Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (39 page)

She studied Willam again. “Not to tell you your business,
but shouldn’t you be doing something?”

“It will get hot enough, soon enough,” he said distractedly,
then came back to his surroundings. “Actually, I set up these spells to search
for me. They’re checking the supposedly empty storage spaces for leftover
pieces of records.” Something occurred to him. “But …” He plied his lap panel
again.

Something appeared to his far right, an opaque area three
feet wide by three feet tall. “No, of course”—he seemed annoyed at himself—“the
updates are running. Let’s see if Jannik was looking earlier.”

The dark area flashed into light, and color: mostly white, with
spots and streaks of blue, green, brown, yellow, and at the upper limit, a
ragged section of brick red. “Well, that’s no good—” Something to his left
caught his attention: one of the blocks of letters and numbers had ceased
marching, and changed color from blue to red. Willam turned away from the
complex colors, toward the simple ones. “We’ve got something.” He pulled the
block closer, directly through another section, still marching, which it had
been half tucked behind.

Willam caused a square to appear, close by, its existence
indicated merely by four white lines. This he picked out of the air as casually
as if it were a pane of glass, and held it over the red-lettered section,
moving it here and there. White letters appeared inside the square. “A
fragment,” Will said, “with no date. That’s why the searcher brought it to me
… It looks like a diary.” He read, tilting his head from side to side,
impatient. “Well, someone fell in love … with a truly wonderful man, la, la,
and this does rim on and on, and … it looks like the writer is a woman, so
it’s someone before Kieran.” A few taps at his lap panel, and the red became
blue, and marched once more.

“Did Jannik keep a diary of any sort?”

“If he did, it will show up.” He indicated several of the
blocks. “Those searchers are looking at the unused storage areas, for old
information left behind. These”—he pointed—“are going through the indexed
areas, looking for anything with a date from a month before Kieran died,
through a year afterward. That one,” to his far left, “is looking for the names
of Kieran or Slado, starting from one end of the storage, and the one behind it
is doing the same thing, starting at the other end. Ho.” The second panel
became red. “Let’s see …” Willam pulled it forward.

Rowan found it useful to think of the blocks of letters as
being written on invisible sheets of paper, pinned up on equally invisible
walls, from which Willam would pluck as needed. It was only at this point that
she realized that the invisible walls seemed to rise from the ranked flat
panels of the unfolded desk.

But these pages searched, of themselves, wrote their
findings on themselves, and would call for one’s attention with a change of
color when they found something.

Willam was passing his white-outlined ghost-square over the
red symbols. He made a noise of amusement. “There you
_are.
”

She was not certain what he meant. “Me?”

He nodded, reading through the white square. “From … more
than six years ago. The last time you were here in Donner. Slado’s general
order to find and kill you. Jannik’s reply, that you were here, and he’d take
care of it.” He looked wry. “Slado sounds very annoyed.”

She wanted to know his words, exactly; but something caught
her attention. “Dragon.”

He looked up. “I don’t see it.”

“Just for a moment. That one.” She indicated, bringing her
fingertip a fraction of an inch from the relevant square. She could not bring
herself to touch it. “I saw a scene, briefly. Shapes moving, in darkness.” She found
it useful to think of a little window that had rapidly opened on a distant
view, then immediately closed.

Will was disturbed. “He found a jammer, with no others operating
nearby at the moment. Then another must have activated, almost right away. This
is going too slow.” He checked his searchers. “There’s a lot of storage to go
through. But if I make any more searchers, they’ll start tripping over each
other …”

He sat back, now tense. He glanced about, found nothing he
could do; then his eye fell on the large square on his right, where the
blotches of random colors still shone. “Well, let’s make sure it’s not a
complete waste of time.” His fingers moved on his lap panel; the colors altered
in flashes, over and over. “It must have been clear sometime …”

Almost simultaneously, three pages of words turned red. Will
turned away from the square of random colors. “We’ve got something, from the
fragments.” He pulled one of the pages forward. “It looks like words,” he said,
as if this would disappoint him. “Numbered lines, and lots of spaces.” Rowan
could see nothing of the sort, but Wiliam pulled the small white outline over
it, which Rowan decided to think of as a magical glass that would translate
from one language to another.

