Gatefather (37 page)

“We'll enter separately,” said Wad.

“I'll enter clinging to your arm like a newlywed,” said Hermia, “or I'll simply appear in the middle of the room.”

“You have some need to make everyone look at you?”

“They'll look at me no matter what I do. I only want them to look at you as well. But think, Loki. If we look like young lovers, who will come up and bother us, or even try to listen in? Nobody wants to hear the sweet stupidities of young lovers. Married couples don't become interesting till they've wished each other dead a few times.”

“I'm fairly sure I never married back in my previous life,” said Wad. “I wonder if that way of thinking formed part of my reasoning. I hope not.”

“You mean your memories are still foggy?”

“Living inside a tree for a millennium and a half does odd things to your mind,” said Wad.

“If you know you're mentally defective, I wonder why you've appointed yourself the policeman of Westil,” said Hermia.

“I'm not so unambitious,” said Wad. “Fifteen centuries ago, I appointed myself the policeman of Westil
and
Mittlegard.”

“Declared everyone guilty and sentenced them to perpetual imprisonment on their home world.”

“Weakening the mages was good for everybody, mage
and
drowther.”

“Birds are always happier with their wings broken.”

“It wasn't
their
wings,” said Wad.

“Nor yours,” said Hermia. “But I know the real reason for keeping the worlds apart, and I wonder if you're even right.”

“Confining Set to one world instead of two was a great improvement.”

“I'm sure you're right,” said Hermia. “But the two worlds are far from equal. Mittlegard has billions of people. I doubt there's been a census, but I get the impression that the low population density brings Westil to, at most, two hundred million.”

“Possibly twice that,” said Wad. “There are places with far larger populations than Y or Ny.”

“But either way, it amounts to a small percentage of the population of Mittlegard, where agriculture has been mechanized and fertilized, with enhanced seeds and plants that bear far more fruit, and an atmosphere lush with carbon dioxide so the plants will grow. Six billion.”

“I have visited Mittlegard,” said Wad. “Even before the closing of the gates, Mittlegard was more prosperous and sustained a larger population. We didn't have the science to measure, but I think our habitable land mass is markedly smaller.”

“So my question, Loki,” said Hermia, “is a simple one. Why is it that the world with Set in it is far richer, larger, more populous, more advanced, more
powerful
than the world that you have kept pure.”

“You tell
me
,” said Wad. “You know the history of your world. How much death and suffering have the people endured?”

Hermia nodded to concede the point. “When you have a larger population, then cruelty can touch larger numbers of people. Thirty million die in one country, because the ruler wants to rid himself of troublesomely independent kulaks. Six million die in another, because the ruler has conceived a mad hatred for people he thinks pernicious and dangerous. Three million in a much smaller country, to eliminate all those who know how to make money from trade instead of agriculture. And then the wars. But I know that Westil also has wars, and if fewer people suffer and die, isn't that only because nations have fewer people to begin with?”

“That's what I think you don't understand,” said Wad. “There have been devastating wars. The vast desert of Dapnu Dap was created by the sandmages who finally defeated the manmages of Ethue Dappa. It was a terrible price to pay, but since then, warfare has been rare, and mostly between mages.”

“You can't tell me that soldiers and sailors don't die in these wars.”

“They do,” said Wad. “But such losses are rare and relatively few. That isn't all, though. Slavery is unknown here, partly because owning another person smacks of manmagery, and partly because when there are gatemages, it's hard to keep slaves confined to one place. It is almost unheard of for anyone to mistreat a child, and when it happens, the punishment from the neighbors is swift and sure.”

“Really?” asked Hermia. “Death?”

“No,” said Wad. “For the first offense, a Wingbrother might bring his heartbound to peck out an eye. For the second offense, the person loses his children, his wife, his place in the village. He goes one-eyed out into the world to make his way, where he'll have no children within his power. But Hermia, you won't conceive of how rare this is. Because in Westil, even though people have all the same weaknesses and harmful impulses as in Mittlegard, they don't have the Sutahites constantly prodding them, making them think obsessively of their dark desires. Whatever evil they do comes from
them
, not the servants of Set working to undo all the ties that hold people together as friends and neighbors.”

“But how do you know that the Sutahites are the cause, or that bringing Set to Westil would be so terrible? Think what the lack of gates has done to all the mages of both worlds, all because you fear something that may not be all that terrible.”

“I saw the difference between the worlds back when their levels of technology were more nearly the same,” said Wad. “I had a century and more to study the situation, to see how the Semitic religions brought Sutahites to ever greater power and influence. They might call Set the devil, or Satan, or Lucifer, but it was the Sutahites who most readily answered their prayers, prompting them to do this or that terrible thing. I knew what I was doing when I did it.”

“But you Westilian mages, you Indo-European gods,” said Hermia, “look at the terrible things
you
did.”

Wad knew he could not relieve her ignorance in the little time they would have together. But still he had to try. “Hermia,” he said, “the Eddas, the Upanishads, the Iliad, all the writings about the deeds of the Mithermages—they weren't written by
us
. They were written by drowthers who thought we were immortal, who thought we had far more control over the natural world than we really do. They thought we cared what happened to drowthers, that some ignorant ‘mortal' could provoke a war among the gods. We
could
have meddled far more than we did, and we would have,
if we had cared
.”

Hermia looked thoughtful. “Well, you have a point. Those writings all seem to assume that the Families cared what the drowthers did to each other. Or they consist of drowther fantasies about how we interact with each other.”

