The Dark Design (70 page)

A man and a woman passed near his door. They were talking of the mysterious event that had taken place less than a month ago down-River. A great noisy monster had flown from over the western mountain at night and had landed on The River. The braver, or more foolish, locals had boated out toward it. But it had sunk into the waters before they could get close to it, and it had not come up again.

Was it a dragon? Some people said there never had been any dragons. These, however, were skeptics from the degenerate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anybody but a fool knew that dragons did exist. On the other hand, it could have been a flying machine of the beings who had made this world.

It was said that some had seen—or thought they’d seen—a manlike figure swimming away from where the dragon had sunk.

The man in the hut smiled.

He thought of Tai-Peng. That was not his true name. Only Tai-Peng and a few others knew what it was. His adopted name meant “The Great Phoenix,” a clue to his real name since he had often boasted in Terrestrial life that he was just such.

Tai-Peng had met him long ago, but he did not know this.

The man in the hut spoke a code word. Instantly, the exterior of the grail sprang into light. The light did not shine over the entire surface. Against the gray metal were two large circles, one on each side of the cylinder. Inside each circle, which represented a hemisphere of the planet, were thousands of very thin, glowing, twisted lines. These intersected many tiny flashing circles. All were empty except for one. This enclosed a flashing pentagram, a five-pointed star.

Each circle, except for that holding the star, emitted dots and dashes of light.

The display was a chart not made to scale. The lines were the valleys, and the circles indicated men and women. The pulse group of each was an identity code.

Clemens and Burton, among others, had been told by X that he had chosen only twelve to assist him. There were twelve times twelve symbols on the lines, not counting the circled star. One hundred and forty-four in all.

A number of circles were pulsing the same group. The man sighed, and he spoke a code phrase. Instantly, the symbols emitting dash-dash-dash-dots disappeared.

Another code phrase. Two glowing symbols appeared near the top of the grail.

Only seventy recruits were still alive. Less than half of the chosen.

How many would there be forty years from now?

Of these, how many would quit before then?

However, there were many nonrecruits who now knew about the tower. Some of these even knew about the person whom Clemens called the Mysterious Stranger or X. The secret was out, and some who’d learned it second-hand were as intensely motivated as the recruits.

Given the changed situation, it was inevitable that others would get in on the quest polarward. And it was possible that not one recruit would get to the tower whereas some nonrecruits might.

He spoke another code phrase. The circles were suddenly accompanied by other symbols. Triangles, an uncircled pentagram, and one hexagram, a six-pointed star. The triangles, which pulsed code groups, were the symbols of the second-order Ethicals, the agents.

The hexagram was the Operator’s.

He spoke again. A square of light appeared in the center of the hemisphere facing him. Then the display outside the square faded away. Immediately, the square expanded. It was a blowup of the area in which the three stars and a few circles were located.

Another phrase brought forth glowing digits above the square. So, the six-pointed star was downRiver by many thousands of kilometers. The Operator had failed to board the
Rex.
But the second paddle wheeler would be coming along, though much later.

In the neighboring valley to the east was Richard Francis Burton. So near yet so far. Only a day’s walk away—if flesh could pass like a ghost through stone.

Burton was undoubtedly on the
Rex Grandissimus
. His circle had moved too swiftly along his line for him to be traveling by sailboat.

The Operator… what action would the Operator take if he did get on the
Mark Twain
? Reveal a part of the truth to Clemens? All of it? Or keep silent?

There was no telling what would happen. The situation had been changed too drastically. Even the computer at HQ would not have been able to indicate more than a small percentage of the probabilities.

So far, there was only one agent on a boat, the
Rex.
At least ten could be picked up by the
Mark Twain,
but it was improbable that more than one would be. If that.

Fifty were in the line between the
Rex
and Virolando.

Of the total of sixty, he could identify only ten. These were upper echelon, heads of their sections.

The chances were that he would encounter none of the sixty.

But… what if he failed to get aboard either boat?

He felt sick.

Somehow, he would do it. He
must
do it.

To be realistic, he had to admit that he could fail.

At one time he had believed that he could do anything humanly possible and some things which no other humans could do. But his faith in himself had been somewhat shaken.

Perhaps this was because he had lived among the Riverpeople too long.

There were so many journeying upRiver, driven by one great desire. By now most of them would have heard Joe Miller’s story, though it was at hundredth-hand. They’d be expecting to find the towel rope up which they could climb the precipice. They’d also expect the tunnel which would permit them to detour an almost unscalable mountain. They would expect the path along the face of the mountain.

