Nightwings Read online

  As we understand the aim of the weather machines, it was to modify the planet’s geography according to a carefully conceived plan arising from the division of what we call Earth Ocean into a number of large bodies. Although interconnected, these suboceans were considered to have individual existences, since along most of their boundary region they were cut off from the rest of Earth Ocean by land masses. In the north polar region, for example, the joining of Ais to the northern Lost Continent (known as Usa-amrik) in the west and the proximity of Usa-amrik to Eyrop in the east left only narrow straits through which the polar waters could mingle with those of the warmer oceans flanking the Lost Continents.

  Manipulation of magnetic forces produced a libration of Earth on its orbit, calculated to break up the north polar ice pack and permit the cold water trapped by this pack to come in contact with warmer water from elsewhere. By removing the northern ice pack and thus exposing the northern ocean to evaporation, precipitation would be greatly increased there. To prevent this precipitation from falling in the north as snow, additional manipulations were to be induced to change the pattern of the prevailing westerly winds which carried precipitation over temperate areas. A natural conduit was to be established that would bring the precipitation of the polar region to areas in lower latitudes lacking in proper moisture.

  There was much more to the plan than this. Our knowledge of the details is hazy. We are aware of schemes to shift ocean currents by causing land subsidence or emergence, of proposals to deflect solar heat from the tropics to the poles, and of other rearrangements. The details are unimportant. What is significant to us are the consequences of this grandiose plan.

  After a period of preparation lasting centuries and after absorbing more effort and wealth than any other project in human history, the weather machines were put into operation.

  The result was devastation.

  The disastrous experiment in planetary alteration resulted in a shifting of the geographical poles, a lengthy period of glacial conditions throughout most of the northern hemisphere, the unexpected submergence of Usa-amrik and Sud-amrik, its neighbor, the creation of Land Bridge joining Afreek and Eyrop, and the near destruction of human civilization. These upheavals did not take place with great speed. Evidently the project went smoothly for the first several centuries; the polar ice thawed, and the corresponding rise in sea levels was dealt with by constructing fusion evaporators—small suns, in effect—at selected oceanic points. Only slowly did it become clear that the weather machines were bringing about architectonic changes in the crust of Earth. These, unlike the climatic changes, proved irreversible.

  It was a time of furious storms followed by unending droughts; of the loss of hundreds of millions of lives; of the disruption on all communications; of panicky mass migrations out of the doomed continents. Chaos triumphed. The splendid civilization of the Second Cycle was shattered. The compounds of alien life were destroyed.

  For the sake of saving what remained of its population, several of the most powerful galactic races took command of our planet. They established energy pylons to stabilize Earth’s axial wobble; they dismantled those weather machines that had not been destroyed by the planetary convulsions; they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and offered reconstruction loans. For us it was a Time of Sweeping, when all the structures and conventions of society were expunged. No longer masters in our own world, we accepted the charity of strangers and crept pitifully about.

  Yet, because we were still the same race we had been, we recovered to some extent. We had squandered our planet’s capital and so could never again be anything but bankrupts and paupers, but in a humbler way we entered into our Third Cycle. Certain scientific techniques of earlier days still remained to us. Others were devised, working generally on different principles. Our guilds were formed to give order to society: Dominators, Masters, Merchants, and the rest. The Rememberers strove to salvage what could be pulled from the wreck of the past.

  Our debts to our rescuers were enormous. As bankrupts, we had no way of repaying those debts; we hoped instead for a quitclaim, a statement of absolution. Negotiations to that effect were already under way when an unexpected intervention occurred. The inhabitants of H362 approached the committee of Earth’s receivers and offered to reimburse them for their expenses—in return for an assignment of all rights and claims in Earth to H362.

  It was done.

  H362 now regarded itself the owner by treaty of our world. It served notice to the universe at large that it reserved the right to take possession at any future date. As well it might, since at that time H362 was still incapable of interstellar travel. Thereafter, though, H362 was deemed legal possessor of the assets of Earth, as purchaser in bankruptcy.

  No one failed to realize that this was H362’s way of fulfilling its threat to “turn Earth itself into a gigantic compound,” as revenge for the injury inflicted by our collecting team long before.

  On Earth, Third Cycle society constituted itself along the lines it now holds, with its rigid stratification of guilds. The threat of H362 was taken seriously, for ours was a chastened world that sneered at no menace, however slight; and a guild of Watchers was devised to scan the skies for attackers. Defenders and all the rest followed. In some small ways we demonstrated our old flair for imagination, particularly in the Years of Magic, when a fanciful impulse created the self-perpetuating mutant guild of Fliers, a parallel guild of Swimmers, of whom little is heard nowadays, and several other varieties, including a troublesome and unpredictable guild of Changelings whose genetic characteristics were highly erratic.

  The Watchers watched. The Dominators ruled. The Fliers soared. Life went on, year after year, in Eyrop and in Ais, in Stralya, in Afreek, in the scattered islands that were the only remnants of the Lost Continents of Usa-amrik and Sud-amrik. The vow of H362 receded into mythology, but yet we remained vigilant. And far across the cosmos our enemies gathered strength, attaining some measure of the power that had been ours in our Second Cycle. They never forgot the day when their kinsmen had been held captive in our compounds.

