Anderson, Kevin J - Gamearth 01 (29 page)

"That has not been proved!" Verne cried defensively. "This balloon has nothing mechanical in it, no invention or technology that can fail
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I say it will work over all the world, and we should not isolate ourselves here when we could be embarking on extraordinary voyages!"

"But no one would test the hypothesis," Frankenstein said, relating a story instead of arguing. "Until now."

Delrael had not been able to take his eyes from the towering balloon.

He craned his neck upward, looking at the bottom of the basket; he tugged on the sturdy tether ropes.

"We can't all fit in that," Bryl observed.

"No," Frankenstein said. "Only two. Perhaps you can risk three, but then the odds grow worse for you."

"No!" Verne insisted. "It must be a fair test, under ideal conditions, until we know more parameters. Only two may ride, and two will remain behind.

Otherwise, it will influence the results of the experiment
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we have to know.

An overburdened balloon may crash, regardless of how the technological boundary affects it."

"I concede your point," Frankenstein said.

Dirac rubbed his hands together. "You asked for our help, and two of you may take this balloon. The others will be quite safe here."

Verne fished in his pocket, withdrew a ticking time piece, and handed it to Frankenstein. He pulled out the pair of dice he had been looking for.

"If you wish to choose who remains behind, you are welcome to use my dice."

Frankenstein produced a small gadget used for automatically shaking the dice.

Vailret shook his head, putting his hand on Bryl's wrist to stop him from taking the dice. "Let's think about this. We have to choose carefully, not by a throw of the dice."

After a moment of silence, Paenar volunteered. "I wish to remain behind. I must ... ask something of the Sitnaltans." He refused to say more.

Delrael stared at the balloon, then looked down at the half-Sorcerer.

His gray eyes looked troubled. "Bryl, you have to go. Your Water Stone is the only real weapon we have against the dragon."

But Vailret watched the way his cousin moved, the pain as he kept rubbing his thigh. "Del, how's your leg?"

Delrael turned to him, then looked down at his leg. He rapped the
kennok
wood and it made a hollow, solid sound. "I can't feel it or bend it at all. There's no magic here to keep it alive." His face turned grayish.

Vailret suddenly realized that his cousin was genuinely frightened, but had kept it all to himself. "I'm afraid it's going to fall off."

"That settles it. You have to get out of these science-ruled hexes -now.

I'll stay behind with Paenar. Maybe I can learn something here." They had clasped hands, saying goodbye.

Axes came down, severing the tether ropes. The red-and-white balloon shot into the air as if propelled by an invisible bowstring. Delrael and Bryl leaned out over the basket, waving, but then drew back inside, clutching the ropes as the balloon rose higher.

Vailret watched the balloon rise above the city until it became only a blur in his vision. He felt alone in Sitnalta, surrounded by strangers who had an alien perspective on life itself.

But then he saw how sluggish the great colorful balloon was, how it drifted at the mercy of the wind currents. If a fire-breathing dragon saw them approaching, Bryl and Delrael would be helpless. And Professor Verne had warned them that the invisible gas within the balloon was extremely flammable.

*11*

Paenar's Eyes

"Everything on Gamearth operates by the Rules of Probability, the roll of the dice. The most unlikely events may conceivably happen, or the most obvious and ordinary things may not happen at all. With sufficient data, we can predict a likely outcome, but we cannot
know
."

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Professor Verne,
Collected Lectures

Purple twilight welled up, accompanied by a salt-smelling mist from the nearby sea. The mist infiltrated the streets of Sitnalta, creeping around walls and into the clusters of buildings. Vailret stared out the window of his quarters on the second floor of a building. After an evening meal, the Sitnaltans had left him and Paenar alone in their room. Now that the strangers had lost some of their novelty, the city dwellers had other things to attend to.

Below, Vailret could see characters climbing on ladders to light gas streetlights on every corner, racing against the dusk. Weblike patterns of already-glowing lanterns sparkled on the winding streets. Other than the subdued conversation of the lamplighters, he heard none of the industrious din of the daytime. Sitnalta had stopped for the night.

Vailret smelled the sea mist, thinking of Bryl and Delrael soaring away in Professor Verne's balloon.

Paenar lay brooding on a resilient cot against one wall. The blind man listened, sniffed the air, and paid intense attention to everything. It made Vailret uneasy.

But any character who had gazed upon the Outsiders and survived ... well, that gave him a right to be a little odd.

"Vailret," Paenar asked without turning his head. "You seem comfortable with others. Have you always ... been with people?"

The young man stepped back from the window, closing the shutters against the oncoming night. He considered the question for a moment, wondering what Paenar was driving at. "Well, I grew up in the Stronghold and I played in the village just at the bottom of the hill. Plenty of other characters around."

Paenar lay motionless on the bed, saying nothing. Vailret became uncomfortable enough with the silence that he spoke again. "Delrael can strike up a conversation with just about anybody, though. He's got a good charisma score
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but I don't think any of that goes very deep. He doesn't like to have to depend on people."

"What about Bryl?" Paenar asked. "You worked well together against the Spectres."

Vailret shrugged. "Bryl doesn't open himself up to anybody. I guess he's a friend, though he is rather strange. But he's sharp and willing to help out when you force him. Especially now. I think this quest has been good for him, to make him feel useful again."

Paenar sounded desolate. "I wish I had known people like you. Before."

The blind man sat up, facing Vailret.

