The Dreamtrails (74 page)

“If it is, then they are clearly winning,” I said grimly. “For rebels would not torch the city.”

“It might be the Raider,” Seely suggested. “Maybe Ariel convinced him to bring some more Hedra from the camp in Norseland, and they sailed across the strait to attack the rebels.”

I considered her suggestion seriously, but at length I shook my head. My instincts told me that Yarrow had been right:
Ariel had severed his connection with the Faction when he had abandoned Herder Isle.

“Do you think the gypsy will make it across the river?” Alun asked.

I studied the billows of smoke and envisaged Iriny flitting between the tents and soldierguard patrols to slip silently into the dark water. “If anyone could manage, she will. But my concern is that if she does cross, she might be leaping from the pan into the cook fire if there are Hedra on the other bank, for the Faction has no love for gypsies.”

I
T WAS WELL
past midday before I returned to the Beforetime complex. Seely had gone back down earlier to let Dell know what I had learned, but I had wanted to try to contact Merret again. I had not managed it, however, even when Kader appeared to take the watch from Alun and allowed me to draw on him.

Puzzled and uneasy about what might be going on over the river, I went below with Alun. As we descended the metal steps, he said with cheerful relish that we ought to arrive in time to sample one of Dell’s delicious midmeal soups. I raised my eyebrows. Many futuretellers at Obernewtyn had chosen domestic tasks to busy their bodies and leave their minds free, but the meals they prepared were invariably bland or peculiarly spiced.

Dell laughed at my expression when I stepped from the elevating chamber into a large, pleasant room that smelled deliciously of the soup she was pouring into a tureen. “I have learned to like cooking and to enjoy doing it well,” she said.

“You have changed,” I could not help saying as she ladled me a bowl of soup and pushed a platter of thickly sliced, fragrant hot bread toward me.

“Our time of exile has changed all of us here,” Dell said seriously. “I think we have become closer than people of different guilds do at Obernewtyn, because danger always
seems to stalk us, and we rely on no one but ourselves.” She changed the subject then, questioning me closely about what Merret had told me.

I concluded by saying I would try again to reach Merret in an hour, for surely by then she would have garnered some useful information and be heading back in our direction.

The elevating chamber doors opened, and Blyss ushered in a flock of boys and girls. Realizing these must be the Misfit children Dell had mentioned earlier, I smiled as they approached and touched their minds lightly to confirm their Talents. The futureteller gave each of them bread and soup and bade Blyss and Alun help themselves. Then she untied her apron and laid it aside, excusing herself and asking me to join her once I had finished my meal. I was puzzled that she had not stayed to eat with us, but then Blyss introduced me to Pellis, who had a startling shock of carrot-colored hair sticking out in all directions. At twelve, he was older than the other children he introduced, who ranged from ten to four.

In normal circumstances, I would have drawn their stories from them, but I was anxious to farseek Merret again, and before I could do that, I would have to see Dell, which made me uneasy. The moment Blyss had finished her soup, I asked her to take me to the futureteller. It was odd, I thought as we entered the elevating chamber. I had felt perfectly comfortable with Dell the cook, but now I feared an interview with Dell the Futuretell guilden.

My discomfort with futuretellers centered upon the fact that, while Atthis had warned me never to speak of my quest, futuretellers often dreamed of it in a fragmentary way, which inevitably led to questions I could not or would not answer. The Futuretell guildmistress, Maryon, had more than once referred
obliquely to my quest, but she had never spoken of it outright to me. Indeed, she had seemed to understand the importance of not speaking of it. But Dell was second in rank and skill to the guildmistress, and Maryon might have discussed me with her before Dell had left for the west coast. Perhaps she had made up her mind to abandon any squeamishness about my quest.
What would I do
, I wondered,
if she asked me about it directly?
And yet was there any need to remain silent with her when Atthis had drawn Dell into a spirit merge with Maruman, Gahltha, and others in order to save me?

As she led me along a yellow-lit hall on the building’s thirtieth level, Blyss broke into my thoughts. “The Futuretell guilden cooks, but she never eats her meals in the great hall. She prefers to eat alone in Sanctuary. I think you will see why.”

“What is sanctuary?” I asked.

She gave me a shy smile. “It is better for you to see Sanctuary rather than have someone tell you about it. But it is also what we call this complex now. Sanctuary, for it has proven so to us, and it was created in the first place to be a sanctuary for the Beforetimers.”

I wanted to say that it had not served them well since almost no one had managed to get there before the Great White destroyed their world, but it would have been harsh to say. I glanced at Blyss again, and she was smiling softly. I contemplated asking about her relationship with Merret but decided it was none of my business and turned my attention to my surroundings.

The corridor we had entered on this level was smooth and bare, like all those I had passed along in the Beforetime
complex, but unlike the rest, it curved, and now that I thought about it, there was something odd about the yellowish light flooding the passage.

I had just realized that, instead of coming from both walls, the light here came only from the inside wall of the curving passage, when suddenly that wall became transparent. I stopped abruptly, astonished to see trees growing on the other side of the glass! The more I looked, the more I realized that it was not just a few trees in some sort of underground garden. There were more trees behind the ones I had seen first and more beyond them. I was looking at a forest, and astoundingly, above the trees was a blue sky!

“Come, there is a door just along here,” Blyss urged. She touched the transparent wall, and like the door to the elevating chamber, the glass split open and the intoxicating scent of hot greenery and damp rich earth flowed over me.

