All through the night, the gun had whispered to itself, conversing with Aden through the wires under his skin, or with the Office over the nonexistent frequencies to Lake Gilbert.
Etridge nodded to Anderton. "All right. What are they saying?"
"The upper three traces"—the other man underlined some readings on an oscilloscope with his light pencil—"are using the old Special Office channels. Even the same scramble techniques." Anderton referred to an open notebook with tan and brittle pages. "Now, this one, you can see, is very different. It extends laterally through several spectrums and trails off into places I'd say exist only in a theoretic sense."
"Our unicorn?"
"Its eye, at least. See the similarities in its wave patterns with those of the first two transmissions?"
Etridge did not, but he nodded anyway. "Any directions on them?"
"The first and the third are directed mainly to Lake Gilbert, and the second one is a responding signal."
"You say, mainly."
Anderton hid his embarrassment behind his radiation scars. "Ah, they also contain secondary signals directed toward us."
"Us?" Etridge brought his face closer to the scope. "That might fit in. The Office could hardly resist speaking to one side of its world without hinting to the other that something was going on. Balance. They hold balance very dearly, you know."
"Sir?" Anderton had been concentrating on getting more definition on the signals, but they remained unfocused.
Instantly, all of the screens across the panel were filled with raging light. Anderton started in his chair and braced his hands against the console as if the luminescence carried a physical impact.
Etridge jerked back too, the surfaces of his face closing shut like the armor of the hovercraft. Watch personnel left their stations and nervously circled the room to get a better look.
This was in silence. Over it, Etridge said: "Would that be our unicorn, Mr. Anderton?"
"Yes sir," he whispered through the colors, touching one or two dials to confirm his own words.
"Does he still address us?"
"It's the eye, the eye, sir. It can't be the creature because it has no power without its master."
"No more than the Office which built the eye in the first place." Colors counter-played inside the bridge, drowning the grids and Kessler-graphs in their swirling torrents. Etridge was dressed in his black uniform, standing in the middle of it. His clothes swallowed the colors, and the metallic whiteness of his skin reflected away everything but an occasional flicker of scarlet.
Obscurely terrified by the colors' violent beauty, Anderton stood up and backed away from his scopes and closer to Etridge's rigidly held blackness. The other men, including Stamp, did the same.
The ship's computers whirred in their cabinets, digesting the flood of information they perceived, searching their accumulated records with measured desperation until an appropriate analogue was found for a particular unknown, the resultant hypothesis tested and proven into a postulate.
"Does it, the unicorn—is
that
what it's seeing too?" Tidal rushes of brilliance beat against scope frames that had patent numbers and manufacturers' plaques riveted to them, threatening to burst out into the room.
"Could the . . . ?"
"That is what the Special Office had been watching? Ah, god." Anderton, crooning low, his voice human and unrelated to his own machines for the first time in months. The man sagged within his uniform; his wide shoulders bent, his pity and astonishment crowded the fear from his joints and let him sit down and cover his eyes.
Etridge said nothing at all. He had established a circle of tired, cynical tranquillity around him. The lights had jolted him at first, but his clothes and skin protected him. All the imponderable beauties of the world, he hinted simply by standing there with his hands clasped behind him, staring straight into the scopes, could be shown to be no more, and possibly less than the sum of their component parts. Man, granted his peculiar affliction of mortality, honed and sharpened through his ages of disappointment, would annihilate first the wonders of magic and then the larger mysteries of death and the soul. Beyond that, god might be discovered, cowering in the tumbled ruin of his own failed creation, his measure taken, and the universe shown to be outside of his control. And then, even that would be studied and broken. They would be alone, safe, no longer menaced by mystery and the anxiety of wondering, all the reasons for heartbreak contained and quantified.
That was why Etridge had frightened Stamp; but he had never seen what had driven the man. Isolated by the limits of Anderton's scopes, the colors of the unicorn's perceptions were still worse than any cold and lonely end Etridge might lead them to.
The alienness of what the scopes contained battered him, and set up a reaction that drove him toward Etridge to share his protective despair. The war, Stamp realized, was not nearly over. A specific enemy may have been defeated or driven off, but his weapons remained to be picked up by whatever random god or madman might stumble upon them.
Stamp glanced around the bridge. The colors made the forward part of the room burn with a thousand different fires, and each one was squared and then cubed by each of the succeeding spectrums in which it burned.
Etridge stepped back to Anderton's station. He looked down the rows of screens and then adjusted filter dials, timidly at first and then with more decision.
The computers assisted with more precisely defined parameters. The colors compressed and withdrew from the borders of the screens; they began to fit within their intended limits on the Kessler-graphs. As though pleased with their success, the computers' electric murmuring eased; overload lights switched from red back into blue. The patterns continued to resolve themselves until, while they retained their stunning beauty, they were comprehensible within the experience of men. They no longer threatened the mind but only the heart, and that could be controlled.
"The eye remains," Etridge mentioned needlessly when the colors had gone, and everyone nodded as if he had suddenly made it true. "The unicorn can still see with it, and the Office is still looking."
"Are we undetected?"—Stamp.
Etridge referred to banks of dials on the right side of the cabin. "No. There seem to be various source detections, both reflective from that little display you just saw, and crude spectrum ranging from the highlands to the northwest of us." Anderton nodded in confirmation.
"Target?" Anderton asked upon finding his voice. He stepped back to his position and ran his hand along the rows of toggle switches. Stamp heard the turrets on the hovercraft's topsides moving.
"Not yet." Etridge waved him away and the turrets quieted. "We'll be in there tomorrow. We don't want to be blowing up our own people." He looked at Stamp. "The Office, you know."
"It is our enemy, too?" Stamp asked from far away.
"Not yet," Etridge repeated.
