Zima Blue and Other Stories (35 page)
'You have never spoken of proctors before,' Malkoha replied.
'Small mechanical puppets. They have very little intelligence of their own, so they won't be able to help you with anything creative. But you needn't be alarmed by them.'
'In twenty years, must we wake you?'
'No, the ship will take care of that as well. When the time comes, the ship will allow you aboard. I may be a little groggy at first, but I'm sure you'll make allowances.'
'I may not be around in twenty years,' Malkoha said gravely. 'I am sixty years old now.'
'I'm sure there's still life left in you.'
'If we should encounter a problem, a crisis--'
'Listen to me,' Merlin said, with sudden emphasis. 'You need to understand one very important thing. I am not a god. My body is much the same as yours, our lifespans very similar. That's the way we did things in the Cohort: immortality through our deeds, rather than flesh and blood. The frostwatch casket can give me a few dozen years beyond a normal human lifespan, but it can't give me eternal life. If you keep waking me, I won't live long enough to help you when things get really tough. If there is a crisis, you can knock on the ship three times. But I'd urge you not to do so unless things are truly dire.'
'I will heed your counsel,' Malkoha said.
'Work hard. Work harder than you've ever dreamed possible. Time is going to eat up those seventy years faster than you can blink.'
'I know how quickly time can eat years, Merlin.'
'I want to wake to rockets and jet aircraft. Anything less, I'm going to be a disappointed man.'
'We will do our best not to let you down. Sleep well, Merlin. We will take care of you and your ship, no matter what happens.'
Merlin said farewell to Malkoha. When the ship was sealed up he settled himself into the frostwatch casket and commanded
Tyrant
to put him to sleep.
Tyrant
to put him to sleep.
He didn't dream.
Nobody he recognised was there to greet Merlin when he returned to consciousness. Were it not for their uniforms, which still carried a recognisable form of the Skylanders' crescent emblem, he could easily believe that he had been abducted by forces from the surface. His visitors crowded around his open casket, faces difficult to make out, his eyes watering against the sudden intrusion of light.
'Can you understand me, Merlin?' asked a woman, with a firm clear voice.
'Yes,' he said, after a moment in which it seemed as if his mouth was still frozen. 'I understand you. How long have I--'
'Twenty years, just as you instructed. We had no cause to wake you.'
He pushed himself from the casket, muscles screaming into his brain with the effort. His vision sharpened by degrees. The woman studied him with a cool detachment. She snapped her fingers at someone standing behind her and then passed Merlin a blanket. 'Put this around you,' she said.
The blanket had been warmed. He wrapped it around himself with gratitude, and felt some of the heat seep into his old bones. 'That was a long one,' he said, his tongue moving sluggishly, making him slur his words. 'We don't usually spend so long in frostwatch.'
'But you're alive and well.'
'So it would seem.'
'We've prepared a reception area in the compound. There's food and drink, a medical team waiting to look at you. Can you walk?'
'I can try.'
Merlin tried. His legs buckled under him before he reached the door. They would regain strength in time, but for now he needed help. They must have anticipated his difficulties, because a wheelchair was waiting at the base of
Tyrant
's boarding ramp, accompanied by an orderly to push it.
Tyrant
's boarding ramp, accompanied by an orderly to push it.
'Before you ask,' the woman said, 'Malkoha is dead. I'm sorry to have to tell you this.'
Merlin had grown to think of the old man as his only adult friend on Lecythus, and had been counting on his being there when he returned from frostwatch. 'When did he die?'
'Fourteen years ago.'
'Force and wisdom. It must be like ancient history to you.'
'Not to all of us,' the woman said sternly. 'I am Minla, Merlin. It may be fourteen years ago, but there isn't a day when I don't remember my father and wish he was still with us.'
As he was being propelled across the apron, Merlin looked up at the woman's face and compared it against his memories of the little girl he had known twenty years ago. At once he saw the similarity and knew that she was telling the truth. In that moment he felt the first visceral sense of the time that had passed.
