The Wizard from Earth (17 page)

Inoldia almost felt admiration for Valarion's guile.  She admitted to herself that she had much to learn about political machinations, but she doubted could have done better in her choice of political puppet by which to advance her goals in Rome.

Valarion continued,  “See also that Archimedes has revealed himself.  True, there is no direct link of evidence between him and the star which fell on the battlefield, but in time the Senate and the Emperor will see that only one man could have been responsible.  This could well be the end of him.”

“Isn't Archimedes the Emperor's friend?”

“Emperors trust no man as friend.  If  one ever did, he would be killed, and his 'friend' would be emperor in his stead.  Hadron follows that logic, so there is no question that in time we can alienate Archimedes even from the Emperor.”

“We should not wait for that.  We should kill him now.”

“There is a good reason why we shouldn't.  A reason that will be of tremendous benefit to the Empire.”

“And what is that?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.” 

She glared, but the smugness of his smile did not diminish. 

“Besides,” he added, “I gather even the Sisters are afraid of Archimedes.”

“We fear no man!”

“If that is so, then when we near Rome, why don't you fly into his courtyard and decapitate him yourself?”

“Perhaps one day I will.”

“There is the old Roman saying, 'No time like the present.'”

Inoldia scowled and snatched the chicken leg and proceeded to gobble it down.

“Patience is needed,” Valarion said, wincing at the manifestation of her appetite.  “His time is coming.  But alienating him from the establishment will be difficult.  Half the families in the Senate have had him as a tutor and think warmly of him.”

“You had him as your tutor, yet you are not warm to him.”

"And I will always be grateful that you rescued me from his prison of dry books and droning lectures.”

He bowed and Inoldia's attitude softened.  But it had been a long time since they had been intimate, and she knew those days were over for both of them. 

"I will be in my cabin," she said, arising.  "Have a large meal brought.  One other thing.  If you find any young woman among the prisoners on any of your ships, inform me immediately.”

“Just guessing, but would this be the young woman whose hair is sometimes orange and sometimes not?”

So he knew.  Of course, Bivera would have reported to him of Inoldia's orders, and his officers at the battle-that-was-not would have reported of the confrontation.

With only a slightly more serious expression, Valarion said, “If ever a young woman was in the care of Rome's Finest, she would be raped and killed by now.”

"I pity any who would try with this one."

"Inoldia, I saw how you stirred when I mentioned a warrior girl in the north a while back.  I assume this is the same one.  What is the story behind her?”

"Valarion, do not inquire into affairs above your station."

“I am within grasp of Seal and Full Purple, and yet you tell me there are things above my station?”

“So you do listen.” 

As she departed, she gave the bare bone one last gnaw and tossed it on his lap.

20.

During the daytime, the slave ship's hold became stifling hot.  The food was unpalatable and the water brackish.  Sanitation consisted of clay pots pushed between rows.  That is, when it consisted at all.

Some men died of exposure, others from shock.  Matt healed the wounds of one man, but his patient never recovered and died a few days later.  Ivan could not identify the cause of death, but Matt had seen the despair in the man's eyes.   

As days passed, the conversations among the prisoners dwindled to almost complete silence.  They passed the forested hills of Frans and Espin, then had only blue water and other ships full of slaves to view through the tiny ports. 

Gradually Matt retreated more and more into the virtual world inside his skull.  Ivan had archives of music, games, and movies.  Matt wandered through photo-realistic 3D simulations of places on Earth, his senses protected from the assault of the sensory horrors of the real world.  Ivan periodically notified him of meal times, clay pot times, and one time a storm. 

Matt reviewed Ivan's telemetry of all that had happen to them since landing on Ne'arth.  He clipped stills from the Fish Lake video, so that he could look at Tret and Layal and the others he'd met there.  Curiously, he felt he knew them better from this than when he had been among them. 

Then he viewed his telemetry of the members of the rebel patrol.  Right away, he noticed something disconcerting.

"Ivan, do you have any video of Carrot when she's not frowning?"

Ivan presented him with several examples.

"How about, do you have any video of Carrot not frowning while she's looking at me?"

It was debatable in one segment whether her expression counted as not a frown.  In another segment, she was staring in his direction but seemed to be looking past him.

Matt was forced to face an uncomfortable fact.  It wasn't just that Carrot didn't like him.  She positively detested him.  How could he have missed her attitude toward him?  It was present in every glare and scowl and sarcasm.  Only wishful thinking had prevented him from recognizing the reality.   

Matt was not so small-minded as to be glad that she might be dead now.  But he did resent that he had cared about her and that she couldn't even treat him with the courtesy that common decency would afford to a stranger. 

