She was beautiful, in the ethereal manner of the queens of the ancient empires; he was quite handsome in the cast of the old knights. It was as if the blood of vanished kings had suddenly sprung up in the new aristocracy of the Caroline.
The stage was set for a predictable chain of events, and much of the conversation was quite in keeping with the time and relationships of that sort, but something was clearly off-key. To begin with, examine their eyes again, for there was too much steel in them. The man saw only the
Victory,
twenty miles to the west but still overpowering in its growing immensity; and even the regal gaze of the girl was barbed with iron, whether from the Yards or from some hidden spot in the sky it was impossible to tell.
Their actions were equally disturbing, for while they stood close together, they never touched; while they talked, they never looked at each other. The girl looked to the stars above her, and the man to the diamond tangle below him.
The boy talked mostly, at first only of the girl's beauty; but gradually he began to speak more and more of the
Victory.
"Ah, can you see her now, my girl? Seven miles long and three across. Seven by three! By Heaven, what a beauty she'll be, too. Even now you can see the curve of the wings and the prow . . . "
"But the
Victory
will never be finished. Remember?" the girl murmured absently, her eyes tracing the constellations.
The boy sighed and lowered his head. "Quite, of course. But when I look at her and at what we've done in these short years, I just can't help thinking, what if . . . " The man smiled to himself. "And I start seeing the places where her cabins will be and where her wings will cut the clouds. All really against what they told us about the
Victory
and her purpose. But, like I said, I really can't help it. And then there is always Home to think about."
"Home," the girl whispered. "Which one do you think it is? That one?" She pointed to a star near the northern horizon. "Or that one, perhaps?"
"Ah, now it is you who is the dreamer."
"Possibly, but"—she searched the sky for the proper words—"but there is a Home out there. Probably not like the one we tell the poor People about, but certainly a new world full of green things and life; quiet, open spaces where you can watch sunsets or dawns without fearing for your life or having the ring of jackhammers in your ears." She looked down at the Yards with a mixture of distaste and fascination.
The man turned to her, for he had heard these words many times in the past few months. He lifted an eye slightly and sighed for he knew exactly what it all meant. His tone was now one of resignation rather than one of hope or happiness. "Then you, my lovely, to your green wilderness and silent nightfalls; I know that wrong or futile as it may be, you have come to believe in them as surely as I have in the Ship." He touched her hand, but fearfully, as if he thought he would somehow pollute her in that simple action. He waved a hand at the Yards. "As for me, I'm afraid that my dream must be placed before yours if either are to be attained—in any sort of way. Ah, the Ship, all bright shining metal burning in a noonday sun. Hardly as quiet a creation as yours might be.
Thunder, thunder and fire and a huge shadow darkening half the sky. There'll be my world even if it must remain as much of a fantasy as yours." The girl said nothing. "Goodbye then, my lady." He touched her hand again, as if to raise and kiss it, but he stopped and drew back his hand; he walked down to Gateway and to the sleeping Yards. The girl started to walk up into the mountains where the distant lights of her home resided among those in the constellation of Eringold, a wanderer of the western seas.
On the same night a parallel conversation had taken place inside the Yards. Two of the People, both of the thickly graceful sort that muralists love to paint, had found the heat and noise of Gateway uncomfortable. The encompassing highlands were ignored since for the past fifty years they had been strictly the territory of the Technos. But the Yards, deserted at night, had appealed to them. They stood down at the end of the ways where the slipway ran into the quiet Sea and talked of dreams much like the Technos had: the man spoke of the Ship for he was a pipefitter and exceedingly proud of his work. The woman talked of Home for she very much wanted any children she might bear to walk in a kinder land than hers. To them the dreams were more than simple musings, they were concrete hopes, not "but ifs," but "whens." Their hearts as well as their minds were wholly committed to what they were expressing. This was good for it meant that the Myth of the Ship had become part of their lives. The disturbing part of it all was that, despite all the protestations, they were merely speculating: the two Technos and the dead Syers had spoken in identical tones.
To the Admiralty, the
Victory
project was already an unqualified success. All over the Caroline, although its physical appearance had changed very little, one could sense the same spirit that Limpkin had seen rampant in Palace Park. Carefully planted legends took their place beside the quaint native ones that travelers heard at the Yards and then spread, suitably embroidered, throughout the rest of the World; the Admiralty had hired several writers to manufacture synthetic mythology about the Builders and Home; almost anything that they might dream up, if it was about peace, and power, and plenty, was readily accepted and incorporated into the very soul of the People.
But as Amon Macalic, then head of the Yards, sometimes felt the legends and myths were joining the People to the Ship in a tie much more binding and absolute than that of simple hope. Over the whole of the Caroline, not just in the Yards, one could see this tie growing and solidifying, drawing the
Victory
and the People closer and closer together—and farther away from the benevolent rule of the Techno class and the Admiralty. Even in the lands beyond the Caroline, peoples were reorienting limited thinking capacity to include stories of this new creation.
The People of the Yards, however, were the most passionate in their attachment to the
Victory.
The growing status of the Ship in their minds began to be quietly manifested in a singular manner: under the completed sections of the fuselage, small mausoleums could be found. Even more disturbing, some of these gruesome little constructions had what appeared to be provisions for worship; a hundred recognized religions existed in the Caroline and her territories, venerating everything from ancestors to Great Men (Miolnor IV being a current favorite) to the usual brands of pantheism, but now the Ship had truly acquired a capital "S" and all that went with it.