Unfortunately, gazing through the dragon lattice, through
the back of the page of red words, and through the back of the translator, at
words written backward, Rowan could not make sense of the odd-shaped letters.

“No good,” Willam said. “A list. Something to do with flower
bulbs.” The letters went blue again, and walked up the page. Two more pages had
gone red, waiting for Willam’s attention. He reached for the nearest, but then
noticed one of the farther ones. “There!” He stood. “I recognize that command.”
He plucked the page out of the air, remained standing. He did not use the
translator, as if this were too urgent to bother with it. He read directly,
blue light on his face. “Override—that’s a command that means, ‘Stop everything
else you’re doing, and only pay attention to this …’”

Rowan waited. Wiliam nodded slightly, then more definitely,
talking as if to himself. “Override, there, yes … And shut down, and shut
down … Delayed command, I don’t know that one, but it’s asking for a lot of
power …” He sat, on the edge of the wizard’s chair, reading eagerly. “Time to
execution … and close all communication …” He looked up at her.

“Would you like to know the exact second the Guidestar was
called down?”

She said, with feeling, “Very much.”

“At fourteen hundred thirty-eight, and twenty-three seconds.
On the two hundred and forty-first day of the year. This is Slado, bringing
down the Guidestar.”

“A record of that event?”

“A record of the orders he used …” He began to set the
block of letters aside; but then stopped short, raised his brows. “Do you know
… ,” he said, suddenly amazed, “if I had the right clearance … If I had the
right clearance, I could bring one down myself, now.” He recovered, studied the
page again, closely. “What’s just before this … ?” He read, became disappointed.
“Broken off. Just a fragment.” He gave the page a shove and released it; it
drifted up and back, then came to a stop high above the others, as if looking
down on them, waiting. Willam turned his attention to another searcher.

For no reason Rowan could identify, this action caused her
mood of acceptance to waver. For a moment, the crossing red lines through which
she watched seemed solid, like the bars of a cage; the floating blocks of
letters beyond, and now above, inexplicable and threatening; the man in the
center, with his skin and white hair painted blue and red in the strange light,
not only a stranger, but stranger than that, a chimera called forth by some
magic spell—something, perhaps, other than completely human.

Something now possessing the knowledge to call down a Guidestar.

Power may move by the numbers; but the human spirit did not.

Nonsense. This was Willam.

She tried to recapture her mood of but a moment before.

These lights—truly, they
were
beautiful, purer and richer than any colors she had seen before,
their arrangement clean, a visible embodiment of the mathematics that must lie
beneath them

But it remained too strange to see such clarity and purity
anywhere other than within her own mind.

She found her gaze drifting toward the large, multicolored
square on Willam’s right. Its randomness seemed more natural, its colors
soothing. The blue, especially, seemed lovely, restful, almost calling to her
in a voice she thought she knew. A swirl of brown specks within one blue area
pleased her, as well

She stopped short. She stared.

Eventually, she said, in a voice sounding distant to
herself: “Do you have time for a question?”

“A short one,” Will replied, half under his breath as he
worked.

“Am I looking at the world?”

He looked up. Then he looked at the square, then back at
her. He said, gently, “Yes. Yes, you are.”

Wulfshaven was obscured by clouds, but the sweep of the Islands,
in a patch of clear, glittering sea, indicated it. Donner was a glimpse of
shoreline, Southport invisible, as was the Dolphin Stair.

The Western Mountains were a riot of browns under thin mist,
twisted, seeming a pause in some ancient violence. The upper branches of the
River Wulf emerged from the cloud cover, reaching toward their sources. In the
far north, the Red Desert was cloudless, and as flat and featureless as Rowan
remembered it, small arms of green farms encroaching its edges, with a few
sunlit flickers of irrigation.

