Page 6 of Engines of Reason

THE RIVER JOURNEY FROM Lannesite to Telm gives me plenty of time to reflect on my general unfitness, but honestly it’s lost its sting. When I am in the downward swing of my moods and casting about for a cause to account for that effect, it is not poor work performance I seize on. I have done more good being a bad anthropologist than I ever did when I upheld professional ethics. Although sometimes it seems good isn’t really something I do.

That is the mood speaking. I have done worthwhile things, here on Sophos IV. Wizardly things, even. Ridiculous.

The greatest offence against anthropology that I commit, on a daily basis, is to be here, amongst these people. I am not of them. I am not even the Elder they name me. Not of the starfaring culture who came out here over a millennium ago to colonise this world. Who monkeyed with the relatively simple native biome to make it work for them; who founded a colony, then lost touch with Earth. Those ancient hands were not my people nor even my ancestors. They collapsed, back on Earth, and each colony was left to its own devices, to dwindle or develop as ingenuity and inheritance allowed.

My own culture arose on Earth later. Straits of necessity developed a less wasteful, more sophisticated technology than the original colonisers ever had. In our hubris, we decided we were eternal and the fruits of Earth’s prior efforts were of scholarly curiosity. Hence, we installed observers on various of the viable colony worlds to study the way the colonial cultures had developed. Which, on Sophos IV, meant a rather fascinating post-technological patchwork of little polities bound together in a net of intricate social conventions I still do not entirely grasp. There’s always a nuance that escapes me, but their system is generous enough to have an inbuilt place even for an actual wizard, in which being slightly off from all their mores is actually beneficial.

On other colony worlds, I believe, they held on to or rediscovered various levels of technology, even outdid their progenitors for all I know. Sophos IV’s biosphere never banked any fossil fuel reserves, though, so it’s human or beast-power, wind, or the river that carries me away from the court and towards this alleged sorcerer. Still other colonies have no more than sticks and stones—no accessible metals perhaps, or a catastrophic collapse beyond the nightmares of the Sophos colonists. Others are dead, and still more we never found. They were energetic, that first wave of Earth-born colonists. They were optimistic. They were desperate.

And we, the anthropologists, we were energetic, too, and I know now that we were optimistic, and it seems very likely we were also unwittingly desperate. Because, after a few centuries of study, no more word came from Earth, and my colleagues left to investigate and never came back, and it was just me in my tower. Me, sleeping and waking and finding nothing had changed, and slowly understanding that I was—for all intents and purposes—the last remnant of my own culture. Not the “Elder Race,” just some jumped-up johnny-come-latelies with a big opinion of ourselves. A candle that thought it was the sun. We flickered and went out, and the neo-feudal culture of Sophos IV goes patiently on.

I fight it, but the thought still oppresses me, when I am at my nadir and I’ve had to disengage the DCS and feel all the raw misery of it. That I am the last and only; that the best I can communicate to these people, of what I am, is that I am some sort of wizard.

Not just a wizard but a court wizard. After Lyn woke me in my tower and recruited me to go deal with a peculiarly troubling piece of business whose return I still watch for, I decided to stay. Not just go back on ice in the ludicrous hope that my long-absent peers would turn up with some footling apology. Just got slightly delayed around Alpha Centauri, good lord is that the time? I followed Lyn, joined the Lannesite court, became a part of it all, became their wizard. Albeit one who wouldn’t perform aggressive wizardry on demand, each refusal making myself less beloved of the Regent because she had very firm ideas on what a court wizard was for. But I will sally out to meet magic with magic. That remains my duty. And usually it isn’t magic. Well, I mean obviously it’s always not magic, because there’s no such thing. But usually it isn’t even not-magic. Just, you know, not magic. Someone with some sleight of hand and a sense of theatre, trading off the reputation of those who, in past times, re-awoke some of the ancient colonial-era tech. That’s how you get to be a sorcerer in this neck of the woods, and it’s happened enough that there are dozens of stories about the archetype. Stories this “‘Sendroth” seems to know very well, given how he’s playing to them.

Telm—the name is etymologically derived from colonial terminology signifying a communications routing station, a fact interesting not even to me—is a modest trading hub. Outside the borders of Lannesite but close enough that nobody looks to it for even nominal independence. The leading civic authority is a porsir, denoting that they owe their position entirely to the good graces of the outside ruler who installed them. Without, quite, being a mere functionary of the Regent. It’s complicated. That’s one thing my people never really appreciated, when we set up our anthropological long watches. We assumed that, because these people had fallen away from the technology of their forebears, they had necessarily also degraded into some crude sketch of a society that we—sophisticates as we were—would be able to entirely comprehend just by watching. And what actually happened—what, I suspect, always happens—is that, yes, the tech falls away but the social structures just keep becoming more complex. Until what we encountered was an intricate web of inter-relations, linguistic conventions and traditions that defied superficial analysis.

Makes introductions difficult, but I’ve chosen this particular river and this particular stopover because the man is known to me. An old friend, in a world where I, an old man, have very few.

Alwaeryn Porsir is, indeed, older. Not the hard young ne’er-do-well of my memory, but a comfortable man of middle years and spreading waist and the good-quality wardrobe of a mid-ranking official. When I enter his audience chamber he waves at me, and that’s not a local custom, certainly not deployed indoors, host to guest. But he waggles his fingers and I understand. He levers himself to his feet—he has a stick now, a bad knee—and approaches. About to clasp his arms about me in a bear hug, maybe, before remembering that doing so with a wizard is perhaps unwise. Stops in front of me, smiling. “You’ve not changed!” he says. “Look at you. If I didn’t know you as a wizard from the horns and from before, I’d know from that.”

