"But a year later you return to the settlement; the spring floods have washed away the pathetic efforts of last year. You issue the same order. But this time when they ask you why, you will have a different answer: 'You, my beloved people, will build a dam for the ship. You will build it so that eight power lines may run into a far-off place called the Yards where this mighty mechanism is abuilding. A starship, a way out. I do not ask you to try to tame this hostile land, I only ask you to honestly work upon it so that we may someday leave it behind.' Then you will produce illustrated diagrams of the ship. Imagine their expressions, Limpkin, when you start to describe the dimensions of the ship in miles instead of mere feet. And then they will look about them, at the same land and a new thought will arise: escape from this World where before the only escape had been death.
"Your men must be skilled, Limpkin. They must speak like prophets and engrave this silver fantasy upon those torpid, withered brains. And if your Office is skillful, every time a peasant looks at the land his eyes will rise to the sky, and at night they will stand out under the stars for hours, dreaming of their new destiny; they will not make it, you must tell them that, nor will their sons, but someday their seed and their spirits will be freed from the shackles of this dismal prison.
" 'Where will my son's son go?' they will ask. It hardly matters what you answer. Use your ingenuity, but make sure the story is always the same. Legend has it that men, before the end of the First World, journeyed to the stars; pick a star, dream up a planet green and golden in the light of its young sun. Tell them that there are homes and factories and roads there, left behind and carefully preserved when the dying First World called its children home in a last effort to save itself. Paragon, Harbor, Home, name it whatever your Office chooses, but make it a paradise, and one as filled with man-made wonders as those of nature, for my psychologists tell me that if the people are told that their new world is ready for instant, comfortable occupation with a minimum of struggle, it will be all that more desirable. A world fit for the habitation of men, and nothing less.
"So the people will set to work with the monstrous shadow of the ship, graceful as a cormorant and powerful as an awakened god, casting the hideous Earth into servile darkness. But here is where the ship will begin her betrayal. The dam will be, if my and many others' estimation of human nature is correct, completed and the eight power lines will stretch to the southeast. Here is where your Office will move in. Only two lines will eventually reach the ship; the other six will be diverted into an area that truly needs them. Their places will be taken by empty dummy cables. And if anyone ever asks about any of this, simply tell them that it is 'for the ship.'
"As more and more of these efforts are diverted back into the nation, the land will become more bearable and more profitable. At first there will be a steadily ascending curve of work, then a zenith will be reached when the people finally begin to realize that the previously unyielding land has changed. As the land grows richer and richer, interest in the ship will taper off, for now the people's will to power will have awakened and fed upon a sufficient quantity of simple hope to allow it to live and grow.
"So you see that the ship's ultimate aim is to become a half-finished hulk. Her reality will be in her building, not in any never-to-be-taken trip into space.
"Who knows"—Toriman drew deeply on his cigar; firelight glinted off his golden ring—"perhaps someday, when the World has grown a great deal more like the First World, the ship will be completed. But then it will rise from the World in the spirit of adventure and not as a beaten fugitive."
For at least a minute neither man spoke. The General had outlined the battle plan and now his chosen lieutenant tried to digest its essentials. Another minute passed; Toriman's gaze drifted to the map and stopped over the tangled northern coastline. At last Limpkin spoke. "Seven miles long; seven miles long and three wide . . . "
Toriman chuckled with satisfaction. "Exactly, my good civil servant, seven
miles
long. Think of it! Seven
miles
by three
miles!
Think of it blotting out half the sky while thirty thousand feet up; see it rumbling down its ways to meet the Sea, for no runway possible could ever support its weight. And think, Limpkin, as will the people, of a day that will never come, when they will file into the cabins and leave the world behind them. Then the thunder, the Sea thrown into confusion, its surface boiling from the engines' breath. Slowly, very slowly at first, she will start to move; then faster with a tidal wave wake trailing aft. Then up into the air, the shock wave of compressed air traveling before her like a terrible herald, flattening mountains." Again the stillness.