“Welcome to Sanctuary,” Blyss said, clearly enjoying my reaction.

“What is this? H-how …?” I stammered.

Blyss shook her head and smiled. “Let Dell explain.” She pointed to a track weaving away from the opening in the glass and through the trees. I followed the empath along it, feeling as if I had stepped into a dream. After we had been walking long enough for me to feel warm, I realized that things were not quite as natural as they seemed. There were no bird or animal cries, nor the sound of insects, and there was not a breath of wind. The light, which seemed at first to be so like sunlight, was too yellow, quite aside from the fact that there was no sun. The light emanated from the blueness, which, I realized after my first shock, must be the blue-painted roof of an immense cavern.

“Here,” said Blyss triumphantly, and I saw that the path
ended in a clearing at the open door of a small dome-shaped hut half obscured by foliage. “This is where Dell spends most of her time,” Blyss added.

As we came closer, I saw that the hut was not a rounded dome but merely many sided. It had only two rather small windows, one on either side of the door, and when we entered, I saw why. Shelves that groaned under the weight of hundreds of books covered the other walls, and on a table in the center of the room sat an enormous computermachine. A chair faced it, but Dell sat in a more comfortable-looking chair beside the window.

Hearing us enter, she rose with a smile, saying softly, “Thank you, Blyss.” It was a dismissal, and Blyss smiled at me and withdrew.

“How did you do all this?” I cried the moment we were alone.

The futureteller burst out laughing. “Of course,
I
did not do this. It was here when we came; it is a living seed store, maintained by Ines. But I should not laugh. My own astonishment was great when I first came here, though Ines had told me what to expect. I thought I was misunderstanding her.”

“Jak told me about you and Ines,” I said.

Again she laughed. “You make it sound like a love affair.”

“You used not to laugh so much,” I said, rather foolishly.

This rendered the futureteller serious. “You spoke before of change, and I have been thinking of your words. True, I have become less … somber than I was at Obernewtyn. I have noticed it in myself. I will not go back, even if that turns out to be possible. I belong here now.”

“Here?” I said in disbelief.

She nodded. “There is enough in this complex to bewitch
the mind for several lifetimes. Jak feels the same. For him it is the information and the laboratories, and for me, it is Ines.”

“You speak of a computermachine as a person.”

Dell sat down at the seat behind the computermachine and bade me draw up a chair. “I think of Ines as something that lives. In some way, our relationship has an element of a beastspeaker and beast in that the two communicate but are essentially different kinds. Because of that, there will always be gaps in their understanding of one another. The secret of harmony is to accept those gaps.”

“Jak says you believe that you can make the computermachine let you enter forbidden areas of its …” I stopped, groping for a suitable word.

“Her program,” Dell said. “A computermachine is only a machine. The program is what allows her to think. It is the mind that inhabits the plast and metal body. But as for
making
Ines tell us the secrets she is keeping, that simply would not be possible. The forbidding is built into her programming just as the instinct not to jump off a cliff is built into us. However, while we could be forced off a cliff, Ines cannot be forced to go against her programming. But she might be brought to reason well enough to see that her program needs to adapt and grow.”

“Do you really think it is possible for a machine to change its mind?”

“What I know,” Dell said, “is that Ines can learn. That is part of her programming. The whole time we have been here, she has been teaching me, but she is also taking in what I tell her as new knowledge, which can be compared to old knowledge. She is changing me, but in a sense, I am also changing her.” Dell lost her lecturing tone and said with a sudden, almost
girlish, burst of excitement, “Elspeth, you cannot imagine what Ines knows of the Beforetime.”

“Then she knows about the Great White?” I asked, suddenly aware that Ines might know the location of the computermachines that had caused it.

But Dell shook her head. “I asked about the Great White, but the last thing she remembers before my waking her is the command her human user gave to put herself to sleep. That is not the same as being switched off. All of the lesser computermachines that she can manipulate continued following their programs, but there was no mastermind. Think of our hearts pumping and our lungs breathing while our mind sleeps.” Dell smiled. “Jak accessed the lesser computermachines not long after we arrived, but Ines woke only after I spoke her name and bade her wake.”

“What made you think of doing it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I do not know. The letters scribed upon her formed a name, so I got into the habit of thinking of the computermachine as a female. Then one day I was thinking of that storysong that Miky and Angina made about a sleeping princess, and it suddenly seemed to me that the computer was like a sleeping princess. Some mad impulse made me command her to wake and speak to me. I did not expect her to answer, and when she did, I near fell over with shock.” She chuckled. “Of course, if she had truly been switched off, as the Beforetimers say, it would have been like trying to waken a dead person.”

“Why was she made to sleep? Does she know?”

“She knows that before she was put to sleep, she was cut off from the other Ines programs. There were many computermachines in the Beforetime with the Ines program. Because
they could all learn and adapt to what they learned, that might mean they are all different, with different information from different human controllers. But they were all linked as well. Indeed, that was their virtue and their specialty. They linked and were able to share information. So what one knew, all knew. This made them incredibly accurate and knowledgeable, but also identical. Then, just before the Great White, all the Ines programs were isolated from one another. That is when
this
Ines, and I suppose all the other computers with Ines programs, became unique, for after this time, they learned and thought alone. Ines does not know why the links between them were blocked, but she says that only Govamen had the power to close down their etherlink.”