I have changed. I have aged. But I also have a suite of genetic modifications that include anti-geriatric measures. Awake and outside the suspension facilities of my tower, I am engaging in a slow-motion dance with time that will, one day, come to an end. But I am only a little more decrepit than I was, and Alwer is older.

We clasp hands. Touch is rationed amongst these people—some plague event way back, I always thought. Skin on skin shows a trust and intimacy. And it means it is Alwer I am meeting with, and not Alwaeryn Porsir the official.

Alwer of the Five Fingers, they call him. When we met he was Alwereth, a criminal whose stump of a hand spoke of a harsh judicial process. When Lyn and I were in need, he put his life on the line for us when he had no need to. For that, I regrew his lost digits in my tower, rid him of the stigma of his crimes, whilst Lyn found him a place and work. Lannesite and major polities are mostly ruled by women, but there’s a stratum of what I can only describe as middle managers who are usually men, the post of porsir amongst them.

His people bring food and drink and, just as I feel that I’ve had all the good fortune I’m due, they bring another friend, one I’d not looked to see.

I stand to greet her, and for a moment it’s as though we conjure Lyn’s ghost between us. That fourth whose absence we all feel. For this is another of our demon-hunting expedition of years past. Esha, Esha Free Mark. Except, just as her people see the world as a river, so names, too, move downstream as the water shifts. Esha and Lannesite are no longer friends. But she and I are.

Esha’s old now, too. Or at least, her pale skin is creased and bluish, the way it goes with the Coast-people. The whites of her eyes are yellowed and her hair is silver.

“Well look at the three of us,” she says, voice a little croaky. We sit, and Alwer dismisses his servants. He’s the porsir of one of Lannesite’s satellite towns, and he’s meeting with the Regent’s court wizard and an agent of a power with whom Lannesite has had a lot of friction recently. This isn’t the sort of conference we invite eavesdroppers to.

The three of us, remembering the four of us. And our missing fourth is close, I know. She’ll have been drawn to this Sendroth character like a fly to vinegar. But hasn’t come to meet with her former friend, her tutor, her …

Esha’s hand on my arm. “I know,” she says. “I miss her, too.” And not the same. What stands between them is politics, neither of their doing. But I am my own worst enemy, with Lyn. I and my ill-chosen words.

We sit, the three of us. We sample the beer, local, smooth on the tongue. Alweraeyn Porsir the prosperous small-town mayor, Esharaeyn Wordbearer, travelling emissary, spy and agitator, and me. Nyrgoth Elder, reluctant wizard.

“I imagine you’re wanting a boat, then,” Esha says, just right out there. And that’s simultaneously a loaded thing to say and cuts through a lot of difficult business which might have put Alwer in a tricky position. Control of the river traffic is currently the subject of considerable debate and even a little bloodshed. I reached Telm on a Lannesite barge, and there were soldiers on it even close to home. I will leave Telm, it seems, on a Coaster ship, and they’d look askance at carrying any Lannesite envoy, or at least charge over the odds. Esha is a friend, and she owes me. A berth is the least she can do. More than she should really offer, but the Coast-people are as large on hospitality as they are on clannishness. Apparently, I don’t even need to ask.

“One wonders if you’ve met with this man yourself?” I ask her. I construct the sentence carefully so that it contains the roots of its own polite dismissal if this counts as state secrets.

Esha’s open enough, though. “Not me but mine,” she says. “Ulmoth come again, they say. Lord of a monstrous host.”

“I mean,” I say, playing up the peevish old man, “I hope he is. If he’s just some thug in a funny hat I’ll not be best pleased. A wizard’s time is valuable.”

And they smile, because they know me, despite all the water gone down that river.

“I’ve not seen her,” Esha says next. Apparently, it’s going to be one of those conversations where my own input is mostly implied. I would have asked eventually. Almost a year away from court, away from her daughter, because of me.

It is good to see them both, but sitting here is like being in a haunted room. Haunted by her. Esha tells some tall Coast tales, and Alwer has some goings-on from the great and the good in Telm. I pass on news from the court, hoping none of it is salient enough to turn up in Esha’s official reports. But my face must speak for my heart, because we don’t mention Lyn again though she never leaves my mind.

The next morning there’s the boat. Alwer gifts me provisions I can’t possibly carry, and I understand he’s using my presence to thank Esha, where he couldn’t just give a Coaster barge free bounty without someone asking questions. Why did everything have to become so prickly? Well, I know: geopolitics, family feuding; a familiar tale if there ever was one. The crew are leery of me, so I spent most of the voyage belowdecks. I think about what I said to Alwer. What if there is no sorcerer? In truth, I will simply be glad if there is nothing worse. We’ve been waiting for another real problem for over a decade. Demons—meaning some class of presence existing at ninety degrees to my understanding of the universe, further removed from my culture’s science than that science is from Lyn’s people. Let it be just a local with some toys and a few command words. Let it be nineteen bandits in a robot suit. Let it be magic to the locals, but not to me.

By the time we tie up, I’ve worked out Esha’s people are trading with the brigands, because right now they’ll encourage anyone tweaking Lannesite’s nose. Esha’s barge has come to take their traders back on board, business accomplished. A swaggering band of them come with sacks and handcarts, away from a field where some tents are pitched. A town beyond, previously walled, no longer. Which tells a tale.