'You can't imagine how odd this makes me feel, Minla. Do you remember me?'
'I remember a man I used to talk to in a room. It was a long time ago.'
'Not to me. Do you remember the stone?'
She looked at him oddly. 'The stone?'
'You asked your father to give it to me, when I was due to leave Lecythus.'
'Oh, that thing,' Minla said. 'Yes, I remember it now. It was the one that belonged to Dowitcher.'
'It's very pretty. You can have it back if you like.'
'Keep it, Merlin. It doesn't mean anything to me now, just as it shouldn't have meant anything to my father. I'm embarrassed to have given it to you.'
'I'm sorry about Malkoha.'
'He died well, Merlin. Flying another hazardous mission for us, in very bad weather. This time it was our turn to deliver medicine to our allies. We were now making antibiotics for all the land masses in the Skyland Alliance, thanks to the process you gave us. My father flew one of the last consignments. He made it to the other land mass, but his plane was lost on the return trip.'
'He was a good man. I only knew him a short while, but I think it was enough to tell.'
'He often spoke of you, Merlin. I think he hoped you might teach him more than you did.'
'I did what I could. Too much knowledge would have overwhelmed you: you wouldn't have known where to start, or how to put the pieces together.'
'Perhaps you should have trusted us more.'
'You said you had no cause to wake me. Does that mean you made progress?'
'Decide for yourself.'
He followed Minla's instruction. The area around
Tyrant
was still recognisable as the old military compound, with many of the original buildings still present, albeit enlarged and adapted. But most of the dirigible docking towers were gone, as had most of the dirigibles themselves. Ranks of new aircraft now occupied the area where the towers and airships had been, bigger and heavier than anything Merlin had seen before. The swept-back geometry of their wings, the angle of the leading edge, the rakish curve of their tailplanes all owed something to the shape of
Tyrant
in atmospheric-entry mode. Clearly the natives had been more observant than he'd given them credit for. Merlin knew he shouldn't have been surprised; he'd given them the blueprints for the jet turbine, after all. But it was still something of a shock to see his plans made concrete, so closely to the way he had imagined it.
Tyrant
was still recognisable as the old military compound, with many of the original buildings still present, albeit enlarged and adapted. But most of the dirigible docking towers were gone, as had most of the dirigibles themselves. Ranks of new aircraft now occupied the area where the towers and airships had been, bigger and heavier than anything Merlin had seen before. The swept-back geometry of their wings, the angle of the leading edge, the rakish curve of their tailplanes all owed something to the shape of
Tyrant
in atmospheric-entry mode. Clearly the natives had been more observant than he'd given them credit for. Merlin knew he shouldn't have been surprised; he'd given them the blueprints for the jet turbine, after all. But it was still something of a shock to see his plans made concrete, so closely to the way he had imagined it.
'Fuel is always a problem,' Minla said. 'We have the advantage of height, but little else. We rely on our scattered allies on the ground, together with raiding expeditions to Shadowland fuel bunkers.' She pointed to one of the remaining airships. 'Our cargo dirigibles can lift fuel all the way back to the Skylands.'
'Are you still at war?' Merlin asked, though her statement rather confirmed it.
'There was a ceasefire shortly after my father's death. It didn't last long.'
'You people could achieve a lot more if you pooled your efforts,' Merlin said. 'In seventy - make that fifty - years, you'll be facing collective annihilation. It isn't going to make a damned bit of difference what flag you're saluting.'
'Thank you for the lecture. If it means so much to you, why don't you fly down to the other side and talk to them?'
'I'm an explorer, not a diplomat.'
'You could always try.'
Merlin sighed heavily. 'I did try once. Not long after I left the Cohort . . . there was a world named Exoletus, about the same size as Lecythus. I thought there might be something on Exoletus connected with my quest. I was wrong, but it was reason enough to land and try to talk to the locals.'
