Legion, page 2
Tim stopped in front of a four-storey longhouse over whose roof towered comdiscs and antennae. “The full Council won’t see you tonight,” he said without turning around. “Just me and Robbins.” He looked back and grinned. “The sheep and the lion, which one is which?”
Mathew laughed again and leaned against a tree while he surveyed the street, the sleeping city, thinking how normal it all was; so normal that a timeported visitor would never be able to tell in the dark and the light of the hours past sunset that the world beyond Central existed only in half-connected fragments; that ContiGov, for all its evocative name and dearly held memory, existed here … and only here. There … out there … the carefully spun web of its postWar influence was beginning to pull loose of its tenuous mooring. What had begun after the PlagueWind had decimated and scattered was finally beginning to stall. Though not for lack of trying. Himself, his father, his grandfather, brother Orion, aunt and uncle … they, and hundreds of others not needed in the labs and comunit stations, pushing outward to reestablish and reunite. House by house. Nightmare by nightmare. A village here, a rivertown there, a cluster in a hollow that thought the Earth dead.
Almost visibly, it had been pulling together; and on the Noram continent people, finally, were daring to hope.
Even his brother, whose seemingly impervious cynicism had been penetrated by their father’s death; and, shortly after Mathew’s own first mission, Orion had set out for Philayork. Within the year he had taken what was left of the cityplex from the dust and the blood and had brought it back. Not fully populated, but nevertheless alive.
That had been a decade ago.
Then, seven years following Philayork’s reconquest, there had been a small village Mathew and his wife Chamra and his sons were living in, rehabilitating, shifting it back into the ContiGov network. Benlowe.
Then Quilly.
And when it was done, Orion had called him.
Listen, brother, I’m sorry about … what happened. Look, why don’t you come out here for a while? There’s plenty to do, and Courtney would love to meet you. She thinks I’m the only insane Parric. Why don’t you come out, Matt? We’ve got hovers searching the coastline, rehabs of our own moving north and finding more and more folks every year. Come out, Matt.
I don’t think so, no.
Mathew! Unless your memory is shot, you’ll recall that you were the one who goaded me into coming here in the first place. You were the one who named a kid after me. Damnit, Matt, you owe me!
I don’t think so, no.
What are you doing, feeling sorry for yourself?
I got over that a year ago, Orion. I have other things on my mind these days.
Fine. But … are you thinking about going after Quilly?
I’m not sure.
What do you mean? Are you or aren’t you?
I’m not sure! It was easy to do it to you; I’m not so sure I can do it to myself. No. I’m not sure I should do it to myself. I don’t know what would be accomplished by it. Damn, I don’t even know if I’m making any sense.
All right, then. No, it’s not all right, damnit. You listen to me for a change, brother. Do me a favor and don’t go hunting for all the wrong reasons. When Father was killed out here, I went for the man who did it, and believe it or not, Matt, it wasn’t worth it. Oh, it turned out all right, I suppose, but my reasons were all wrong. You know that, I know you do. Stay out of the trap, Matt. And come visit when you can.
It wasn’t mentioned again, and Mathew never visited; and last month, when Quilly began marching again, Orion contacted him on his home channel comunit.
Matt, I’ve been hearing stories, and I don’t like them.
What stories? About me? I’m doing my job.
No, you’re doing what you’re told. That’s not your job.
You’re not making sense.
I’m making perfect sense, and you know it. Quilly’s on the move again, and they’re putting the pressure on you. They’re unhappy, Matt, with … well, with what you haven’t done.
They want me to be a general, I know that already. A general in charge of a legion of the righteous; but I don’t know what’s right anymore.
You’ve been thinking too much.
It runs in the family.
You’ve got some time coming?
Some. A few weeks, I think. Just got back three days ago.
Then take it. Stay away from Robbins, Matt, before he poisons you. Do some thinking, different thinking. But whatever happens, don’t let them get you mad. You do, and you’ll be in the trap before it’s over. Remember the trap, Mathew, and don’t get mad. Please. I want to see you again. Alive, and grinning.
Orion?
What?
It’s been almost three years, and I still don’t have a reason.
You don’t have to tell me, brother, I’ve been there before.
I had a reason once. When I first started out, remember? Father and Grandfather, they had the reasons then.
They’re dead, Matt, and you’re not. I could tell you to take a look around and you’d have your reason, but you’ve done that already, if you’re a Parric like me. The old reasons are no good now.
No.
Then I can’t help you.
Orion?
What?
I’m thirty-five years old, and I’m frightened.
Welcome to the club, Matt. I was wondering when you’d join.
Footfalls made him blink, and he turned to the street behind him. Basil had already started to cross, slowed for a moment before stepping to the curb and staring at the longhouse.
“Steel in there?”
“Yes,” Mathew said.
“What are you going to tell him, Matt?”
He shrugged.
Basil brushed a hand through his hair, scrubbed at his jaw and coughed. “Matt, they took me off rehabs late last week. They said—are you ready for this?—they said I was scaring the outlanders too much, even more than the androids. Confound it, I can’t help it if my mother was a giant, can I? They’ve got me in comms now, and I hate it. All you do is listen to static. Once, just once I talked with a guy in Eurecom. He lives on an airfield. A million planes all over the place and no place to go. He’s going nuts. So am I.