“She didn't give me a chance,” he said.  “She didn't even try to find out what I was like on the inside.”

“We have previously discussed that she has genetic mutations designed to enhance effectiveness in combat.  It might be that as part of that, she also is genetically programmed to be combative.”

Matt stared at the video still of Carrot that Ivan projected.  Her eye ridges were furrowed, her chin was set, her mouth was twisted in a frown as it was about to deliver another cutting remark.

“I don't think that's it,” he said. “Off.”

The image vanished and he was back in the hold of a ship filled with slaves.  He felt almost relieved.  What was she to him?  Someone he had met for a few days and become infatuated with.  And if instead he had kept his wits, if he hadn't been distracted at the crossroads while trying to save her, he might have noticed the approach of the soldiers and eluded them.  And then he would be free in Londa right now, about to start his career as a successful and prominent healer.

I'm not going to think about her anymore
, he thought. 
She's not worth it.  I've got plenty of other people in my life to care about and think about. 

A little later, he commented, "You know, it's funny, I hardly think about my family and friends . . . ."  He paused.  "Ivan . . . are you messing with my memories?"

"What do you mean by 'messing?'"

"I mean, are you controlling my memories in some way?"

Ivan paused.  "It depends on what you mean by 'controlling.'"

“Ah.  What are you doing to my memories?"

"I am constricting neural bandwidth access to all memories prior to arrival in the Delta Pavonis System that have a protein signature indicative of strong emotion."

"Why are you doing that?"

"You requested that I do so."

"I don't remember that.
  Uh, is there a reason I don't remember that?"

"At the time of the request, you also requested that I erase your short term memory."

Matt was silent for a while.

"Ivan, I'd like you to stop constricting access to my memories."

"Understood.  Complying."

At first it didn't seem like anything had changed.  But then when he thought of Earth, the memories were no longer faded and flat.  His memories were infused once more with emotion.  He vividly remembered the squirt gun fight with Mom.  The hikes with Dad.  The virtual medieval battles with Random.  The time seven-year old Synethesia had stolen a kiss on his cheek and scampered away to plant one on another boy.  He not only remembered the events, he remembered how he had felt about them, and how he still felt about them.   

His extended family, all his friends.  Bicycling down Ravenna.  Flying kites at Sand Point.    Sailing on Lake Chacuabs.

Most of all, he remembered smiling and laughing, and how that had felt, and how long since he had smiled or laughed freely.  It had been before he had stepped inside Pod 3025H. 

"It's all gone now.  My whole life on Earth.  I knew things would change a lot when I went to the stars, but I never thought it would be like this.  We don't even know if there's a Seattle anymore.  Or an Earth.”

“It is unlikely that Earth would be destroyed.  Cosmic catastrophes are extremely rare.”

“Yeah, but what about artificial catastrophes?  What if over the course of seven hundred years a super AI took over the System and built a quintillion printers and converted the entire mass of the planet into processing circuitry?”

Ivan paused.  “That is possible.”

“Or there could have been an interplanetary war with weapons that create black holes to swallow entire planets.  Anyhow, something's keeping the people of Earth from coming here.  And maybe it's that they're not there anymore.”

“Do you no longer believe in the cosmic zoo hypothesis?”

“I don't know what to believe.”

Finally, Matt broke down in tears.  This passed unremarked by his fellow prisoners.  There had been enough weeping over the days of their voyage.  Matt's home might be vastly different than theirs, but the reason for his tears was the same:  he was homesick for a place he would never see again.

After a day of grief, he said, “Ivan, I can't take this anymore.”

Ivan paused.  “Do you wish to initiate the euthanasia protocol?”

“That's not what I'm talking about.  I can't take this ship anymore.  I can't take being trapped in here anymore with nothing to do.  Even in VR, I know my body is still here and I can't stand it.”

“Are you asking to be placed in autopilot mode?”

“Take me out when we get to where we're going.”

“Initiating autopilot mode . . . autopilot mode terminated.”

For Matt, it was that one moment they were at sea in mid-voyage, and in the next the ship bumped a dock. 

The crew tied the ship fast and soldiers entered the hold, reconfigured the chains, and led the prisoners to shore.  It was not the island of Italia.  There was a bay, but instead of a city and a dormant volcano, Matt faced barren hills that rose sharply from the shore.  Satellite view, which Ivan had been monitoring all along, indicated their location as thirty kilometers north of Rome.  The island was small and uncharted by the Fish Lake atlas.

The Romans, however, seemed to think it was important.  There were heavily armed soldiers everywhere, and dozens of naval vessels circled the waters.  The building up the trail ahead had siege walls crowned with crenelations and bristling with crossbow mountings.  Perched upon the highest hills, towers watched the sea.