  In a night of terror they came to us. Now they are our masters, and their vow is fulfilled, their claim asserted.

  All this, and much more, I learned as I burrowed in the accumulated knowledge of the guild of Rememberers.

  5

  MEANWHILE the former Prince of Roum was wantonly abusing the hospitality of our co-sponsorer, the Rememberer Elegro. I should have been aware of what was going on, for I knew the Prince and his ways better than any other man in Perris. But I was too busy in the archives, learning of the past. While I explored the details of the Second Cycle’s protoplasm files and regeneration nodules, its time-wind blowers and its photonic-flux fixers, Prince Enric was seducing the Rememberer Olmayne.

  I imagine that this was, like most seductions, no great contest of wills. Olmayne was a woman of sensuality, whose attitude toward her husband was affectionate but patronizing. She regarded Elegro openly as ineffectual, a bumbler; and Elegro, whose haughtiness and stern mien did not conceal his underlying weakness of purpose, seemed to merit her disdain. What kind of marriage they had was not my business to observe, but clearly she was the stronger, and just as clearly he could not meet her needs.

  Then, too, why had Olmayne agreed to sponsor us into her guild?

  Surely not out of any desire for a tattered old Watcher. It must have been the wish to know more of the strange and oddly commanding blind Pilgrim who was that Watcher’s companion. From the very first, then, Olmayne must have been drawn to Prince Enric; and he, naturally, would need little encouragement to accept the gift she offered.

  Possibly they were lovers almost from the moment of our arrival in the Hall of Rememberers.

  I went my way, and Elegro went his, and Olmayne and Prince Enric went theirs, and summer gave way to autumn and autumn to winter. I excavated the records with passionate impatience. Never before had I known such involvement, such intensity of curiosity. Without benefit of a vi
sit to Jorslem I felt renewed. I saw the Prince infrequently, and our meetings were generally silent; it was not my place to question him about his doings, and he felt no wish to volunteer information to me.

  Occasionally I thought of my former life, and of my travels from place to place, and of the Flier Avluela who was now, I supposed, the consort of one of our conquerors. How did the false Changeling Gormon style himself, now that he had emerged from his disguise and owned himself to be one of those from H362? Earthking Nine? Oceanlord Five? Overman Three? Wherever he was, he must feel satisfaction, I thought, at the total success of the conquest of Earth.

  Toward winter’s end I learned of the affair between the Rememberer Olmayne and Prince Enric of Roum. I picked up whispered gossip in the apprentice quarters first; then I noticed the smiles on the faces of other Rememberers when Elegro and Olmayne were about; lastly, I observed the behavior of the Prince and Olmayne toward one another. It was obvious. Those touchings of hand to hand, those sly exchanges of catchwords and private phrases—what else could they mean?

  Among the Rememberers the marriage vow is regarded solemnly. As with the Fliers, mating is for life, and one is not supposed to betray one’s partner as Olmayne was doing. When one is married to a fellow Rememberer—a custom in the guild, but not universal—the union is all the more sacred.

  What revenge would Elegro take when in time he learned the truth?

  It happened that I was present when the situation at last crystallized into conflict. It was a night in earliest spring. I had worked long and hard in the deepest pits of the memory tanks, prying forth data that no one had bothered with since it had first been stored; and, with my head aswim with images of chaos, I walked through the glow of the Perris night, seeking fresh air. I strolled along the Senn and was accosted by an agent for a Somnambulist, who offered to sell me insight into the world of dreams. I came upon a lone Pilgrim at his devotions before a temple of flesh. I watched a pair of young Fliers in passage overhead, and shed a self-pitying tear or two. I was halted by a starborn tourist in breathing mask and jeweled tunic; he put his cratered red face close to mine and vented hallucinations in my nostrils. At length I returned to the Hall of Rememberers and went to the suite of my sponsors to pay my respects before retiring.

  Olmayne and Elegro were there. So, too, was Prince Enric. Olmayne admitted me with a quick gesture of one fingertip, but took no further notice of me, nor did the others. Elegro was tensely pacing the floor, stomping about so vehemently that the delicate life-forms of the carpet folded and unfolded their petals in wild agitation. “A Pilgrim!” Elegro cried. “If it had been some trash of a Vendor, it would only be humiliating. But a Pilgrim? That makes it monstrous!”

  Prince Enric stood with arms folded, body motionless. It was impossible to detect the expression beneath his mask of Pilgrimage, but he appeared wholly calm.

  Elegro said, “Will you deny that you have been tampering with the sanctity of my pairing?”

  “I deny nothing. I assert nothing.”

  “And you?” Elegro demanded, whirling on his lady. “Speak truth, Olmayne! For once, speak truth! What of the stories they tell of you and this Pilgrim?”

  “I have heard no stories,” said Olmayne sweetly.

  “That he shares your bed! That you taste potions together! That you travel to ecstasy together!”