“Matt, when you do—and I know you will—please take me with you before I yank some screens off the wall?”
Mathew saw the pain in the man’s face twist him almost comically. He knew it was Kalen’s way, the melodramatic, and he knew the man’s friendship was not to be laughed at.
“I wouldn’t leave without you,” he said finally. “We can’t afford you wrecking the place.”
Kalen sighed, rubbed his face once again and stepped back into the shadows when the longhouse door opened. “Good luck,” he whispered.
Mathew only nodded.
II
When Philayork had been partially resurrected and the lights had been turned on in its center called Hive, there had been solemn and cautious rejoicing in the streets of Town Central. It was considered a major victory without which entropy might have been defined. Soon after, Orion and his people reestablished a comlink with ContiGov that created in spirit if not always in fact a beacon for those places north and south where Central’s own people were unable to search on foot. Orion also scanned the world, picking up pockets of existence too few to be significant, yet enough to prove that the planet, though dying, was not yet dead. It was bad, then, and it was good. Bad, because the full extent of Noram’s collapse, and the collapse in kind of the rest of the globe, was carried home more forcefully than ever before; the blank screens and static had a deadening effect, a sobering that drifted over into dreams. Good, because the remnants of the Noram Government that had managed to escape the PlagueWind were better able to reconstruct their ambitions on a more realistic foundation. Good. Bad. But nothing was total defeat. When it had been confirmed, for example, that Descago and Lofrisco had no such similar webs reaching into the continent’s interior, the mourning was tempered by the knowledge that—in the short term, at least—no serious rivals to ContiGov’s authority had yet been spawned. They hoped. And it was all they had.
Now, in that slow long decade since Orion had ascended, he and his people were still holding on. Holding, and growing. Parties of Central workers were occasionally sent in for support—as much moral as anything—and small numbers of roving outlanders were still drifting in. The latter, however, were politely discouraged since the day ContiGov woke up and realized it needed a grip on the land as well as the ’plexes. There had been little trouble in that regard—once the outlanders knew and kept knowing, they more than willingly returned to the farms, the hills, the mountains and their homes.
It worked. And smoothly.
And eventually, if all went according to ContiGov planning, when the numbers were great enough that the population could safely and successfully filter throughout the ’plexes and restore, and hold them, Town Central would become a shrine to a world that had survived.
Until … Quilly.
Two men strode by. Mathew nodded automatically, then froze when he recognized them as youngsters barely out of their education, two men who had once caught him in Dinko’s and in a drunken rage had thrashed him because he had had no anger to lead them. They scowled, and he smiled. One stopped as though to speak with him, but the other grabbed an arm and pulled. Their punishment had been a year’s restoration of the road above the city, punishment because they had no androids to help them; they did their own carrying and were permitted no balm. They moved on, in silence, and Mathew let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
Damn, he thought without rage, without pity.
The door opened and a soft voice called to him, and he stared at the departing young men, half-tempted to call them. His hand went to his face, and he wished for the first time in days that he had not shaved off his beard. Not that he needed the age it had given him—thirty-five was enough for anyone these days—but it had been a comfort when he needed something to stroke, to scratch, to pull at while he searched for the words that needed to be said. Now all that remained was a slightly squared chin, a slightly hooked nose, eyes nearly green, and a thatch of brown hair split along the right side from temple to nape by a thin bolt of blond he had long since stopped trying to comb under.
The mark of the Parrics, he thought wryly as he walked; a reminder that his grandmother had had hair to match the sun.
He tugged at a curl bothering his ear, and moved up the walk to the door. His palms were suddenly moist, and he cursed them, wiped them on his dark trousers and through his hair again. Thea, a Councilwoman holding the portfolio of Education, waited for him. She was smiling, as she always did, was wrapped about in a bright blue cloth that stretched proudly over the life she bore in her swollen womb. Her feet were booted, with silver chains over the instep. He grinned at her, and she stepped aside with a touch to his elbow.
“Courage,” she whispered, and his grin broke a short laugh.
“Are you going to be in there?”
“No,” she said. “Concert tonight in the Hall.”
“Lucky.”
“Not so. I heard the rehearsal.”
He laughed as she slipped by him into the dark, turned to watch her with a flicker of envy before he closed the door behind him.
The center corridor was dimly lighted, the rooms right and left closed and locked. After a moment’s indecision, he walked to a blackstone pillar in the middle, thumbed open a door and hurried down the steps built into what once had been a functioning lift/tube. Two floors down and he heard quiet voices.
Harve Robbins was the ContiGov Chairman, ranking member of a Council of two dozen who carried portfolios as though the world still heard them. From Defense to Culture, Research to Education. Elected popularly to staggered terms, choosing the Chairman from their own number, portfolio-at-large. This was the third and last term for Robbins at the top, and Mathew knew the man hated him, and did his job well.