"I became a Scavenger because I wanted to be away from people. I wanted to be alone. My father was cruel and forced a family's worth of work out of me. My mother allowed her children to be beaten as well as herself. Both of my parents were killed when our dwelling burned down
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Father was too drunk on spring cider to wake up, and Mother ran back to save him. The other villagers came out to watch my home burn, but no one tried to save it.

"Later, the woman I wished to marry chose a richer man instead
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he was an excellent gamer and had won most of his wealth through dicing. She did not love him, but she expected me to understand that simple love could not keep her fed. The others in the village taunted me because of it."

Vailret fidgeted, not sure he wanted to hear the blind man's confession, afraid it might forge a bond between them.

"So, I became a hunter and a wanderer. Early on I encountered a band of the Black Falcon Troops. They were perfect examples of how bad human nature can be, aiming to kill every non-human race on Gamearth, even the friendly ones. I was ashamed of my own people
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even I did not have such wholesale hatred. I just wanted to be left alone.

"Later, I found I could be useful by uncovering artifacts from the old Sorcerers. I did not need the coins the artifacts brought me ... but I did need an excuse for my life, a purpose. I wandered along the Spectre Mountains, up to Sardun's Ice Palace and down to Sitnalta. Then I stumbled upon the deserted Slac fortress and the Spectres. Now my eyes have been taken from me, and our world is doomed, and I am still alone.

"But just watching you, your attitude and your ambition to do something
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that stirs things in my heart. It feels strange."

Vailret fidgeted, embarrassed and awkward that a stranger had opened up to him so much. "So why did you volunteer to stay here in Sitnalta? When we were deciding who would ride in the balloon, you said you needed to ask for something. But you've made it quite clear you don't like these people."

Paenar stood up from his bed and unerringly strode over to the window.

He opened the shutters and breathed the damp air. Vailret could see that mist had swirled down the streets, making the gas lights look like glowing pools of butter.

"I will challenge them to make me new eyes."

Bryl clutched the edges of the balloon basket so tightly that the wicker bit into his fingers. He didn't like being so high in the air, especially not when the craft's own inventors refused to ride in it.

The balloon ropes creaked with the weight of the passengers and the shifting temperatures of the air. If he was going to gamble, Bryl preferred to do it with dice, not his life. The half-Sorcerer kept his fingers crossed, hoping the contraption would hold itself together. He thought he could hear the gas leaking out even now. He knew they were going to fall.

Since the wind pushed them along at its own speed, the air around them was calm. Though they could detect no motion, the three clustered hexagons of Sitnalta's city terrain soon dropped away. The buildings grew smaller, the people looked like black specks, as the balloon pulled away in smooth silence, moving with a deceptive speed that made Bryl dizzy. He could still hear the clanking sounds of Sitnalta in the still air, snatches of conversation carried up in a pocket of wind, the noise of the manufactories.

Delrael moved from one side of the basket to the other, peering at the world below. The balloon swayed, making Bryl ill, until he begged Delrael to stand still.

Below them the jagged edge of land met the sea, giving way to an interlocked network of blue hexagons of water. In the other direction the island of Rokanun showed plainly against the blue of the sea, three hexes distant.

Bryl had no way of telling whether they continued to rise or not. The sea below seemed so far away that he could no longer tell the difference.

Through the holes in the wicker of the basket, he could see the long drop beneath his feet. He tried shutting his eyes, but that didn't help at all, just left his imagination open to picture worse things. By watching the line of Rokanun, he noticed they had begun to drift in the wrong direction.

"Trial and error, I guess," Delrael said. "We know we were heading in the right direction a while ago. Maybe if we go up a little higher, we'll reach an airstream to take us toward the island. Or when the day starts to cool we should drop down again. That's what Professor Verne said."

Delrael untied the end of one of the sandbags and let the sand run out.

Bryl leaned over to watch the tan grains pouring down, vanishing in the distance before he could see them hit the water. He thought he could feel the balloon jerk upward again.

"Not so much! Be careful."

Delrael tied the sandbag again.

The afternoon swept on, the sun fell toward the western edge of the map. The towering dead volcano on Rokanun, Mount Antas, jutted up like a festering elbow on the far side of the island. Gulls flew far below them in the still air. Bryl kept an eye out for soaring, fire-breathing, fang-filled, scale-covered
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"Look!" Delrael flexed his
kennok
limb, climbing on the edge of the basket. "I can move it again!" He seemed so relieved he wanted to dance. But the gondola was crowded with a cumbersome metal tank in the corner. The tank contained enough of the mysterious buoyant gas for their return journey.

The half-Sorcerer widened his eyes. "If the magic in your leg works again, the we must have passed the technological fringe ... and the balloon isn't going to fall apart on us!" Bryl wiped his forehead and sat down in relief.

Hours later, Rokanun loomed below and in front of them. The balloon puttered aimlessly in the eddies around the great island. They could not control its course and hung suspended over the first hexes of grass terrain on the shore of Rokanun. With dusk coming on, they began their descent.

Delrael bent to the task of letting the lighter-than-air gas escape from the balloon. He scrambled up the rope mesh around the balloon's body, using his
kennok
leg with ease. He opened sealed flaps on opposite sides of the fabric, just as Verne had taught him, allowing the gas to escape and keeping them from going into a spin.

The red-and-white balloon sagged inward, settling toward the ground.

Bryl sat in the basket, yelling against the hissing sound and trying to be useful by directing Delrael to adjust the rate of their fall by opening and closing other flaps. Stray winds drove them closer to the shore as they came down.

The basket struck the brown beach grass, knocking Bryl to his knees.

The balloon was still buoyant and bounced upward again in a gust of wind.