Limpkin finally roused himself. "I find your scheme entirely impractical."
"We are in an impractical position."
"My mind refuses to accept the sheer size of the thing. But then my imagination takes over, with a vengeance in this case. Could we not just use the pretense of building the ship?"
"I admit that it would be more inexpensive, but no, I'm afraid that the ship must be built. Perhaps a man of your stature, one who has read some of the First World and now knows that the stories of its might are true, can be excited merely by the idea of the ship. But here we are trying to inspire the slow-minded, dull, witless people, and several generations of them at that. They must be able to go to the Yards and come back to their godforsaken villages and tell of the glory and power of the ship. The Yards are many leagues from here and you can be sure that with every step the pilgrim travels back toward his home, the ship will grow just that much more magnificent. The ship, the ship, the ship, this must be their only thought until the land begins to bend, as it must, to their will."
"The ship could easily become a god," intoned Limpkin as the thought grew in him.
"Only if she grows too fast. Only if she absorbs the imagination instead of merely capturing it. That is the job of your Office."
Limpkin now turned to the painting of the ship. "And her name?" he inquired, not raising his eyes.
"
Victory.
"
"
Victory, Victory . . . "
Limpkin repeated. "And I suppose that your psychologists dreamed that up too."
"Of course. That and much more." Toriman walked over to one of the thin map drawers that, twenty deep, ran along each wall; he flipped out the end of a blueprint and a sheet of mathematical notations, normal numbers and symbols ranged beside an apparently corresponding row of rune-figures. "The ship," said Toriman, gesturing at the rest of the library, "and the knowledge to build and sail her."
Limpkin sensed that the audience was over. He put on his coat and waited for a sign from Toriman. "I hope that I have not kept you too long, Limpkin. Here, I'll walk you to the gate." Toriman produced a fur-collared jacket with the silver piping of a field officer.
When they had reached the main courtyard, between the two walls, Limpkin could see that dawn was growing beyond the distant city. One of the general's carriages, complete with footmen and heavy chasseur escort, was waiting.
As Limpkin boarded the coach, he turned again to the east to see the clouds of a young snow storm already shrouding the sun. "A dark dawn," he observed with as much dignity as he could summon up at that early hour.
"Perhaps others will be brighter," Toriman rejoined. "Many others besides myself have had a hand in this plan, Limpkin. Many more able and knowing than either you or I shall ever be; we are not alone in this, and we never shall be."
A footman shut the door and the convoy rumbled out of Caltroon and down to the River Road.
About a mile from the castle, while adjusting his blanket and warming pan, Limpkin came upon a present from the General. It was a small model of the
Victory,
wrought from solid silver, and beautiful detailed. Limpkin held it up to the feeble light of dawn until they reached the city walls;
seven miles!
For a week after that the work piled up on Limpkin's desk as the miniature
Victory
flew on a thousand imaginary voyages to a million different worlds. And at the end of each trip, when the great starship had been moored in a turquoise bay, a party was sent ashore only to find that the new world was the one they had left so many years ago, but changed into something fine and beautiful.
On the eighth day a messenger was sent from the Office of Reconstruction to notify Toriman that an appointment had been made for him and Limpkin with the King and Council.
But the messenger returned saying that the General had contracted a slight virus and his physician had insisted he stay in bed. In his place the General had sent twenty-eight carriages with the contents of his library on the ship in them. He also sent the keys to the Black Libraries at Dartmoor and Iriam; they had not been opened for a thousand years, for their contents had been adjudged by successive Churches to be too heretical and dangerous to be absorbed by the human mind.
Despite Toriman's absence, the audience with George XXVIII and his Council was successful, although Limpkin felt that he had not conveyed the grand scope of the design as well as he might have. In place of the General's commanding language he had used graphs and maps and charts. And when he left he noticed that several Councilors, as they waited for their carriages, glanced up at the night sky and quietly moved their lips.
