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But you can find that out from him." His eyelids flickered. "Meanwhile, I am going to leave you two together to talk it out. "Consider that you could arm your weekend warriors and with our most concerted aid ferret out every rebel enchanter remaining on Earth. Of course, you could not cut them into little pieces, or whatever you are used to doing to them, but you would have the satisfaction of deporting them enough to sate Page 136 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html principle, if not passion. Outlaws no longer, your men would benefit, as would these environs. You could lift a state of siege that has persisted for two hundred years. If you turn away from my offer, you turn away from peace and cast your vote for gratuitous violence. "Should you decide in favor of civilization, come to New Chaeronea, anytime, and present yourself at the consulate. I'll make you special adviser to the governor, and you can start rebuilding what you have helped to tear down." Thome just watched as Chaeron retreated without a farewell. Cluny appeared in the arch of the multidrive, and the two stopped and spoke when they met midway. Then the lithe enchanter disappeared into his con- veyance without taking a backward glance and Pope shuffled toward him, taking many. He had not risen, he did not rise. He squatted there while the youth came up and stood over him, and while the multidrive roared up into the sky, taking its false daylight with it. 216 JANET MORRIS "He says you can have all the horses that survived the enkaphalin sorry the sleeping-beam, but not to go down there until the crews come to collect their prisoners." "Cluny . . ." "Thome. . . . Commander, sir, he is right." "And I am wrong?" "Wasn't what I meant, I mean . . . it's over, don't you see? And something else is beginning. With or without us." "Go back with them, if you think that." "I would have. He's assigned me to you, sir, until you give him some statement of intent." An imperfect dark settled down around them, speckled with dancing blues and reds and greens from the bright light's passage, faded into black. Thome welcomed the cover it threw over him, the privacy of anonymity, the room to sort out conflicting emotions he did not want to feel without worrying about how it might appear to Pope. A time later, the youngster said, "I never would have come here if he had told me what he'd planned, but I am glad I did. Jesse, don't choose the old ways- I have seen so much and learned so much that is good and right and honorable that I don't know how to begin to tell you. There is room enough beyond the sky for everything a man could want to be. You can have the best of both worlds, and never take another life. The sibyl told us that you would come to' this, and make a choice for life or a choice for dishonor. Surely, this is that." "Scout, you are too much like your new friends, these days. And I asked her before about her prophecy, and she and I agreed the time had come, then. So I have passed that moment of choosing, and in my heart, fate feels fixed like a barb. Do not press me. I need quiet and time to think and did I not, I still could not hear advice from you and take it well. So stay, or go, but give me silence. I will do what I will do, and when I know it, 1 will let you know it. Until tomorrow, bide, and I will give you an answer to take back to your new-found friends." During the night, he slept not one wink, but watched the airborne crews drop down into the dell and remove all traces of Hooker and his men and their enchanters' EARTH DREAMS 217 Page 137 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html encampment. True to the proconsul's words, no one touched the horse-line. But the gift of horses did not please him, as it might have otherwise. He looked upon the future's minions while they took prisoner the past's once-mighty enchanters, having effortlessly laid low those Jesse had found too powerful to surmount, filling the air with catcalls and jokes and offhand gripes about the number of inflatable and the dead weight of uncon- scious men who must be carried into the waiting vehicles Cluny called "APCs." He felt much too helpless, and too much like a fool. If time were space he would have run back to his begin- nings as fast as his legs could carry him, but not one among the black enchanterbreds just waking on the horse-line and lurching to their feet was fleet enough for that. He cast sidelong glances at Pope, who wore his hopes unhidden and unashamed. It was hard for him to speak at all, but he told the boy to make his choice of horse, and to take his leave. "What word for the proconsul?" the youth astride a high, black back demanded reproachfully, while the horse sneezed foam and danced in place. "Say that I will talk to friends of mine, and come in a month's time with a consensus." "You will not," Pope blurted, his tears nearly over- flowing, his chin quivering. "Even I do not know that. Say what I have said." He walked away before his own heart overflowed, to- ward the horse-line where destiny had given him full measure. With such stock as this, he could run, or fight, or calmly settle down wherever he chose. But there is always a price to pay. In the bright noon light he turned them loose, and en- dured their surprise, their Joy, their realization, where before when he had pulled the nails out of their shoes and pried the metal away from horny hoofs they had snorted distrustfully and tried to bite his neck. He swung up on the one he had chosen to keep, saying to it that he was sorry he could not let it go with the others, but that he would, someday. Then he headed it 218 JANET MORRIS for Bolen's town, the closest place where a man might get drunk enough to steep like the dead. The argument between Penrose and Spry in Acheron's guildhall had gone on for nearly an hour, hot and heated, and showed no sign of abating. Pilots lingered in knots close by and listened to talk full in "inertial" and "accel- erated" frames, but only Baldy dared to interject the ob- vious: "What difference can this make? We have done it. Tyche has " " received messages in sponge from the Marada," Spry interrupted. "The Marada found Hassid in sponge and followed her out of there without a pilot two, no three years ago. Tyche's not proved anything except that the Marada is unique. I don't like these timelike geo- desies and I don't like the fucking geometric extension, and I don't like the goddam a priori assumption beneath it all that time has multiple arrows. The holy universe is complicated enough without canted spacetime manifolds." "Spry, it's simple. It is simpler, and simplest," Rafe groaned, then put forth his two hands so that his ex- tended index fingers formed a cross. He wiggled the lat- eral finger: "Space," then the longitudinal digit; "Time. Any event in sponge can be simultaneous to any thrice- cursed event E according to A, B, or whomsoever, any- Page 138 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |