The Visitor (17 page)

G
eneral Gowl, Over Colonel Bishop Lief Laron, Doctor Jens Ladislav, and Major Mace Marchant–Comador, from Apocanew, were gathered in the officers' dining room late one afternoon, sharing drinks and talking about one thing and another. Also present was Captain James Trublood–Turnaway, an ambitious youngster being proposed by the bishop as an aide to the doctor. The bishop felt there was something twisty and un-Regimic about Colonel Doctor Jens; a certain bull-headed dedication to saving people's lives in the body instead of just bottling them in the interest of efficiency; a certain smiliness that wasn't always appropriate; a lack of respect, and young Captain Trublood seemed an ideal spy to plant on the doctor, particularly inasmuch as he might also make a good husband for one of the bishop's older daughters.

The group was discussing the first “missionary” teams that had already crossed the border to make converts, and the army, which was already stronger than it had been a span or so ago. This turned their thoughts to the existing agreement between the Spared and the demons, which was the only obstacle preventing further action.

“Why don't we just conquer them?” Captain Trublood asked, his face flushed with enthusiasm. “Then we can go out of Bastion whenever we want to!”

“We used to go out whenever we wanted to,” said Major Marchant, reprovingly. “On salvage trips. Then the outsiders started targeting the officers, and none of them made it back. It got to the point that no one wanted to lead salvage expeditions anymore. That's when the demons offered us a deal, and we've more or less stuck with it ever since. They give us the things we need in return for our staying peaceably within Bastion.”

“But now we mean to do more than merely salvage,” the captain said. “We're going to conquer the world. If we're going to do that, we have to conquer the demons first.”

“There's a slight problem,” murmured the doctor. “They happen to be stronger than we are.”

“That's heresy!” exclaimed the captain. “The Rebel Angels are at least as strong as any demons, and they're on our side.”

“While your statement is doctrinally true, young man, it is practically irrelevant,” interrupted the bishop, glancing at the general. “The general has not mentioned any commitments on the part of the angels.”

“What angel was it?” demanded the captain.

The doctor said, reprovingly, “The general met a being who resembled one described by Hal P'Jardas, the discoverer of Bastion. In that case, the being named herself as Tamlar of the Flames. A Lady of the Silences was also mentioned.”

“Angel of the Silences,” corrected the bishop.

“I've never heard about that.” The young captain flushed but held his ground. “What Angel of the Silences?”

It was the doctor who answered. “It's in the Archives, Captain. Look it up under Hal P'Jardas.”

The bishop murmured, “The being didn't call itself an angel. P'Jardas wasn't specific, he just thought it was.”

“Or we thought he thought it was,” murmured the doctor.

“How mysterious,” said the captain, with a slightly sinking feeling. “A little…well, daunting.”

“Yes, I imagine angels could be intimidating—to ordinary men,” murmured the bishop, “but we Spared must remember we are set apart from ordinary men.”

“But when you say we can't be specific…You're not implying angels are an invention?” asked the captain, in a worried voice. “A fiction?”

Major Marchant bridled, saying in a monitory tone, “Of course they're not fictional, Captain…”

“Except,” murmured the doctor, “in the sense that all human discourse upon the supernatural must be, in a sense, fictional. Supernatural creatures are by definition unknowable, and when we start being specific about essentially unknowable beings, we risk being to some extent untruthful. So, we need to be careful in our talk, careful not to say what supernaturals are, how they are named, what they do, or why they do it, because anything we say about them is clearly an assumption. We don't even know if angels are differentiable, one from the other. They may all be aspects of the same thing.”

The bishop snarled silently. Leave it to Jens Ladislav to confuse the troops! He nodded ponderously, his jowls swinging. “It's possible that all angels may be uh…aspects of one being whose name we don't know. But it doesn't matter. The error is…”

“Insubstantial?” offered the doctor, irrepressibly.

“A matter of terminology,” growled the bishop. “Our Dicta teach us that The Art works by invoking angels, and we know that's true because the people who actually do magic always start out by calling on Volian or Hussara or one of the others.” He turned his glare at the young captain who was somewhat losing luster in his eyes. “Does that clarify it?”

