"The Gardener is no longer here." Ray answered slowly. "There may have been an accident. Our communications were rudimentary. In the process of searching for resources to use, we may have removed minerals critical for the Gardener. Had we but known it, we would not have done it. However, in our ignorance and because of the Gardener's own lack of success in communicating with us, we may have contributed to the conditions that ended the continued existence of the Gardener." Ray was glad for his practice as a politician, tap-dancing around ugly truths.
The mage leaned back on its stool, looking long and hard at Ray. "The Gardener is... dead?"
"Yes."
"You killed it."
Ray didn't want to put it quite that bluntly. As he struggled for an alternate answer, the mage answered himself.
"That's impossible. These primitives couldn't hurt the likes of us. " This came from a second mage, identical to the first, only standing on his right.
"Well, the Gardener is gone," said a third mage, this one on the first's left.
"Many things could have happened here. We have only begun our own examination." The mage was proliferating at a blinding speed, thousands appearing, stretching out at the right and left of the first, all talking, all arguing. "They may be primitive, but killing is a primitive reaction." "How could something so small destroy the Gardener?" "The Gardener was old. It had long been out of touch with us. Anything could have happened." "We are old and not what we once were. Could they terminate us?" "That is not possible." "Neither could the Gardener vanish." "You go too far." "You do not go far enough."
Ray stepped back from the growing crowd of arguing mages. He spotted one that was missing an arm. Somehow the Teacher had changed modes from singular to plural. From the sound of the arguments, it or they didn't have a whole lot of experience at consensus-building.
"Now you have done it."
Ray found the bewigged lackey at his elbow. "Done what?"
"Got them fighting among themselves. They can keep this up until dark and sunrise again." The servant cast him a dour, sidelong glance. "You should not have done it."
"Why?"
"They will carry on like this and forget to take care of themselves. And when they do remember, my job will be all the harder. You should not have done that."
"I see your point, but maybe now, while they're busy, 1 can get some sleep myself"
With the attendant still glowering at Ray, he vanished quietly away.
Ray came awake slowly, his usual discomfort only pressing, not demanding. "Doc," he called. When he got no answer, he raised the volume. "Doc, I need to take a leak, and if you don't unplug me from all your test gear, I'm gonna do it right here."
"Just a second, Ray, I'm coming." In a moment, the curtains were jerked aside and Ray found himself facing a very excited Jerry and Kat.
"What's got into you two?'
"You've got to come look at our monitors," Kat demanded.
"You have a good rest?' Doc asked.
Ray stretched. "Yeah. Best in a week or so. No headache, either. Got any opinions why?"
"Some. You dropped off to sleep like normal, then your readings took off on a wild ride. Lasted six minutes, thirty-four seconds," Doc said, glancing at his board. "Then you dropped down into the sleep of the innocent."
"Nice," Ray yawned.
"And Kat here came galloping in, telling me I had to wake you up to see what she was seeing."
"I'm glad you didn't," Ray said, sliding off the table and looking around for the nearest rest room.
"Off to your left," Doc said, reading his mind.
"Our sky eyes are showing a total change," Kat enthused. "People have quit fighting, no more fires. Colonel, everything changed just like that."
"I'll be with you in a moment," Ray said, slipping into the rest room and closing the door behind him. Kat, still excitedly following him, almost had her nose flattened in the process. Relieved of annoying bladder pressure, Ray rejoined them. "So my little talk with the Teacher had immediate results."
"Looks like it," Jerry said. "What'd you tell it?"
"I'm not sure it was what I said. I think it might be where I left it."
"Which was?" Kat insisted.
"Arguing with itself. Or selves. I'm not sure whether it's one critter or a thousand. I'm not sure it knows the answer to that." This got him two quizzical stares.
"Sorry, folks, but let's keep one thing clear: My mind, conscious, subconscious, whatever, is having a hell of a time relating to this thing. It's filling in a lot of holes in the data, and I'm never sure what is really it and what is me painting in something from my memory that may or may not be like something the Teacher is trying to send. Communications is not taking place here on a one-for-one basis. Follow me?"
Both Jerry and Kat nodded slowly. "Being drafted into the navy, I had to learn a whole new language, or so it seemed. We middies could hardly understand Dumont or Mary's marines, either flavor, at first. At least we're all human. Imagine something that's never even seen a human before. Trying to get a word across must be damn near impossible."
"I only wished I'd gotten better at it before we killed the Gardener."
"Sir?" Jerry and Kat froze in place.
"It seems there was a reason why the hill Mary tapped had such a high concentration and wide variety of minerals. It was something like the central core for a thing I've been calling the Gardener." That earned Ray blank stares. "I named it that because the mental image I always got when communicating with it was of an old fellow who used to handle the flowers and shrubs around the Academy." The nods he got from both of them showed at least some understanding.
"Well, the Gardener last appeared to me and the kids the afternoon Mary tapped the metal out of Jeff's hill. He looked kind of sick, and got sicker as we talked. I haven't seen him since, and the Teacher keeps asking me where the Gardener is."
"Oh, lord," Doc groaned.
"Could we kill a part of a world machine?" Kat asked.
Ray stabbed a finger at Doc's board. "That, my friends, is the question I left the Teacher squabbling over among its selves. That's why he's too busy at the moment to drive people into a killing craze. Doc, find out if they've got a morgue in Refuge with all the victims of the rioting. If you can tell the difference between the rioters and their victims, I'd love to see a comparison between the size of this damn thing in their heads. Something was driving me damn near crazy enough last night in Refuge to want to riot. I think it was this tumor."
Jerry nodded. "I'll see what Cassie can tell me."