There was no small talk. No need for introductions. The room was large, the walls covered with carefully illuminated maps of the continent that pricked where colonies had been found, had been settled, disturbingly blank where nothing at all existed. On the rear wall, behind a table designed to hold the entire Government in comfort, was a map of the East, and a bright red circle where Town Central lay, just east of the Allegheny.
Robbins—stocky, his black hair slicked tightly back from a rodent-like face—nodded curtly as Mathew took a seat halfway down the table. Steel was opposite him, winked once and looked away.
“Mathew,” he said, his hands flat on the table in front of him, “there’s no secret about this meeting tonight, but I felt it best we not be bothered by the others. They,” and his smiled was quick, “don’t always understand you. I, at least, know you better.”
Only, Mathew thought in a struggle with anger, because your daughter was my wife; you know nothing more than that.
“The Parrics,” the Chairman continued, somewhat annoyed when Mathew did not respond, “from Franklin to Dorin to your brother and yourself, have given a great deal to ContiGov and its survival. I must be frank in saying, then, that there are some on the Council who don’t think this meeting is therefore altogether fair.”
Not you, though, Mathew answered silently; you have a daughter to avenge, don’t you, old friend. Not to mention the legal means to do it.
“The point is,” Steel interrupted, his voice betraying annoyance, “you know as well as we do, Matt, that we have to get to Quilly before he gets to us. It’s that simple. And of all the people in Central, you’re the one who knows him best.”
“I don’t know him at all,” he said, frowning.
Steel’s breath came out like a shudder. “You know what I mean, Matt, stop the pretending. And we need your advice, more if we can get it. Look, the man we brought down here tonight is an obvious warning that Quilly’s ready to make a move toward us, abandoning his town-by-town campaign in the process. He—”
“You’re guessing,” Mathew interrupted.
“Of course we are,” Robbins said. “But it’s a damned good guess based on a lot of things you’re not privy to. Take Tim’s word for it—Quilly is coming here.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“We told you,” Steel said softly. “Advice.”
Mathew wondered, and in wondering took the time to stare blindly at the map behind Steel’s head. He had thought Robbins would try to wave the Noram banner under his nose, rally him around the sacred flag of preservation, salvation, and some vague destiny of man. He’d decided they’d attempt by their coercion to, as he’d told Orion that long month ago, convert him into a general of sorts; ironical, since being a general would mean he would have to have an army—and there was none, had not been since the world fell apart. Having accomplished that, so his dialogue-dream had gone, they would send him out with some hastily conscripted troops to defeat the rebel. He was off-guard, then. Steel had told him Robbins would demand an answer, not advice.
“Come on,” Robbins insisted.
Mathew glared at him. “All right. All right, then why not take us all—lock to barrel—and head for Philayork. Orion’s got everything going for him there, and the place works. Even the WalkWays are in order, he says. Here, in spite of the fact that you have the domewall, you’re sitting ducks. Mountains, the river … we have just about ten thousand people, counting the children, and that’s not enough, not nearly enough if Quilly wants us as badly as you say he—”
“Out of the question,” Robbins said, with a look to Steel, who nodded confirmation. “We’ve already been through this, Mathew, a dozen times. Steel here is Defense, right? He knows, Matt, he knows. We have a better chance here than in Philayork, by far. If we do go,” he said quickly, as Matt opened his mouth to object, “we’ll be stuck in the Hive. A few square kilometers in the middle of the ’plex, and not much more. We couldn’t get in and out the way we can here. And while the comunit links between us and the rest of the country are active enough, you know we have to see them personally every so often, or we fail in the long run.
“But suppose we do move into the Hive. Then Quilly finds out and he brings in what people he can trust, settles in the Fringes where we have no hope of adequate protection, and he waits us out until we die of old age or something. Guards with weapons on the WalkWay bridges…“ He clapped his hands hard, as though squashing an insect. “Sooner or later, Mathew, sooner or later. It’s a nice thought, but it isn’t practical, isn’t feasible. If you don’t believe me, ask Tim. He’s the one who ran all the comp projections.”
“He’s right, Matt,” Steel said, staring at the ceiling. “It’s safe, and it’s dumb. If we had a couple of hundred more androids … if Zelloche could build us his babies in a week or so, maybe we could fill the gaps. But we haven’t, and he can’t. Tough luck.”
Mathew did not argue, knowing already the answer he would receive, and pleased at least that they’d been considering alternatives.
“All right,” he said then, “if you won’t go to Philayork, and since you don’t have enough trained men to find Quilly, much less beat him on his own terms, then you’ll have to do something else.”
“Good,” Robbins said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm. “Very good, Mathew.”
“Shut up, Harve,” Tim said quietly.
“Look,” Matthew said, “I don’t know why you’re both playing stupid here. You know damned well what you have to do. You have to stop Quilly—”
“Stop him?” Robbins said.
“Come on, Harve, you know damned well what I mean. If you can’t kill Quilly … all right, I said it, are you happy? Kill him. If you can’t kill him with an army you don’t have, then you’re going to have to kill him some other way, aren’t you?”
Steel grinned suddenly and rubbed his palms together. “At last! At last! Lord, we’d been hoping you’d say that, Matt. How nice of you to agree.”