Even the character of the Yards had changed. By their nature and occupation the Technos felt at home in the Yards' bright new steel. That they knew and loved almost as much as the First World had. But since its first awakening, the Yards had grown into something less orderly; in places, it was a metal forest where stories could grow as easily as they had in the Karback Cyprus marches. Under the enormous darkness of the
Victory,
an incredible tangle of pipes, power lines, and ventilation shafts had grown up. Mobile cranes that could no longer reach a section of the hull stood unused for months; steel fittings from under the Yards sometimes waited years before they were lifted into position. The whole lot of it was much too untidy for the Techno mind to tolerate; the People, on the other hand, were quite taken up with it. But even these jarring discontinuities only served to make the eastern bank of the Tyne delta a place that even the First World might not have been able to outdo.
A traveler cresting the mountains around the Yards would suddenly feel all the wretched hopelessness of the World swept away. His eyes would sweep down the mountains, astounded by the designs of the homes he would see there: large, spacious, open, and clean they were, surrounded by rich gardens. Magnificent carriages and horses moved smoothly along the wandering roads carrying proud men in black and silver.
Further down the traveler would see a great city with tall, close-packed tenements and ringed by factories belching smoke and noise. Color, activity and an atmosphere of purpose that he had never felt in all his travelings would drift up to his high perch; he would see great motor vehicles upon the broad avenues, laden with unrecognizable cargoes.
Then, his eye would reach to the Yards and be blinded by what lay there.
The psychological reaction to such a sight, especially after having spent a lifetime getting used to the World, was quite predictable. One would either flee in disbelief, mentally paralyzed by the scene, or, more likely, one would stumble down the slopes, utterly captivated by the
Victory
and all that it suddenly meant to you.
The Technos were continually delighted that their creation promoted such strong feelings in such a short time, and usually let it go at that. Then some duty-conscious Techno decided to send one of their converts back to the Admiralty as an example of the job they were doing out in that godforsaken wilderness.
The Admiralty people questioned the man, a lordless knight from Enom, and were similarly gratified until someone pointed out that the instant devotion of the
Victory
depended to a great extent on the shock of seeing all that accomplishment in the middle of the World. "Quite," replied the other Admiralty people, "just shows how much we've done." Then the man continued to point out that the knight had first journeyed to the Caroline and then followed the Tyne to Bloody Ford and then by devious routes to the Yards. The smiles faded into worried frowns as the Admiralty people began to realize that the knight had noticed no difference between the Caroline and the rest of the World. Seventy years and the Yards had grown tremendously but it seemed that the land had hardly been touched. An eager cipher clerk immediately began to run off a progress report request to the Office of Procurement in Knightsbridge, but a more suspicious mind suggested that any studies that they make of the Ship and the program that supported it be conducted by the Admiralty alone.
To this end a new and regrettably short-lived agency was established. The Office of Extraterritorial Intelligence was meant to be the coldly determined branch of the Admiralty that was to keep watch on all aspects of a program that suddenly seemed to need watching desperately. But the men who were responsible for its creation were still strictured by a childish belief that all was going well, and by a jealous concern that this new agency would find something wrong with
their
particular aspect of the project.
When the Office of Extraterritorial Intelligence was finally put into operation it had a total complement of fifteen men, six horses and some sub-standard stationery. Ironically, its sole office was established in an old church in the Knightsbridge quarter: 25 Stewart Street, a mere two blocks from the O.P. and the People's Palace. The placement of the office was quite accidental and no one took advantage of it until it was too late.
The only mission of the O.E.I. was launched in the early fall of the seventh decade of the Ship.
As the Admiralty began to look about itself, it realized just how completely it had removed itself from direct contact with the rest of the nation and how utterly it had come to depend on mere reports to keep the whole enterprise moving.
Thus it was decided that for a beginning the O.E.I. should send out two parties. The first was to go to the Yards and make as complete a survey as possible of how, if at all, the purpose and meaning of the
Victory
might have become perverted. Three men were assigned to this task and they left the city for Kelph the day after receiving their orders. They were never heard from again and one can only suppose that they perished in the subsequent disturbances in the Tyne delta.
The second party of four men was to confirm a progress report from the Armories. According to the report, a "modification" had been performed on a power chain leading from a hydroelectric dam on the Denligh River in southern Yuma to the Yards. Three transformer stations had been established on the line before its eight cables reached the Yards. All in all the line ran for several hundred miles through four new protectorate nations of the Caroline and the Badlands. That the lines had reached the Yards at all—all but two being dummies—was a bit of a miracle, for while the southern lands that the line traversed did not carry the legendary stigmata that the far north and west did, they still held the more pedestrian horrors in abundance. It was thus only slightly incredible that the Armories reported that only three men had been lost in its modification; two hundred men in the original crew had died. It had taken the Armories five months to carry out its mission; the War Office engineers had needed three years to build the real and fake power lines.
The first station was reached, but a repair crew from the Armories was at work there. Only a single line was diverted here, but it was impossible to check out its operation without arousing the curiosity of the Armories' men; the secret line was supposed to lead to a village named Kendreal, fifty miles to the northeast. Since the line covered the distance in almost a hundred miles of serpentine wanderings, the O.E.I. party decided to assume that it was working properly.
The second station was two hundred miles beyond the first; even in those latitudes the coming winds of winter could be felt. The station itself was situated among the worn, low mountains that reached up from the Sea and encircled the southeastern corner of the Black Barrens. It was a depressing, sterile place, but relatively safe because there was not enough food to support large life forms. There the three heaviest lines were diverted, two to garrison towns along the Tyne and one to a provincial capital in one of the new protectorates.
The lines had been set up about two years ago, and although no mention of the new power had reached the Admiralty from the garrisons and the capital, it aroused no concern, for the whole scheme was carried out in secrecy, not even the lower echelons of the War Office being fully aware of what was happening. The object was the introduction of the new power into the selected areas in as subtle a manner as possible. Occasionally the lines had to await the construction of a dummy power plant in some suitably visible spot so that no one would guess that the lines had been robbed from the Ship.