Authors: Migration
“Korshak?” she murmured in a low, cautious voice. He rose, smiling, just a few feet away from her, stepped forward, and clasped her hands. She stared for a moment in delighted disbelief and kissed him impulsively, but her expression changed to one of alarm. “You must be insane, coming here like this.”
“Did you ever doubt it?”
“But how did you get in?”
“I have no need of doors. Didn’t you know?”
“Oh, you’re impossible! Do you even know how to be serious about anything? My father has eyes everywhere. Have you any idea what would happen if you were caught?”
“Eyes look outward. Never back inside their own heads.”
Vaydien sighed despairingly; but she was happy. Korshak lowered himself onto the seat and drew her down next to him. “I was beginning not to believe you’d be back,” she said.
“Then you need to get to know me better,” he answered. “I always keep promises.”
She looked at him hesitantly. “And does that mean you’ll take me with you? That was also a promise.”
“Of course.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
Vaydien choked weakly. Just as she had been finding her strength…. “Now I think you are serious,” she managed.
“I always tell the truth, too.”
Vaydien took in a long breath while she fought to maintain her composure. “You… also seem to have a way of keeping surprises until the last moment,” she said finally.
Korshak shrugged. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t be surprises. Besides, the worst way I know of guarding a secret is to make it known too soon.”
“What, even to me?” Vaydien looked shocked. “Who would I tell, apart from Mirsto? And I know that you trust him.”
“You don’t have to tell anyone. People have other ways of communicating themselves, that they’re unaware of, but which those who make it their business to be suspicious are very good at reading…. In any case, Mirsto already knows.”
Vaydien gave a satisfied nod. “I
knew
there was something odd afoot the moment he walked in. He talks with his eyes.” She looked mildly reproachful. “He could have just told me, without you risking your neck like this.”
“Send an old man to speak for me, while I hide like a rabbit?” Korshak shook his head. “That’s not my way.”
“I know it isn’t. And that’s why I want to go with you – to a new world.” She snuggled more closely against him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Tell me more about it. Another world that turns about a distant star that’s another sun. The light that moves across the sky is the great ship that will take us there.”
“Yes,” Korshak replied. It was another subject about which he had refrained from divulging too much.
“But how are we to get to it?”
“The builders of the ship will bring us there. They are the ones whose images I have seen and talked with in my travels.”
Vaydien shook her head distantly and dreamily. “What manner of arts can build a ship that travels across the sky, large enough to carry thousands, you say, yet so high that it appears as a speck? Can one sail to the stars?”
Korshak took her hand, admired it, and lifted it to his lips while he considered the question. “Shandrahl has metalsmiths who work in the forge and armory to shape weapons for his soldiers,” he said.
“Ye-es,” Vaydien looked at him uncertainly.
“And in schools and craft shops out in the city, there are those who cut and polish lenses for spyglasses and magnifiers, and others whose artifice enables steam to turn engines that move mills and other ingenious devices.”
“Secrets that only the specially gifted can know,” Vaydien said, voicing the generally held belief.
“Those are just a few, isolated techniques that have been preserved without understanding from a far vaster trove of knowledge that once existed, that enabled feats beyond our comprehension.”
“You mean greater magic than that which you persuade people you command?”
Korshak snorted and grinned. “If you like.” He had already made it clear to Vaydien that the things he did were accomplished through trickery – although at times he wasn’t sure if she completely believed him.
“I have seen strange, intricately fashioned parts of metals and other materials that were unearthed, that could serve no discernible purpose,” Vaydien said slowly. “And once, a decayed device with studs that I was told would let its owner talk instantly to anyone, anywhere. But I was never sure whether to believe it.”
“Oh, such things were once commonplace,” Korshak assured her.
“And was it that knowledge that destroyed the old world?” she asked.
“Yes. But it didn’t have to. The world then was not like the one that you know today – divided into many regions like Arigane and Urst, that are cut off from other places and communicate little. The knowledge that existed then was available to all people, everywhere. There are places in the world today where that knowledge has been resurrected, and the ancient wonders have been created again. But those who have rediscovered that knowledge will not, this time, give it freely to the world to be misused again. It is shared only with selected adepts. To be accepted, they must show themselves worthy in spirit and disposition, as well as aptitude of mind.”