These were no more.

Neither was the tunnel at the end of the path, at the base of the mountain. It had melted into lava.

He looked again at the unencircled star. Close. Far too close by. As the situation now was, it represented the greatest danger.

Who knew how the situation would change?

Now the loud voice of Tai-Peng entered the hut. He was outside, having tumbled his woman, and he was shouting something unintelligible at the world. What a noise the man made in this world! What a blur of action!

If I cannot shake the gods on high, I will at least make an uproar in Acheron.

Now Tai-Peng was closer, and his speech could be heard clearly.

“I eat like a tiger! I crap like an elephant! I can drink three hundred cups of wine at a sitting! I have married three wives, made love to a thousand women! I outplay anyone on the lute and the flute! I write important poems by the thousands, but I throw them into the stream as soon as they’re finished and watch the water, the wind, and the spirits carry them off to destruction!

“Water and flowers! Water and flowers! These I love the most!

“Change and impermanence! These wound, pain, torture me!

“Yet it is change and ephemerality that make for beauty! Without dying and death can there be beauty? Can there be perfection?

“Beauty is beautiful because it is doomed to perish!

“Or is it?

“I, Tai-Peng, once thought of myself as flowing water, as a blooming flower! As a dragon!

“Flowers and dragons! Dragons are flowers of the flesh! They live in beauty while generations of flowers bloom and die! Bloom and become dust! Yet even dragons die; they bloom and become dust! A white man, pale as a ghost, blue-eyed as a demon, once told me that dragons lived for eons! Eons, I say! For ages that make the mind turn upside down to think of them! Yet… they all perished millions of years ago, long before Nukua created men and women from yellow mud!

“In all their pride and beauty, they died!

“Water! Flowers! Dragons!”

Tai-Peng’s voice became less loud as he went down the hill. But the man in the hut heard one especially clarion passage.

“What evil person brought us back to life and now wishes us to die forever again?”

The man in the hut said, “Hah!”

Though Tai-Peng’s poems spoke much of the shortness of life of men and women and of flowers, they never mentioned death. Nor had he ever before referred to death in his conversation. Yet now he was speaking boldly of it, raging at it.

Until now he had seemed to be as happy as a man could be. He’d lived for six years in this little state and apparently had no desire to leave it.

Was he ready now?

A man like Tai-Peng would be a good companion for the voyage upRiver. He was aggressive, quick witted, and a great swordsman. If he could be subtly urged to resume the course he had forsaken…

What was likely to happen in the decades to come?

All he could predict—for now he too was one of the webs in the dark design, no longer a weaver—all he could predict was that some would get to Virolando and some would not.

The more astute would discover a message there. Some of these would surely decipher it. Among these would be both recruits and agents.

Who would get to the tower first?

He
must
be the one who did.

And he must survive the perils of the journey. Probably the greatest of these would be the inevitable battle between the two great boats. Clemens was determined to catch up with King John and kill or capture him. It was possible, highly possible, that both vessels and their crews would be destroyed.

Savagery! The idiocy of the tiger!

All because of this frenzied desire for vengeance which had seized Clemens. Clemens, who was otherwise the most pacifistic of men.

Could Clemens be talked out of this childish passion for revenge?

Sometimes he agreed with what the Operator, in a depressed mood, had once said.

“Humankind sticks in the throat of God.”

But…
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

And the Master of Dark Truth was riding on unpredictable Change.

“What… ?”

The glowing lines and symbols had disappeared.

For a few seconds he stared, his mouth open. Then he uttered a string of code phrases. But the surface of the grail remained gray.

He clenched his fists and his teeth.

So… what he had feared had at last happened.

Some element in the complex of the satellite had suddenly quit working. No wonder. After over a thousand years the circuits were due for a checking, but no one had been able to inspect them on schedule.

From now on, he would no longer know exactly where the other men and women were. Now he too was in the house of night, bounded by fog. The passing of the lights on the grail had left a deeper gloom behind. He felt like a tired and companionless pilgrim on a lonely shore, a shadow among shades.

What would go amiss next? What
could
? For one thing, no, surely not… But if it did, then he might not have all the time needed.

He stood up and straightened his shoulders.

Time to go.

A shadow among the shades and running out of time.

Like the recruits and the agents, like the Riverdwellers, like all sentient creatures, he would have to make his own light.

So be it.