use
for them. The nuclear warheads he would have dis-armed or destroyed entirely, had he known how.
It occurred to him for the first time that a good wizard could see how to disarm the warheads, but he had
not known that when he had done his salvage work a few days after the crash. He was not entirely certain
that he could do it safely himself, even now. Although he could and did handle all the simple, everyday
magic, such as flight or the most obvious ap-plications of wizard-sight, he had never become very expert at
the more delicate and sensitive sorts of wiz-ardry, a fact that had been a great disappointment to his master
and his other teachers; he had the raw tal-ent and could draw on as much psionic energy as any-one when
he forced himself to, but he had found himself lacking in the sort of tight concentration that the really good
wizards could muster. He also kept overlooking possible ways to use his abilities. He attri-buted his failure
of concentration to lingering psychic damage from his fourteen years of total isolation and the aftereffects
of induced multiple personality; for fourteen years of wandering through space he had tried very hard not to
think, because it had only de-pressed him in his trapped state, and the specialization of his different selves
had made concentration so auto-matic when he needed it that now that it was volun-tary, he found it hard to
contrive consciously. As for overlooking possibilities, he assumed that was simply because he had spent the
first three-fourths of his life with no knowledge of psionics at all and was too set in his ways to adjust
completely to his new talents. The other wizards had all grown up knowing that wizardry existed and
roughly what it could do, so that as chil-dren they had all spent time imagining what they would do if they
ever became wizards themselves. Now they were wizards and could draw on those child-hood imaginings.
Turner had none to draw on. He sus-pected that if he had grown up on Dest he would be more creative in
his magic.
If whatever was transmitting the repeating message did prove hostile and Turner found himself forced to
fight it, he would have wizardry on his side, and the weapons he had salvaged, but that would be all. After
all this time he felt sure that anything left in his wrecked ship would almost certainly be useless. The hull
had been breached in the crash, allowing every-thing from rats and rain to mold and mildew into the
mechanisms. The nuclear warheads in their shielded casings could well be intact, but the missiles to deliver
them would hardly be trustworthy—fuel lines might be chewed through, fuel contaminated, or control
chips warped or cracked.
Even the energy weapons that he had salvaged, snarks and lasers and shockguns, would probably have
lost their charges by now. He had not checked on them in years, and the charge tended to trickle away.
Not that he could have done anything about it if he had checked on them; if they were drained, as he
expected, he had no way of recharging them, since the ship's fu-sion plant had been ruined in the crash.
They were almost certainly useless.
He had a variety of firearms, though, everything from easily concealed pocket pistols to high-powered
machine guns and portable rocket launchers. He had kept them for his own use rather than turning them
over to the city government—now the imperial gov-ernment—for reasons that he himself was not sure of.
His experiences back on Old Earth and Mars had left him with a permanent mistrust of all governments, a
mistrust more emotional in origin than rational, and the government on Old Earth had at least made a
pre-tense of being representative, where the rulers of Praunce, both wizard and normal, held their posts by
appointment of their fellows and predecessors, claim-ing to know better than their subjects what the city
and empire needed.
Turner had to admit, despite his democratic predi-lections, that Praunce's government ran at least as well
as Old Earth's had. That was still not very well, how-ever, and he attributed the oligarchy's relative success
to Praunce's smaller population and simpler way of life.
And, democratic or not, he had always had the nag-ging egotistical suspicion that he could do far better at
running a nation than had any government he had ever encountered. With that in mind, he had kept his
pri-vate arsenal private.
His selfishness and mistrust were just as well, he decided, since it meant that he still had guns and
am-munition now, when he might need them.
He knew, though, that no small arms, not even his heaviest shoulder-launched rockets, would be much
use against an armored starship. The only hand-held weapon he had that might be able to pierce a starship's
hull would be a snark, and that would be possible only at extreme close range—assuming that any of his
snarks still held a charge.
Against a warship he would be virtually helpless.
Was a warship coming? If it was, would he have to fight it?
He didn't know. He didn't know much of anything. The message might mean nothing, or it might herald an
entire fleet about to come in shooting, like the one that had destroyed Dest's cities three centuries ago. He
shelved the last of his purchases, a large crock of honey most of which was destined for Ket's breakfast
cakes, then tucked the emptied market sack back in its corner and leaned against the table, weighing his
op-tions.
Should he check out his weapons, see how much firepower he actually had? Parrah would almost
cer-tainly notice; she would want to know why. Did he have a good enough reason to worry her, and
probably incite her to alarm every wizard in Praunce?
The voice in his head had grown quite loud now, indicating that he probably needed to reach a decision
quickly; the repeating message was becoming harder to ignore.
Then, abruptly, he no longer wanted to ignore it, as the droning chant broke.
". . . Anyone loyal to Old Earth . . . told you, let me send my own message. Oh, I'm transmitting? I am?
Well, good, damn it, it's about time. I don't see why we have to warn the bastards in the first place, but if
you won't give me fire control without it, I'm not going to make an issue of it, I'll just do the damn warning
myself. You'd screw it up somehow, you stupid ma-chine. You don't know what you're doing half the time;
I have to watch everything you do. So, if we're really transmitting, hello, down there, if anyone can hear me,
which I doubt. This is Independent Recon-naissance Unit 247, responding to a total-shutdown distress signal
from IRU 205. If there is anyone down there who can hear me, and knows a reason I shouldn't open fire,
you had damn well better answer quickly. I'm entering orbit around the only inhabited planet I can find in
this system, the one with those weird gravitational anomalies flickering all over it, and unless someone tells
me otherwise, in the next ten minutes I'm going to assume it's inhabited by murder-ing rebels, like any other
planet, and I'm going to start nuking cities. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Over."
The transmission ended, and the sudden mental si-lence left Turner momentarily dazed.
When he could think again and had recalled as best he could the technique of subvocalizing messages
over his communications circuit, he wasted no time in call-ing out silently, "IRU 247, this is IRU 205—don't
shoot! The planet's friendly!" He hoped he was re-membering how to transmit correctly, and he hoped that
his transmitter still worked.
Although the hostile nature of the message shocked him, he was, in a way, grateful that it was another
IRU arriving and not a heavy warship or a fleet, not only because an IRU was much smaller, with less
firepower and only a single person aboard for him to deal with, but because he was so intimately familiar
with its capa-bilities; having been the human half of an IRU him-self, he knew exactly what he was now
摘要：

thewizardandthewarmachineLawrenceWatt-EvansCopyright©1987byLawrenceWatt-EvansLibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumber:87-91228ISBN0-345-33459-0CoverArtbyDarrellK.Sweete-bookver.1.0DedicatedtoLesterdelReyChapterOneBRIGHTDAYLIGHTSPILLEDTHROUGHTHECHUNKSofcoloredglasssetintothewindows,stripingthefurcarpetswit...

展开>> 收起<<
Lawrence Watt-Evans - War Surplus 02 - The Wizard and the War Machine.pdf

共98页,预览20页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：98 页 大小：349.94KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 98
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注