“And is that how you were chosen?”
Korshak nodded. “But the same patterns of evil have been arising again in the nations taking shape across the world. So the Builders decided that they would go away and begin a new world of their own, where their knowledge will be used wisely. And so they constructed the great ship that you see traveling across the sky as a light. Its name is
Aurora
.”
Vaydien was listening, spellbound, her deep brown eyes watching Korshak’s face unwaveringly. “And we depart tonight?” she repeated.
“Tonight. You, and I, and Mirsto, with Ronti.”
“What must I do?”
“That is what I have come to tell you. Now, listen carefully….”
At a table in the kitchens at the rear of the palace, Ronti was eating soup and bread with some of the household staff.
“The same magician that astounded them before,” one of the cooks informed the table over her shoulder, from where she was stirring the contents of a large pot on a stove. “What’s his secret, Mr. Ronti? Everyone has a secret. His must be a special one.”
“You don’t think he’d tell you, do you?” one of the scullery maids said scornfully.
Ronti sat back and treated them to a look of one imparting a rare confidence. Part of his function was to take on the hat of Korshak’s agent when the opportunity presented itself. “It’s the bloodline,” he told them. “Korshak is from a family that has produced generations of adepts. His mother could see into the future. She said when he was young that he would one day visit a land far from the sea, where the first daughter would marry a warrior chief and become queen of a great nation.”
“Lady Vaydien and Prince Zileg!” an upstairs servant girl exclaimed in an awed voice. “Just as is happening. She foretold it!”
“Master Predger told me once that he thinks it’s all trickery,” the cook said. “Isn’t that so, Master?”
A man seated at the table head, who was evidently the one referred to, finished a mouthful of food and cleared his throat. He was older than the average of the others, erectly poised and dressed more formally, and could have been a head butler. “All I’ll say is that I’m not convinced. I heed the words of Mirsto, who says that we should be cautious in belief of all things, and demand evidence.”
“But we all ‘eard ’ow ‘is mother knew about Lady Vaydien and Prince Zileg years ago,” a man in rough outdoor garb put in from the far side. “’Ow could that ‘ave been trickery?”
“You see,” the servant girl invited triumphantly.
A young man who looked like a stable hand, sitting next to the one who had just spoken, looked up. “I hear Prince Zileg doesn’t have much time for ideas of magic, either. He says that properly argued reason can reveal natural, everyday causes for all things. In Urst they’re making a better quality of steel by adding burned bones to the melt.”
“Where did you hear that?” the head butler demanded.
“Jarsind the smith talked to one of Zileg’s guards while we were shoeing their horses. Prince Zileg takes a great interest in the work of artisans.”
“Did you hear that, Nastra?” the scullery maid called to the cook. “You’d better start keeping the bones for Jarsind.” Ronti had been watching the scullery maid. Her name was Eena. Although lacking in refinement, she was sharp-eyed, intelligent, the kind who would rise to a challenge. Born into a different background, she could have gone far. Also, Ronti’s instinct told him she had a mischievous streak, which would suit his purpose.
The cook eyed Eena derisively. “Jarsind? The only thing he’d know to do with them would be throw them to the dogs.” Laughter greeted the remark.
Ronti listened intently as he continued eating. He had observed Zileg’s hostility toward Korshak, and read that it was rooted in more than just skepticism toward magic. Zileg was shrewd and missed little. Such was human nature that a penchant for cruelty and vanity didn’t preclude intelligence. That could be a dangerous combination.
“More bread, Mr. Ronti?” the maid next to him asked.
“Please.” Ronti took a piece from the dish and looked around the table. “We noticed from our camp in the hills yesterday that there’s some rebuilding going on near the marketplace,” he said. “What’s the story?”