“There was savagery in Mittlegard before I closed the gates,” said Wad. “But what I saw was that as Set gained power and experience, the Sutahites became far more effective at goading drowthers
and mages
into doing unspeakable things. And then came the day when I learned that Set could not be expelled from a person by passing him through a gate. That meant that if Set possessed someone who knew where a Great Gate was, he could pass over to Westil, bringing millions of Sutahites with him. The people of Mittlegard had hundreds of generations of experience, learning how to ignore the Sutahites, resist them, defy them. But the Westilians had no such experience.”

“So you closed the gates.”

“No, I
ate
the gates,” said Wad. “I gathered them into myself and held them, and if anyone on either world even tried to make a Great Gate, I stripped them of their gates, because Westil is not capable of coping with an onslaught of Sutahites.”

“So the real danger is the Sutahites, not Set himself,” said Hermia.

“Set, by himself, can only rule one person. Now, that person might do terrible things. But think of the worst tyrant in Mittlegard history, and ask yourself—how much evil could he have accomplished if there weren't hundreds or thousands of people eager to obey his evil commands? And why did they do such terrible things? Because Sutahites were goading them, convincing them to follow their darkest desires, to take pleasure in following orders that they
knew
were immoral. Unspeakable. Isn't that so?”

“If you say,” said Hermia. “I don't know how you can pretend to
know
any of this. Danny and Pat think they can
see
the Sutahites now.”

“See?”

“Well,
sense
them. Somehow.”

“Can they sense Set himself?” asked Wad.

“Danny obviously thinks he can, because he's sure he's got the old devil locked up inside him, the way you locked up all those gates.”

“If he thinks he can do that, he's a fool,” said Wad. “Or maybe I'm the fool. Who knows what Danny North became when he went to Duat? His powers increased to such a degree that he doesn't even
want
his gates back. And the effect has spilled over to you and Pat and … anybody else I should know about?”

“I think you know who the others are,” said Hermia. “Because they're from
your
world. The boys and their mother. They know how to leap from place to place the way I do. Sooner or later they'll realize, as I did, that they can go from world to world.”

“And so every one of you has become exactly the person Set has been waiting for. If he can possess you, he'll have your power to gate from world to world, only without having to make actual gates, so that I can't prevent it by eating those gates.”

“So you've lost,” said Hermia.

“I had my fifteen hundred years,” said Wad. “And so far, Danny
has
kept Set in his place. But Set is intelligent. He learns. He experiments. He learned how to attach himself to people so he isn't expelled when they pass through gates. What is he learning right now? Because I think that's what's really happening—he's not under Danny's control, he's just trying to learn to do what Danny
does.
What
you
do.”

“What if he's learning that he wants to be more like Danny? Not just to have Danny's power, but his genuine kindness, his desire to do no harm?”

“You'll have to discuss that with Danny,” said Wad. “I've never been possessed by Set, I've only seen the effect on others. They all became completely despicable and dangerous, so it seemed to me that Set was toxic. Incorrigible. He's not a person. He was never a child, he didn't grow up with human connections. He doesn't have any maternal or paternal feelings, no sense of brotherhood or belonging, none of the impulses built into our minds and bodies that help us live together in peace. It isn't in his nature to do
anything
that would help somebody else at his own expense. But maybe Danny thinks that Set is learning virtue.”

Hermia studied Wad. “No, you don't believe that,” she finally said. “In fact, I think you're afraid that Danny might
think
that, but you're so sure he's wrong that … are you planning to kill Danny North?”

Wad shook his head. “I'm not planning anything. This is out of my control.”

“Really? Then why did you show up in Y, deciding in your infinite wisdom whether Gerd and I should be allowed to bring dragons into Westil?”

“Because Gerd is a typical Mittlegard mage—the Families think they're entitled to do anything.”

“But I'm not,” said Hermia.

“You're as much a product of a Family as she is,” said Wad. “You show it in everything you say and everything you do.”

“And you're not?”

“Drowthers need protection from people like you,” said Wad.

“So you would never make an arbitrary decision that damages everybody in the world, without consulting with anybody else?” asked Hermia.

“Damages a few people,” said Wad. “Damages them slightly, and saves far more people from invasion by these invisible monsters. And also from having the Families run roughshod over them.”

“The hero of the drowthers. Robin Hood. The champion of the people.”

“You say it scornfully,” said Wad, “because you're so arrogant you think that you have the right to be a god.”

“I'm not the one who set up a flaming sword to keep Adam and Eve out of the garden,” said Hermia.

“I'm trying to keep the serpent confined to the place where he already is,” said Wad.

“To the place where, if you're right, he and the Sutahites have already brought suffering and death to hundreds of millions of people, in order to protect
your
little village-sized world.”

“This?” asked Wad, indicating the tavern, the city, the world of Westil. “This isn't my world. I wasn't born here, I didn't grow up here.”

Apparently that had never crossed Hermia's mind.

“I grew up among the Norse. Before the Sutahites prompted them to rage through the world, burning and ravaging and ravishing. I grew up among farmers and fishermen of Mittlegard.”

“And played tricks on them,” said Hermia.

“Mercilessly,” said Wad. “I
am
a gatemage.”

“But in Westil, you never did that?”

“I wanted to end the warfare between Families,” said Wad. “So, as the most powerful gatemage in the world, I created Great Gates in a dozen different places. I made sure that no Family would have an advantage over any other because of superior access to the other world. And it worked. Except that then all the Families exploited the drowthers, practically enslaved them. All the worst mages from Westil came to Mittlegard because it was a bigger, richer place, and there were more drowthers to use and control. So yes, even before I realized that Set could pass through a gate, I realized that it was a mistake to let the Families have easy access to Great Gates. Because they do things like … you know…”