Aden's campfire had burned through the night in three of the nearest spectrums, excluding that of visible light. Discolored leaves and twigs of certain herbs smoldered in the semicircle of rocks. He stamped it out, and made the appropriate gestures through the proper spectrums to fully extinguish it.
It will be good to see again. He looked to the horizon, to the advancing ocean, and chuckled at his pun.
Aden rose, unclipped the scope from the holster and sighted down into the forest. Fountains of infrared light poured upward from the near end of the avenue as the hoverships warmed up their engines. The dawn sun raked across the treetops, shattering a tower of stained glass and another of yellow diamond with the weight of its light.
He chose a shallow drainage which would shield him from unassisted observation and carefully followed it. After half an hour, he encountered a cyclops lying across the trail. From the smell, the thing had been dead for some time, and there was a great scattering of bones and pieces of weapons around it.
The sun moved up, warming the segmented carcass inside its rusting armor. Ants crawled across the empty eye socket of the monster and gnawed at the strands of tendon that locked its hand around a mace.
Aden shifted and noted a movement on the left. He continued turning, more slowly, and saw a dwarf sitting on a rock above him. He was playing noiselessly on a mahogany flute, addressing his songs to the dead cyclops and then to the other bodies around it. He paused and bowed toward each one in turn. By following his gesturing, Aden spotted more and more corpses on either side of the gully until he estimated their numbers in the hundreds.
Aden's surprise quieted. He remembered that it was often the custom of the men of power to commemorate their victories, and sometimes their defeats if they had been at the hand of some particularly worthy foe, with the presence of such a player. Being made of magic, they lived and sang by their graveyards until a newer battle erased them or the power that conjured them was itself erased.
Aden walked through the bodies. The flute player had eyes made of stone and took no notice of him. He passed close to the miniature human, bent near to him and heard a tune he thought he recognized from years ago. If he had the eye back he could have seen into the other spectrums where the song was being played and learn the true meaning of the battle.
The drainage opened onto the plain before the City. He passed by the scenes of other encounters, each without apparent reason or cause but all having been fought only between the adherents of magic. There were no shell casings, no spent cartridges and no chemical residues that the gunsight could discover to show that his world had had a hand in any of them. He found only more dismembered myths of the sort that carpeted the dry lake in front of Joust Mountain after the great battle there, swords engraved with still glowing runes and baroque mottoes written with dragons' blood on the ground beside dead giants.
Each successive battle site had its attendant watcher. They were mostly built along human lines but were invariably dwarfs or stunted, as if their diminished statures could exaggerate the importance of an engagement by contrast. Some played flutes like the first he had seen, while others strummed lyres carved from rosewood and inlaid with pearl, monotonously beat animal skin drums with curved talons dangling over their rims, or just sang wordlessly.
Aden ventured up along the slope of the hill on his left as far as he dared without chancing discovery by the hovercraft and found more of the same. The land was pockmarked with the remains of small, bitterly contested fights, spreading in a rough arc around the walls of the City. There were no great lines which would have indicated the maneuvering of organized companies toward any goal. It was more as if the magicians had emptied all the City's grotesques out onto the foothills, told them the slurs their brothers had committed against their masters' names, and set them upon each other until all were dead.
The gunsight showed that the dead had many different kinds of magic clinging to them, but the memorialists were formed from a single power. The rhyme and measure of their songs, when one could hear them, indicated a common basis.
A sea gull screeched in the air above Aden. It orbited him for a minute and then flew off, back to its ocean to feed on garbage from his world's approaching navies.
Magic, defeated by the examinations of his world, might have sought to affirm its own existence by turning upon itself. The men of power had continued their internecine wars even as they prosecuted their larger offensives against rationality, so it was not inconceivable that their servants had attacked each other as their masters sickened and died. They must have been the last, and the unicorn, alone but for its own servitors, may have created the dwarfs to bear witness to their struggles.
Aden reached the foundations of the road he had left the City on. He was in the open now but at the same elevation on which the hovercraft must approach; the forest would hide him. Steles and pylons, many discolored and snapped in half, bordered it. Everywhere, he conceived, there was commemoration and memorial, projections of thought and alien sentiment that reached through time to connect the observer to the powers that had caused them.
There would be no such monuments raised by the people he had seen last night. They will regard them as signposts whose existences will taunt them and draw them farther along. The unicorn would be sought out for the same reasons.
Aden walked more quickly. Last night he had put together reasons for fearing the arrival of the men. Now he realized that he might be one of them. Though he sought only the eye that had once been his, he was still here. He had used weapons of his own world, the gun and his knowledge of the tank column's analytic web, in destroying both it and the fairy castle.
A hollick the size of a ferret scuttled across the road in front of him. The gun was in his hand instantly. He tracked it until it disappeared into a crumbling tomb on the left.
The gun hummed irritably in his hand. He pointed it to the southeast, to where the forest came closest to the City's walls. High plumes of plasma jetted into the air behind peacock fans of questing radiation. The ships are looking, he whispered to the gun, they are deciphering everything, every deserted altar, corpse, creature, rune and scrap of magical rubbish left behind.
Aden was sweating. His palms glistened when he held them open, and for a moment he feared that their increased conductance would distort the gun's perceptions.
"The old coastline followed this elevation, here." Bock traced a line with his finger. His hands were small and delicate, as was his body, and that was permissible for a cartographer. He had been distrusted by rear echelon people because he had shown some fascination with the nature of the enemy in the way he decorated his maps with fanciful castles and mythic bestiaries. For the same reasons, Etridge valued his presence and his loyalty. "Assuming a steady rate of advance, the ocean should be back to its original borders in four years. After that, I would think intensive dredging can have the harbors ready for deep water traffic in three more."