The Last Hour of Gann (73 page)

He kept talking, but the audio was gone, and the next thing that came in clearly was, “…won’t help anymore,” so she knew it had gone the full loop.

“So,” said Meoraq. He looked around, not as if hunting out dangers this time, but just looking. Seeing the ruins, perhaps for the first time. “This is what he heard.”

“Huh?”

“Master Tsazr. The man I knew who entered Xi’Matezh.” His eyes finished their slow crawl over the dead city and came back to her. “He was here.”

“Maybe.” Amber spared the kiosk a distracted glance. “He says he’s transmitting across every bandwidth, or at least, I’m guessing that’s what he’s saying. So your teacher might not have been here, exactly—
”

“You’ve always got
to poke holes, don’t you?” interrupted Scott.

“—but this is probably something he heard if spent any time in one of these cities where the TV was on,” Amber finished, ignoring him. “I’m a little surprised you’d never heard it before. I guess you’ve never been in any ruins, huh?”
             

“Many times.
” Meoraq tapped at the kiosk wall—the monitor nearest to his hand flickered—and shrugged his spines. “I’ve never listened to the things I’ve heard there before. Ha. I might have heard this a hundred times.” He paused and looked back over his shoulder at Scott. “I admit, you make me curious,” he said, and cocked his head (not, Amber recalled, a gesture of curiosity). “Why did you stop to listen? What is it that you believe it means?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious?”
Scott waited until Meoraq deliberately flattened his spines before declaring, “It’s proof.”

Amber gave the lizard a few torturous seconds to jump on that, but he seemed content to just stand there and study
Scott, so in the end, she broke. “Of what?”

Scott
looked at her, smiling. “It’s a transmission, Miss Bierce. It’s coming from Matezh. And since you appear to be incapable or unwilling to add two and two, I’ll do it for you: There is a transmission tower at Matezh
and
,” he went on, raising his voice and one finger as Amber opened her mouth. “
And
it’s still working!”

Again Amber tried to talk, but this time it was Nicci who stopped her. Her color was high, but the shine in her eyes was too bright and brittle to be only excitement. It was a Bo Peep look, when the high was gone and she was trying to cozy just one more hit out of someone until tomorrow, just one more hit and everything was golden, just one more and it was all love.

“Listen,” Nicci pleaded in their mother’s voice, wearing their mother’s face. “Just listen to him, okay? He makes sense!”

Sense? Amber shook her head, looking back and forth from her baby sister/dead mother to the lunatic in a damned usher’s uniform, but it was Meoraq she kept coming back to. Meoraq, who merely watched it all play out with his head tipped up like that and his arms calmly folded.

“I’m aware of our situation here and I’m aware that we may all be living it with different goals,” Scott was saying, addressing all of them now. He talked fast and loud, making eye contact with everyone as he paced in front of the kiosk, and the choir was already clapping and swaying along. “I want to find a transmission tower at the end of this road. Hell, I want to find a skyport! Is that fantastic? Yes! But how fantastic, really? Meoraq—” He swung to point and Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. “—wants to find a temple where he can talk to God,” finished Scott, backing away. “And Amber Bierce wants us to find
this
!”

His voice
bounced off the walls and down the lifeless street, making people look uneasily around them, reminded of the emptiness all over again.

“What are you doing,
Scott?” Amber asked. She didn’t like the sound of her voice following those echoes. “How can you stand there and talk about skyports like it represents some sort of real chance?”

“Why not
? Look around! All their stuff is still here! It still works!”

“Yeah, right. We don’t know what it’s doing, but it works. At least, the stuff that hasn’t crumbled literally to dust still works.”

“That was just the synthetic stuff.”

“And God knows there won’t be any of that on a
starship
!” Amber flung out her hands in a kind of furious surrender. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Let’s go to the magical land of Make Believe and pretend there is a ship somewhere in Xi’Matezh. What makes you think you could actually fly it? Piloting a starship isn’t something you just hope to figure out
on the way
. Do I seriously even have to point out that it’ll be an alien ship? With alien technology?”

“Technology follows logical rules, no matter who makes it,”
Scott declared. “Look around you, Miss Bierce. The lights look like lights. The doors open like doors. Heck, even the bathrooms look like bathrooms.”

“And the giant fucking spiderweb in back
of the building last night? What did that look like, genius?”

“I’m not going to continue this discussion if you can’t be reasonable.”

“I’m the only reasonable one
in
this discussion! We will not be able to fly an alien ship! Even if we found a manual, we couldn’t read it! This is craziness!”

They booed her. They actually booed her. She thought Crandall started it, maybe as a joke, but there couldn’t have been less than a dozen others who joined in. In the echoing
street, it sounded like more. A lot more.

“See, that’s the difference between you and me,”
Scott told her in his lofty Commander-on-Deck voice. “I don’t need to scare people to feel better about myself. I’m not afraid to give people hope.”

Amber stared at him
, at all of them, speechless. Then, the explosion. She never felt it coming. One second, she was fine, if dumbstruck; the next, she was shouting up the whole world. “There is no fucking ship, you lying son of a bitch! We are
never
going home! This is it! This is what’s real!
There is no fucking hope
!”

Meoraq’s hand closed over her shoulder. Hard.

“You see? This is her reality,” Scott told the rest of the crowd while Amber tried unsuccessfully to shrug herself free. “The one where everything is pointless and we might as well give up and jump off the first cliff we come to.”

“No,
Everly
, it’s the reality where we’re starving to death on a fucking alien planet instead of making people think we don’t have to try anymore because we’ll all be saved by a magic ship!
That’s
giving up, jackass!
That’s
—Get your goddamn hand off me, Meoraq!”

