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

the wizard and the war

machine

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

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

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