The prisoners, exhausted and hungry and bewildered, did not struggle as they were led inland. A squad of soldiers poked the prisoners up the slope into the central region of the island.  Ahead lay roads that branched toward holes in the mountain sides.  Men carrying picks and shovels were entering and exiting the holes.  Matt was unchained, given a shovel, pushed inside a shaft, and commanded to start digging. 

The air was oxygen-poor and the lowest galleries were knee-high with water, which was sucked out by a steam-driven pump.  Matt reflected on the technology and concluded that Ne'arth's Rome could be on the verge of its own version of the Industrial Revolution.  Not that remarkable, given that many historians had concluded that Earth's Roman Empire had actually taken a few faltering steps toward an industrial revolution of its own.  

In the drudgery of the mines, Ivan could tune out the noise and block the pain.  Ivan could not do the digging for him.  Matt reflected on the irony of using autopilot mode to escape the monotony of the ship to immediately encounter an even greater monotony on land.

"Where are we?" Matt asked a haggard prisoner who had been in the mine when the prisoners from the ship had arrived.

"Palras," the man muttered. 

"What is this place?"

"Silver mine.”

The man's eyes, like those of the others who had been there a while, were glazed into a zombie stare.  Matt decided not to ask any more questions.  He wasn't sure whether he had any.

When Matt and the others were finally permitted to emerge from the shaft, it was night.  Soldiers with torches shoved the work gang down a path toward a cluster of tents.  Inside each, the prisoners were fed slop and made to sleep on bare dirt.  Where the ship's hold had been hot, the ground here was cold.  Several prisoners awoke in the morning with hacking that Ivan identified as pneumonia.   

Throughout the camp, several of the new arrivals had died during the night.  The soldiers bossed prisoners into carrying away the limp bodies.  Matt wondered at the fatality rate, and asked a fellow prisoner, “How long have you been here?”

“Shut up,” came the reply.  But when the guards weren't looking, the prisoner said, “A year and a moon.”

The man's beard was long and flecked with white.  His cheeks and eyes were hollow.  He looked old and young at the same time. 

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

Barely nineteen in Earth years
, Matt thought. 

Over the course of the day, in conversations equally as terse, he learned that the longest that any prisoner had been there was three Ne'arth years.  Matt surveyed the gray hairs and wrinkled skin and haggard forms, and concluded that unless Rome favored old men as mining slaves, the years on Palras were hard.   

“We've got to escape,” he subvocaled.   

But when evening came, another day of constant digging had left him exhausted.  Even Ivan's powers of regeneration could not operate without a source of energy, and the food was barely edible, never mind nourishing.  Matt fell asleep despite Ivan's prodding.

The next day, however, he gathered enough mental energy to begin laying plans.  First, collect information.  Ivan photographed shackle keys whenever they were revealed in the hands of the guards, and generated a digitized model.  Using that as guide, Matt fashioned a bit of stray wire (which had come off the tip of a soldier's whip) into the proper shape.  Now he could escape even when the chains were on.   

Using satellite view, they mapped a path through the hills and identified the currents that would carry him near a neighboring island which they knew was visited by fishermen because fishing nets were spread over the rocks by the beach.  As it was a thirteen-kilometer swim, they searched the shoreline of Palras for driftwood that could serve as a paddle board.

The more he planned, the more holes Matt saw in the plan. 

“The soldiers will stop us if we leave the tent under regular conditions, so we'll have to wait for a storm like the one the other night.  But then the waters will be rough, and I don't know if I can make it against the current even in the best weather.  And then the soldiers count prisoners in the morning, and they'll know I escaped, and they'll send ships to the island as the first place they'll look.  So I'll have to leave as soon as I get there.  But how do I get a fisherman to take me anywhere else in his boat?”

“You could give him silver.”

“Or he could kill me and take the silver.  Or turn me over to the Romans and get a reward on top of getting to keep the silver.”

But silver did seem part of the answer to the puzzle of escape, and in that he had enjoyed a lucky break:  the ore veins on the island were rich.  The very dust he was caked with daily in the process of digging in the mines had an intrinsic value that he knew from his observations at Londa Market was well respected on this world. 

Each night when he returned to the tent, he brushed off his skin and clothing and made a little pile of silver dust on the floor.  It was barely concealed in a corner, but it wasn't the target of theft in a place where silver was abundant and no one thought they would have the opportunity to spend it.  If he could reach the outside world, however, it would be a different matter, and a handful of silver might be enough to buy his continued freedom in situations where otherwise all hope would be lost.