Despite being both confused and set back, Captain Trublood held his peace. The conversation returned to the question of the demons.

“I'll meet with a delegation of them,” growled the general. “I'll tell them if they stay out of our way, we won't harm them. If they get in our way, we'll run over them.”

The gathering broke up shortly thereafter leaving Doctor Ladislav and Captain Trublood to go down the stairs together.

“Join me for a drink?” suggested the doctor.

“I'd be honored, sir,” the captain replied. They had already drunk quite enough, but the doctor had a certain look in his eye.

“Tell me, young man,” he said, when they were seated and served in one of the taverns on the ground floor of the Fortress. “What do you and your fellows think about demons?”

“Think, sir? You mean, do we believe?”

“Exactly. Do you believe in demons?”

“Well,” the captain turned his glass somewhat uncertainly. “We do and we don't. Some of us laugh at demons when we're here in the Fortress, but the people who are sent on missionary duty tell me they worry about demons.”

“Have any of the people you've talked to ever seen a demon?”

“No, sir. We know they exist, of course, because we trade with them for chairs and bottles, and we know there are times we face away from certain places because they might be there and if we don't see them, we won't aggress because we have the non-aggression agreement with them.”

The doctor attempted to look sorrowful, succeeding only from the nose up, for his lips could not evert their usual smile. “Here in Bastion a cart loses a wheel and the carter utters an aversive prayer to drive off the demon who broke it. That doesn't fix the wheel, so he calls a local carpenter who probably prays for angelic intervention. That doesn't fix the wheel, either, so he drags it off to a wheelwright, who fixes it without invoking anyone.”

The captain smiled. “Oh, sir, that's just human nature. Angels won't intervene with stuff we can do ourselves. That's in the Dicta.”

“Which is the point. We're getting less and less able to do things for ourselves as we get further and further away from the time when our machines were designed and built. What will happen to our population when we use up the last preserving jars, the last wheels, the last drill bits and metal cog wheels? We don't make steel, we salvage it. We don't make glass, we salvage it, that's why our windows have those tiny
little panes made out of old bottles. So far we've kept going by stealing from the past. What happens when there's nothing left to steal?”

The captain said severely, “What you've just said is totally unorthodox, Colonel Doctor. If I didn't know better, I'd think you'd been touched by Scientism!”

“Ah. Scientism. One of the heresies. How would you define Scientism, Captain?”

“A heretical belief that men once did the things you've mentioned through their own efforts, without angelic assistance. The Dicta teaches us that our ancestors depended upon angels for their power, just as we will when we rediscover The Art.”

“Well, I wouldn't want to be taken for a heretic, Captain, but I'm a physician, and I spend a lot of time learning how to better heal people. A few times when I've been up near the border, I've even met some people who might have been outsiders.”

“Unless you're on a mission for the Regime, that's against standard rules of behavior, sir!”

“It is. Quite right. But the general has been kind enough to overlook it because there are many things we don't known about healing, and some outsiders have known about herbs and cures that really work.” He sighed. “They've kept the general and the bishop alive, as they wouldn't be if I'd stuck to the standard rule of behavior.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but I don't get where this conversation is going!”

“It's not necessarily going anywhere, Captain. If you're going to be my assistant, as Over Colonel Bishop Lief Laron has suggested, I need to know how you feel about things. You already know that even though standard rules of behavior say we're to have no contact with demons, we do get all our Chairs from demons.”

“I know that, yes.” He flushed, started to speak, thought better of it.

“So you acknowledge there are exceptions? Well, from time to time I ruminate on how our lives might be improved
if we made some other slight exceptions. For instance, if we saved some of what we trade for chairs and bottles, couldn't we support a medical school? I've been told they have such schools, out there.”

The captain frowned. “We wouldn't want to copy anything they have out there. Even though the general's vision told him there are Spared people out there, the general population is still mostly heretical or demonic, and they use dark arts. We can't be involved with the dark arts.”