“Hush,” he said.

“But—”

He looked down at her, his head cocked a
nd red eyes burning.

She shut her mouth, breathing hard,
fighting not to cry.

“
Thank you, Meoraq,” Scott said, turning back to his Manifestors. “I never said we don’t have to try, now have I? The difference is, what I think we need to try to do is survive until we can find our way home, while Miss Bierce seems to think we need to survive until we die.
She
says there’s no future.
She
says there’s no hope.” He paused to send her a scornful glance. “I think we’re all pretty lucky you’re not in charge.”

“This isn’t ab
out who’s in charge!” she insisted, and just as suddenly realized that, where that was concerned at least, she was dead wrong. Flustered, she looked around and saw a hundred accusing, angry eyes aimed back at her. Even Nicci’s. And she guessed that shouldn’t really surprise her, since Nicci had better reasons than anyone else here to think Amber was a bitch and a bully, but it still hurt. “You can’t…Come on,” she said, not shouting anymore but only trying to make them understand, to make Nicci understand at least. “Think what you want about me, but just…be sensible. Nothing we find out there could possibly be in better condition than this place, and just look at this place! It’s falling apart!”

“Stuff still works,” said Eric after a moment. “The doors open. Some of the lights come on. The
bots look okay.”

“
Okay?” Amber pointed accusingly at the straggling commercial units that had followed them—all spitting out damaged audio feed and error messages, their dented hulls and cracked face-plates showing countless years of erosion no matter how well they’d tried to maintain themselves. “That’s what you call okay? That’s what you’re using to prove we can power a ship up? Launch it? Navigate our way back to Earth?”

Meoraq’s hand on her shoulder tightened briefly, making her realize how her voice was climbing…and quavering. Again, she quieted without conscious effort, but her attempts to catch his eye were futile. He watched
Scott, only Scott, with his head still on the tilt and now his mouth very slightly open to show the glinting tips of a few teeth, but he wasn’t saying anything. Why wasn’t he saying anything?!

“A ship would be in a hangar,” Eric said
after an uneasy glance at the bots. “It’d be protected. Like the spider-things from last night. They were all okay, not even a little bit wonky. Even the bot that lived there was doing just fine.”

“One of them! All the others were dead! You can’t just ignore that!
You can’t…” She trailed off, seeing nothing in Eric’s face but a flat disdain that she simply couldn’t understand. He wasn’t some crazy Manifestor, he was a Fleetman who’d called Scott an idiot a hundred times behind his back. He knew better than what he was saying. He knew better! “Look,” she said, abandoning Eric to try and appeal to the others. “I want to go home as bad as the rest of you—”

Scott
laughed loudly and several others joined in with scorn.

“—but this isn’t going to happen,” Amber insisted. “It’s just not! It’s…It’s silly!”

“You’re right, Bierce,” Scott said, actually smiling at her. She was down, surely he had to see that, but he just couldn’t resist a parting kick. “Thinking we might find a starship is just silly. Why don’t you look Meoraq here in the face and tell him we’re on our way to meet God? Why don’t you ask Him to send us home? Hell, let’s ask Him for a brain and a heart and some courage while we’re at it, what do you say?”

Amber never had a chance to answer. The hand that gripped he
r shoulder with such strength now abruptly shoved her to one side so that Meoraq could stride furiously forward. Scott jumped back, but he wasn’t quick enough. In fairness, Amber really didn’t think anyone was quick enough. Meoraq snagged him by the shirtfront and yanked him close, holding him easily upright even when Scott’s feet went right out from under him.

And then he tipped his head back, studying the
sky with a calm and thoughtful air while Scott struggled at the end of his arm. “I do not require your belief,” he said at length. “Not yours. Not hers. Not anyone’s. Sheul needs no standard carried before him into battle. His will permeates all things, human. All things. So. I do not require your belief,” he concluded, still speaking softly as he raised Scott up just a little higher, just a little closer to his furious dragon-like face. “But I will not tolerate your mockery. Perhaps it does not offend Sheul, but it fucking well offends me.”

“
I didn’t mean it like that,” Scott said hurriedly. “I was just trying to make a p—”

“Regardless of what you think you will find when we reach X
i’Matezh, that is where I am taking you. It is not a matter for discussion and it is certainly not a matter for you to argue over. ‘But the Second Law writ was this: Lo, the Age of the Ancients is ended. Let their cities fall to ruins. Let their time pass out of memory. Let no one seek to master or remake the machines with which they poisoned Gann, lest they be corrupted in return, for such corruption shall be deemed unforgiveable.’ So did God speak and so did the Prophet record and so am I, Uyane Meoraq, bound to enforce. Hear me and mark me well,
S’kot
, Xi’Matezh is the oldest of the shrines built at the hour of the Fall and there may well be machines even in that holy place, but if you seek to make yourself their master—” Meoraq brought Scott right up to his scaly face, lifting him until nothing but the very tips of his scrabbling toes touched the ground and doing it with just one hand and no suggestion of effort. “—I will draw His blade and cut you down and leave you to rot where you lie. How do you mark me?”

“Meoraq, you can’t arbitrarily
—”

“How do you mark me?”

“How is it a sin to use a starship if God Himself put it there for us to—”

Meoraq drew
his long sword and raised it slightly, just slightly. “How do you mark me?” he asked, no louder and with no greater menace. He didn’t really need it.

“I understand,” said
Scott.

“Do I have your obedience?”

“You’ve always had my full support, Meoraq. You’re an invaluable resource and I’m confident we can come to some mutually respectful compromise before we reach your temple. In the meantime, you can rely upon me to direct my people to provide you with any assistance you feel you require in the course of your efforts.”