'Were they at war?'
'Just like you lot. Two massive power blocs, chemical weapons, the works. I hopped from hemisphere to hemisphere, trying to play the peacemaker, trying to knock their heads together to make them see sense. I laid the whole cosmic perspective angle on them: how there was a bigger universe out there, one they could be a part of if they only stopped squabbling. How they were going to have to be a part of it whether they liked it or not when the Huskers came calling, but if they could only be ready for that--'
'It didn't work.'
'I made things twenty times worse. I caught them at a time when they were inching towards some kind of ceasefire. By the time I left, they were going at it again hell for leather. Taught me a valuable lesson, Minla. It isn't my job to sprinkle fairy dust on a planet and get everyone to live happily ever after. No one gave me the toolkit for that. You have to work these things out for yourselves.'
She looked only slightly disappointed. 'So you'll never try again?'
'Burn your fingers once, you don't put them into the fire twice.'
'Well,' Minla said, 'before you think too harshly of us, it was the Skylands that took the peace initiative in the last ceasefire.'
'So what went wrong?'
'The Shadowlands invaded one of our allied surface territories. They were interested in mining a particular ore, known to be abundant in that area.'
Depressed as he was by news that the war was still rumbling on, Merlin forced his concentration back onto the larger matter of preparations for the catastrophe. 'You've done well with these aircraft. Doubtless you'll have gained expertise in high-altitude flight. Have you gone transonic yet?'
'In prototypes. We'll have an operational squadron of supersonic aircraft in the air within two years, subject to fuel supplies.'
'Rocketry?'
'That too. It's probably easier if I show you.'
Minla let the orderly wheel him into one of the compound buildings. A long window ran along one wall, overlooking a larger space. Though the interior had been enlarged and re-partitioned, Merlin still recognised the tactical room. The old wall-map, with its cumbersome push-around plaques, had been replaced by a clattering electromechanical display board. Operators wore headsets and sat at desks behind huge streamlined machines, their grey metal cases ribbed with cooling flanges. They were staring at small flickering slate-blue screens, whispering into microphones.
Minla removed a tranche of photographs from a desk and passed them to Merlin for his inspection. They were black and white images of the Skyland air mass, shot from increasing altitude, until the curve of Lecythus's horizon became pronounced.
'Our sounding rockets have penetrated to the very edge of the atmosphere, ' Minla said. 'Our three-stage units now have the potential to deliver a tactical payload to any unobstructed point on the surface.'
'What would count as a "tactical payload"?' Merlin asked warily.
'It's academic. I'm merely illustrating the progress we've made in your absence.'
'I'm cheered.'
'You encouraged us to make these improvements,' Minla said, chidingly. 'You can hardly blame us if we put them to military use in the meantime. The catastrophe - as you've so helpfully pointed out - is still fifty years in the future. We have our own affairs to deal with in the meantime.'
'I wasn't trying to create a war machine. I was just giving you the stepping stones you needed to get into space.'
'Well, as you can doubtless judge for yourself, we still have some distance to go. Our analysts say that we'll have a natural satellite in orbit within fifteen years, maybe ten. Definitely so by the time you wake from your next bout of sleep. But that's still not the same as moving fifty thousand people out of the system, or however many it needs to be. For that we're going to need more guidance from you, Merlin.'
'You seem to be doing very well with what I've already given you.'
Minla's tone, cold until then, softened perceptibly. 'We'll get you fed. Then the doctors would like to look you over, if only for their own notebooks. We're glad to have you back with us, Merlin. My father would have been so happy to see you again.'
'I'd like to have spoken with him again.'
After a moment, Minla said: 'How long will you stay with us, before you go back to sleep again?
'Months, at least. Maybe a year. Long enough to be sure that you're on the right track, and that I can trust you to make your own progress until I'm awake again.'
'There's a lot we need to talk about. I hope you have a strong appetite for questions.'
'I have a stronger appetite for breakfast.'
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