"The shuttle's yours if you need to make a quick trip to Refuge."
"I'm on it." The doc dropped into his workstation and started stabbing keys.
"Now, young woman, I'd like to see just how fast the Teacher's distraction turned off the murderings."
"Yes, sir."
Ray was in the conference room as evening gently settled into full dark and his exhausted battle staff, as he was starting to think of them, filed in. The padre had begged off; he had a premarriage counseling session already scheduled.
"How'd the day's core sampling go?" Ray asked for starters.
"Pretty much as you expected," Harry answered. "There's a lot more metal in the soil just below the first layer of storm debris. We drilled at six different locations. All the same. A pattern in the data piqued my interest. Seems less metal was laid down after the first storm inundation. Even less after the second. Matched in all six locations. So I went hunting for someplace where there were no major storms to tear up the ground, just minor sandstorms adding to the alluvial topsoil."
"Don't keep us waiting," Ray urged him. What did happen when there was no major disaster?
"Small amounts of residual metal at almost every level, growing larger the farther down we go. Apparently recovery was poorer each time. Top layer gave us the largest sample. However, it was nowhere near as high a concentration as we got in places undisturbed from the first break."
Ray rubbed his chin, then brought everyone up to date on what had been laid on him hour by hour through the day.
"The tumor is a commlink and memory, but memories of things you never did," Mary summed it up. "The Teacher is somehow causing the antisocial behavior, but that is biased toward the north." She stared at the ceiling, as if studying something. "There's a large landmass to the north, so it's probably coming from there. Have we missed anything?"
"It's electronic," Lek said. "Based on the content of the metal core samples, it has to be.
What did your dream mean by we'd wrecked its eyes, ears, fingers?"
"Any of you been having weird dreams?" Doc asked.
That got nods from around the table. "Even you," Ray said to Jeff and Harry.
"Been getting weirder over the past six, nine months," Harry said. "Same nightmares I had as a kid. Hated them then. Now I see what was going on."
"In my dreams, I'm dealing with something that my subconscious has dubbed the Teacher." Ray normally had no patience with long, rambling morning expositions about people's nightly entertainment. Now he launched into an exhaustive outline of his, both with the Gardener and the Teacher.
"Oh, no," Mary groaned as he told of his last meeting with the Gardener. "I had no idea."
"Neither did I," Ray pointed out. "We were moving fast and it was talking slow." Ray went on to finish with the connection between his leaving the Teacher—or Teachers—lost in debate, and the level of violence taking a nosedive.
"Is it attacking us?" Kat asked.
"I don't think so. In my dreams I don't feel any hostile intent. In Refuge, when I was about ready to run riot myself, there was no direction, just a general itch. No, right now it's puzzled by us and our behavior. Something that I might point out is mutual."
"So what?" Mary cut in. "It's raising havoc, no matter its intentions. How do we defend ourselves? Do we counterattack?"
"For the moment," Kat said slowly, "let's assume this is the thing that built the jump points. It sure as hell can do crazy things to our biology. Do we really want to piss it off? I mean, worse than we've done already? I didn't much like fighting Unity, and I was pretty sure we could beat them. Anyone think we can lick whatever-it-is?"
"Can't argue with you," Mary answered. "But do we have a choice. Looks to me like we're already at war. From a rifle sight picture, those bastards coming over the hill from Richland don't look all that different from Unity thugs."
"But those poor folks got even less control over their lives than Unity gave their troopers." Doc shook his head. "Killing people who don't even know why they're out to kill you ..."
Ray had spent twenty years fighting whatever enemy the government of Wardhaven pointed him at. Then Unity started calling the shots and he started having second thoughts. Un-good for a soldier. Worse results for President Urm of Unity. Damn. This was getting more complicated by the second.
"Does anybody around this table think we have any chance of enforcing our will upon the Teacher?" Ray asked as he looked from one person to the next. He ended with Mary.
"Colonel, I don't know how we can win, but I'll be damned if I'll give up without a fight."
"So, how do we de-escalate this without a fight?" he asked.
"Think you could tell it we just want to live in peace?" Kat asked Ray.
"I'll try that next time I close my eyes. Don't think I'm going to get much rest without saying a few words to our friend first. Mary, check on the kids, see if they're having problems."
"Yes, sir. So, what do we do?" Mary demanded back.
Ray took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He had no idea. He glanced around the table. Harry raised a finger tentatively. "Go for it," Ray said.
"Seems to me that we have two problems: the fire, and the boiling kettle. The Teacher is the fire, heating up the kettle, but the poor folks boiling around in the kettle are as much victims as perpetrators, no matter who holds the club. Your Kat and I ended up facing some of those folks last night. They'd been my neighbors most of their life. If something wasn't inciting them, they wouldn't have been out to bum my house."
"Agreed." Mary said. "So?"
"If you can't put out the fire, maybe we could dump ice in the pot, keep it from boiling."
"Great concept," Mary muttered. "Doing it. Now, that's the problem. What do we use for ice?"
"Just a thought," Harry started. "Miss V caused a lot of this by demanding copper. Panic spread a lot faster than any problems in the market. What if we ... I mean you spacers ... went into business against Sterling Enterprises? What if you offered the copper and other metals this economy needs?"
"That's gonna cool things down?" Mary shook her head. "You might as well declare war on the Teacher. Besides, my nanos won't survive many rounds with hills that fight back."
"The Teacher is moving down from North Continent So we start with our south side. There was no violence there. If we're mining their hills, it'll be easier to deliver to them."
Mary leaned back. "They're less panicked. They'd be easiest to unpanic. I like that."