Suddenly the Office of Reconstruction assumed a different character. The staff was reduced by about half, for after several millennia the words "security risk" had reentered the common tongue.
The Office itself was a pleasant pile of granite left over from when the Dorian flag had flown over Caltroon. But now an iron spike fence grew up on its lawn, separating it from George Street and the surrounding buildings. Guards armed amazingly enough with actual rifles and, perhaps even more amazing, in clean uniforms, stood at the new gate and patrolled the grounds.
A carriage shuttle with the War Office was established, for the upcoming war with Yuma would require a great deal of coordination between the two ministries.
Most of all Limpkin noticed that his staff, which had been told of the ship and its actual purpose, was actually exhibiting a near enthusiasm for their work; he almost yelled with surprise when he saw a clerk running down a corridor to catch a War Office coach.
But these were fairly intelligent people, members of a more or less elite and their activity could be the result only of the novelty of the whole scheme. Limpkin hoped that this estimation was wrong, and as time went on he thought he saw evidence that he was.
Every week a fat dispatch pouch arrived by mounted messenger from Caltroon with instructions in Toriman's handwriting; although it made Limpkin feel at times like a marionette, he followed them religiously. The first step was the manufacture of a war with Yuma.
Later historians called it part of the "era of the Ship," but when the war started, only the innermost circles of the Government and some of the military knew of its eventual aim. It was begun in the south and centered around a small village by the name of Canbau, which sat at the intersection of three of the major trade routes in that area. The town's major industries were legal and illegal highway robbery, bars offering something politely labeled the Black Death, and bordellos. The Caroline garrison there synthesized the needed incident when it "found" a cargo of illegal armaments secreted away in a Yuma caravan.
TheCarolineRepublic demanded an apology for sending arms to revolutionaries operating in her mountains. The Yuma Foreign Office had the stupidity to note that this was the first mention of any sort of insurrection in the Caroline. Publicizing this as a deliberate evasion and an intolerable display of arrogance by Yuma, a force of Caroline cavalry was sent to plunder all Yuma caravans on the three roads. Yuma, still not seeing the point of the affair, protested first with several notes and then with the destruction of a Caroline irrigation dam which a hasty survey determined to be within Yuma'sborders.
The Caroline's sense of justice and right being offended, an attack was launched from Canbau. One could almost hear the chuckling coming from the War Office, the Office of Reconstruction, and Caltroon. Caroline mounted forces supported, it was rumored, by horse-drawn artillery of a very ancient vintage (and consequently, of a very high state of efficiency), swept westward. They reached the eastern border, wheeled, and drove northeast, diagonally across the country.
It was not a very bloody conflict, for in those days of fluid alliances, loyalty often depended upon which way the chips happened to be falling at the moment. One by one the towns of Yuma surrendered until, four months and one day after the first incident, the black and silver of the Caroline was run up the State House flagpole at Bannon der-Main, Yuma's capital. The only real battle developed in the north, a week after the formal truce. A group of die-hard patriots, crying God and Constitution, barricaded themselves in the Armories. There, emplaced in cliffs overlooking the Tyne, they managed to hold the entire Caroline expeditionary force at bay for a month.
Since the Caroline liked to preserve the image of a perfect war fought in a perfect way to a perfect victory, contemporary accounts of the battle at the Armories are generally sketchy. But there are songs about that place: the confidential war diaries of the units involved provide enough material for the construction of legends. The Tyne was supposed to have flowed red for a week and the peasants living in the surrounding regions now tell of a hideous battle between men and demigods.
There is now a small lake, fed by the Tyne, where the frontal galleries of the Armories used to be, and one has only to overturn a stone or clod of soil to find some blackened instrument of war.
The 42nd Imperial Hussars garnered another battle pennant. Toriman sent a wagon load of wine to the survivors and a shipment of fine coffins to the dead.