"Name of god I will!" Etridge roared. "You took the unicorn away from me. Blew it up and packed it away in god and history where no one can get it!"
"You couldn't have . . . "
"
Then why kill it, Aden?
" Etridge had his hand around the man's shirt front again, twisting the cloth and drawing his face closer. "Why the words from your damn Office, or from whatever thing or monster was speaking to you? Why that bastard little gun of yours? Just refugees talking to one another, right? Little, gutless minds the war's used up and thrown away, to bother people like me! That's you, Aden, and your bloody Office! You know that?"
Aden tried to speak but nothing came out. Stamp saw dark recognition spreading over his face, blocking his words. Simultaneously, a mirror image of the same emotion crossed Etridge's face.
Aden tried to tell him about the eye. "The Special Office never was. It closed down . . . "
"It's still open. Just like you. And now that you, all of you've taken the unicorn, I'll tell you what we're going to do!" Etridge paused. He stood there for more than two minutes, looking down into the agent's eye, half of him seeming to wait for some signal to be broadcast to Aden from an antenna at Lake Gilbert or some outpost situated deeply within the terrible regions he wished so passionately to explore and subdue.
"You're so lost in your own language and your precious balancing act between our world and theirs that you're half magic yourselves. That's what you'd want, that's what you'd like, isn't it?
Isn't it?
" Aden nodded stupidly to Etridge. "So we're going to follow
you.
Let you go, all of you, and follow you and your goddamn bleeding Special Office! And when you run from us, when you run in the only ways you've taught yourselves, you're going to lead us to and through all of the secrets that beast took with it." Etridge threw Aden backward into the rubble so violently that he almost lost his balance and fell with him.
"We're going to chase your gang through every spectrum, through every dimension and hiding place you run to. You're cripples, Aden! When we move after you, you and your Office'll run, it'll be in directions that we can anticipate. One chase, one segment at a time. You're going to teach us, everything, until we don't need you any more."
Stamp felt a vicious peace and contentment inside of him; his conversion had not come too soon. This way would take longer, but the understanding and the triumph would inevitably be theirs. He knew that it would, both in his own mind and from the way Aden's face passed through shock into a despair so profound that it could only be a reflection of truth.
Professor of Astrophysics
University of North Carolina
Skirmishes over millennia between squabbling survivors of an atomic cataclysm have poisoned lands and broken human spirit. A dwindling cohort roused by prophets of Armageddon to end gloriously Humanity's agonizing death spiral invariably expire without effect. Evil seems for a while to be more competent or at least more creative: it sets up over centuries an interstellar Trojan horse, but ultimately fails. Magic and science coexist in intersecting dimensions, but the reductionists analyze then counteract the magicians to extinction, diminishing the world of the martial victors.
These themes of the Book of Wars trigger darkness on sunny afternoons, a tribute to the young writer's talents. If one reads SF for vistas and planetfalls, starship Victory is potent imagery. But all the credulous workers/ worshippers swept into its mystique don't hold our interest. Rather, we identify with the few who glimpse a plot before an inevitable fatality. The seeming triumph of this machine will stick as a profound betrayal. But from several centuries of perspective on that battle, we learn in Dragon that evil Salasar was vanquished while draining survivors and their lands ever more. Humanity had indeed reached the stars, so Victory was a legitimate tool turned against us. But after its demise, an ultimately futile empathy had drawn the star voyagers home. Entropy got to them, and in Dragon they are using their skills to cannibalize machines for war.
Cassandras are still pointing at our Trojan horse. Fossil fuels underpin our civilization, giving some time away from subsistence farming to read and write. They dispatch our robots into deep space, swelling bodies to the corner grocery, machinery to mine our food, and warriors to stand astride dwindling repositories of ancient sunlight. All species become extinct. But, wouldn'titbe grand to clean up our act enough to take it on the interstellar road before closing the show?