All foreshortened, not like a map at all, but exactly as
seen by an eye hanging high in the sky.

She matched the angles. “The Eastern Guidestar.”

“Mm.” Willam had several red blocks waiting for him; he dismissed
them after a brief glance, one after the other. “I’m sorry I can’t find better
weather for you, but Jannik only stored today’s view. Do you want an overlay?”

She heard herself say, distantly, “I don’t know that word
…”

He replied by playing his fingers across his lap board; thin
lines appeared across the view, outlining details the steerswoman already knew
by heart. She gazed, scarcely daring to breathe.

“I’m going to give you the Western Guidestar,” he said, casually,
as if the star itself could be presented as a gift. Then, apologetically: “The
change might make you dizzy.”

It did not. But it showed her parts of the world no steerswoman
or member of the common folk had ever seen.

Familiar parts of the world were slanted, compressed by perspective.
The black outline of lands below the cloud remained, speaking to her with the
logic of geography: mountains, here, with rivers twisting between; a collection
of round lakes, like jewels from a broken necklace, their spill arcing across
the land. And beyond, far to the west, under the clouds, an outline ragged and
brutal, with nothing beyond—an ocean?

The steerswoman tried to burn the view into her mind, to reconstruct
later, but then: “Dragons.”

Will stopped short. He seemed a bit out of breath. “How
many?” But he saw for himself. “Oh …” Seven adjacent dragon eyes showed tiny
night scenes. “Wait …” They winked out, as if little shutters had come down
on little windows.
OUT OF RANGE,
the
shutters read.

“That’s not good … ,” Willam said.

“How many jammer-spells altogether?”

“Thirty.” Willam was disturbed.

“And you have no way, even from here, of knowing how many
remain?”

“No.” Four of his searcher pages needed attention. He
returned to them, but kept glancing up at the dragon eyes.

Rowan did not want to interrupt his work, and waited before
speaking further. In the interim, Will puzzled over the searchers without using
the translator, selected two, sent them to join the one hanging high above, and
set the others back to their work. Rowan said, in the pause: “Did you use any
sort of pattern in arranging the jammers?”

Will grew still, and quiet. “No … ,” he said; but it was
with deep uncertainty. “I tried to be random—”

“You can’t have been random.” A truly random arrangement
could not

She struggled a moment. She had not had a real grip on the
phenomenon of the jammers. They each had a range, she had been told; but range
of sight, range of sound—these she understood. An object could block sound, and
sight; but Will had said “coverage …”

She thought of the wizard’s green umbrella, made huge, a
half a kilometer across, with its handle rooted to the ground.

Then multiplied: thirty of them, crowded together, some
folded, some open, with edges overlapping, creating solid shade beneath. Then
some disappearing, suddenly; and some of the folded ones opening …

How many to maintain full coverage?

“Will, the jammers are not arranged randomly.” The constraints
of the problem delimited the solution. “And there’s more than one way to
discern organization.”

“Like you did in the dragon fields.” He thought, displeased,
then became more confident. “No. Rowan, Jannik is nowhere near as smart as you
are. He’s not even as smart as I am!

He probably doesn’t use a tenth of what he has here, and he
couldn’t do what I’m doing, working behind the interface. I think … I think
he was just lucky for a moment.”

“Then let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be his lucky day.”
He looked around at his searching pages. “All right; let them trip over each
other.”

He caused more to appear, dozens. They stood tucked behind
each other, crowding the air around him: bright butterflies of light hovering,
as if in a frozen moment of time, magic words moving on their wings.

Willam worked; Rowan watched. When she became overwhelmed by
strangeness, she turned her gaze to the view of the world.

With more searchers, Willam was busier, correcting them when
they became confused. Or so she assumed; she did not interrupt to ask. But at
one point, he did something that caused numbers to appear at the top edge of
the dragon eyes, and indicated them to her silently. She watched them and soon
decided that they represented the remaining time to the end of what Willam had
called the “updates.”