“Oh, there was a big fire about half a year ago now,” the stable hand answered. “It started in the rooms at the back of the inn….” He went on to elaborate, letting Ronti lead them away from Shandrahl’s smith and the new steel being developed in Urst. Five minutes from now, Ronti doubted if any of them would remember that the subject had been broached at all. But Ronti would report every detail back to Korshak.
From such seemingly trivial snippets, were many wondrous miracles and prophecies born.
Later, Ronti just happened to be passing along the passage to the door opening from the yard, when Eena came out of a pantry, carrying an oil jar.
“Still here?” she said playfully. “I thought you’d gone back to your wagon outside.”
Ronti kept his voice low. “I stayed back to have a word with you, Eena – when the others were out of the way.”
“Really?” The tone of her voice asked, now where had she heard this before? But her eyes were saying she could be interested.
“No, it’s nothing like that. I need to recruit an accomplice. I think you’re the right kind of person.”
Eena studied him, puzzled but curious. “Accomplice? What for?”
Ronti glanced behind him, then steered her back into the pantry doorway and moved closer. “It’s for our act tonight. We just want to add a harmless little joke into the routine….”
High above the surface of Earth, Masumichi Shikoba headed back toward the two-level suite, now in the final stages of being fitted out, that would be his personal quarters in the three-miles-long, six-miles-around orbiting
Aurora
. His first premonition that something was amiss came when he emerged from an elevator into the gallery running through the complex of residential units and saw the scattering of twigs and leaves forming a trail along a side corridor to end at his front door. He turned his face toward the lens in the panel alongside, opened the door with a voiced command, entered warily… and stopped, stunned.
To facilitate free expression and cater to individual preferences, the
Aurora
’s design made extensive use of modular constructions that could be configured into whatever style of space the occupants desired. Masumichi had specified a simple layout of sleeping and living space above and a personal working area for his robotics research below, with a spiral stairway connecting the two. Instead, a circular opening eight feet or so across had appeared in the ceiling, making way for the trunk and branches of what, from the leaves that he could see above, appeared to be a young sycamore tree. Its base was encased in some kind of temporary structure covered by plastic sheeting. The two robots that he was developing as general-purpose prototypes and assigning various construction tasks as test projects regarded him dutifully. They had universally pivoting heads with wide-angle and narrow-focus lenses for all-around viewing, and bulky torsos sprouting slender, bi-tubular limbs with bulbous joints, giving them somewhat the appearance of metallic stick men with mantis heads. Masumichi had left them with a decorating job, evidenced by their generous splattering of paint.
“What’s this?” he inquired, gesturing at the tree.
“That’s the tree,” GPP-1/B informed him.
“What tree?”
“You told us to paint a tree in the lower level. There wasn’t a tree there, so we got one from the Bot and Ag Conservatory. What color do you want it?” The robot seemed to register the sinking feeling that Masumichi was trying not to show. “Er, we weren’t sure about going through to upstairs. It didn’t seem right to cut it and just use half…. We could get a shorter one if you like.”
“Bot and Ag people very cooperative,” GPP-1/A put in. “Like having plant things grow anywhere possible.”
Masumichi could see his mistake. “I meant a
picture
of one – a mural, after you’d done the walls,” he said resignedly.
“Oh.”
1/B and 1/A looked at each other with what could have passed as mutual recrimination, but Masumichi dismissed the impression as subjective. Whatever electronic exchanges might have flowed between them were lost on him. While he was still grappling in befuddlement with how best to handle things, voices sounded in the open doorway behind.
“Ah yes, he’s back.”
“Masumichi, what’s all the mess on the floor out here? Are you planting a forest?”
It was Helmut Goben, whose work lay in mapping biological molecular machinery, and his partner, Sonja Taag, a teacher. With them was a slim, fair-haired girl in her twenties that Masumichi didn’t know. Before he could stop them or say anything, they had come on in.
“We stopped by earlier, but you were out,” Helmut went on. “We’re looking for some ideas on…” His voice trailed off as they stopped, staring in astonishment. Masumichi, too embarrassed to speak, showed his teeth in a parody of a smile. The two robot geniuses stood motionless.