The doctor ruminated for a considerable time before asking, “Don't you think we are involved with dark arts? Some of us? Perhaps only the very trustworthy ones?”

The captain paled. “You're coming close to The Disease, sir. The Spared eschew the dark arts. I learned that in kindergarten. And we don't deal with the outside, because we won't risk the possibility of contagion.”

“The Chairs come from outside.”

“But the Chairs are exemplary and life-ful. We can use imports if they've been made to our order, exemplifying our purity and faith. You know that, you're a doctor!”

“I'm a doctor,” agreed Jens Ladislav, “and I know we've lost a lot of ground. Our maternal death rate is high…”

“But not a single mother dies all at once! Every one who gets in trouble in childbirth gets bottled, doesn't she? And the baby, too.”

“We're unable to do tissue transplants…”

“Then why do we accept organ donations,” the younger man asked, his voice challenging. “Why do we go on accepting organ and limb donations from people with The Disease if we won't be able to use them? We can't use the tissue of the dead. It has to come from the living…” His voice trailed off and he glared at the doctor, his face very pale except for flushed bars across his cheekbones.

“Ah, you see the implications,” murmured the doctor. “Well, there could be a good reason for taking the organs and not using them. Prisons are expensive and the Regime would have to pay for prisons. Cripple a man and he's less
likely to be a troublemaker, and Chairs are a lot cheaper than cells, and the sinner's family pays the expenses.”

“We could execute people even cheaper,” the captain cried. He had had this conversation with backsliders before, but he had not thought he would encounter it in the very precincts of the Hold! “If I may say so, sir, it's startling to me that the general and the bishop will let you bend the rules just to keep themselves alive! A life is a life. Whether it has a body or a mind doesn't matter so long as it's living! The Dicta say it doesn't matter if we live one second in the womb or eighty years here in Bastion or five hundred years in a bottle wall! A life is a life!”

“A few cells,” dismissed the doctor.

“One cell is a human being,” said the captain, quoting Dicta furiously. “The cell is the life, and the life is the soul.”

“You do believe that?” asked the doctor in an interested voice.

“We've known that since the olden days! My family traces its heritage back to a famous warrior who was martyred for shooting demon baby-killers! We Spared Ones know that every fertilized egg is a human person. We've always known that! So, if a single cell egg is a human person, then any living cell out of a person is that person. All the Angels need is the pattern to resurrect the total adult person! That's the reason pious Regimic women bottle their menstrual fluid, because it may have a single cell person in it. That's why we keep cells alive in bottles from every miscarried fetus, every stillborn child…”

His face was red and his voice triumphant, “On the Trek, before we had bottles, we froze everyone we could. When we got here to Bastion, we revived those frozen cells in bottles, and since we've been here, we've kept living cells from everyone so everyone will still be alive when the angels come down and un-bottle us!”

He smiled beatifically, glowing with virtue. “As a good doctor, you should know that better than me.”

The doctor stared at him for a moment, then beamed at him, a sweet, radiant expression of total approval. “Of
course Captain Trublood. I see now what the general meant when he recommended you to me. He said you'd stand up to testing, and he was right! You're unwavering! Good for you.” He smiled again, and clapped the younger man on the shoulder.

The captain cringed as though the blow had been an angry one, his mind scurrying for what he'd said, what he'd implied. So it had all been an exercise? A test? Seemingly so, for the Colonel Doctor was paying for the drinks and bidding an acquaintance good evening. It had been a test. Nonetheless, it was remarkable how sincere the doctor had sounded.

When the doctor shook his hand and bid him good night, the captain thought fleetingly that he, James Trublood, should perhaps report the conversation they had just had. Then again…the doctor outranked him by a good bit. A very, very good bit. And he was being considered as the doctor's aide—well, monitor, for the bishop, either one of which was definitely a step up. No. Best not say anything about it at all. It had been a test, and he'd passed, passed with flags flying, and the best thing to do was put it out of his mind and go on with his duty.