  Olmayne’s smile did not waver. Her broad face was tranquil. To me she looked more beautiful than ever.

  Elegro tugged in anguish at the strands of his shawl. His dour, bearded face darkened in wrath and exasperation. His hand slipped within his tunic and emerged with the tiny glossy bead of a vision capsule, which he thrust forth toward the guilty pair on the palm of his hand.

  “Why should I waste breath?” he asked. “Everything is here. The full record in the photonic flux. You have been under surveillance. Did either of you think anything could be hidden here, of all places? You, Olmayne, a Rememberer, how could you think so?”

  Olmayne examined the capsule from a distance, as though it were a primed implosion bomb. With distaste she said, “How like you to spy on us, Elegro. Did it give you great pleasure to watch us in our joy?”

  “Beast!” he cried.

  Pocketing the capsule, he advanced toward the motionless Prince. Elegro’s face now was contorted with righteous wrath. Standing an arm’s length from the Prince he declared icily, “You will be punished to the fullest for this impiety. You will be stripped of your Pilgrim’s robes and delivered up to the fate reserved for monsters. The Will shall consume your soul!”

  Prince Enric replied, “Curb your tongue.”

  “Curb my tongue? Who are you to speak that way? A Pilgrim who lusts for the wife of his host—who doubly violates holiness—who drips lies and sanctimony at the same moment?” Elegro frothed. His iciness was gone. Now he ranted in nearly incoherent frenzy, displaying his interior weakness by his lack of self-control. We three stood frozen, astounded by his torrent of words, and at last the stasis broke when the Rememberer, carried away by the tide of his own indignation, seized the Prince by the shoulders and began violently to shake him.

  “Filth,” Enric bellowed, “you may not put your hands to me!”

  With a double thrust of his fists against Elegro’s chest he hurled the Rememberer reeling backward across the room. Elegro crashed into a suspension cradle and sent a flank of watery artifacts tumbling; three flasks of scintillating fluids shivered and spilled their contents; the carpet set up a shrill cry of pained protest. Gasping, stunned, Elegro pressed a hand to his breast and looked to us for assistance.

  “Physical assault—” Elegro wheezed. “A shameful crime!”

  “The first assault was your doing,” Olmayne reminded her husband.

  Pointing trembling fingers, Elegro muttered, “For this there can be no forgiveness, Pilgrim!”

  “Call me Pilgrim no longer,” Enric said. His hands went to the grillwork of his mask. Olmayne cried out, trying to prevent him; but in his anger the Prince knew no check. He hurled the mask to the floor and stood with his harsh face terribly exposed, the cruel features hawk-lean, the gray mechanical spheres in his eyesockets masking the depths of his fury. “I am the Prince of Roum,” he announced in a voice of thunder. “Down and abase! Down and abase! Quick, Rememberer, the three prostrations and the five abasements!”

  Elegro appeared to crumble. He peered in disbelief; then he sagged, and in a kind of reflex of amazement he performed a ritual obeisance before his wife’s seducer. It was the first time since the fall of Roum that the Prince had asserted his former status, and the pleasure of it was so evident on his ravaged face that even the blank eyeballs appeared to glow in regal pride.

  “Out,” the Prince ordered. “Leave us.”

  Elegro fled.

  I remained, astounded, staggered. The Prince nodded courteously to me. “Would you pardon us, old friend, and grant us some moments of privacy?”

  6

  A weak man can be put to rout by a surprise attack, but afterward he pauses, reconsiders, and hatches schemes. So was it with the Rememberer Elegro. Driven from his own suite by the unmasking of the Prince of Roum, he grew calm and crafty once he was out of that terrifying presence. Later that same night, as I settled into my sleeping cradle and debated aiding slumber with a drug, Elegro summoned me to his research cell on a lower level of the building.

  There he sat amid the paraphernalia of his guild: reels and spools, data-flakes, capsules, caps, a quartet of series-linked skulls, a row of output screens, a small ornamental helix, all the symbology of the gatherers of information. In his hands he grasped a tension-draining crystal from one of the Cloud-worlds; its milky interior was rapidly tingeing with sepia as it pulled anxieties from his spirit. He pretended a look of stern authority, as if forgetting that I had seen him exposed in his spinelessness.

  He said, “Were you aware of this man’s identity when you came with him to Perris?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said nothi
ng about it.”

  “I was never asked.”

  “Do you know what a risk you have exposed all of us to, by causing us unknowingly to harbor a Dominator?”

  “We are Earthmen,” I said. “Do we not still acknowledge the authority of the Dominators?”

  “Not since the conquest. By decree of the invaders all former governments are dissolved and their leaders subject to arrest.”

  “But surely we should resist such an order!”

  The Rememberer Elegro regarded me quizzically. “Is it a Rememberer’s function to meddle in politics? Tomis, we obey the government in power, whichever it may be and however it may have taken control. We conduct no resistance activities here.”

  “I see.”

  “Therefore we must rid ourselves at once of this dangerous fugitive. Tomis, I instruct you to go at once to occupation headquarters and inform Manrule Seven that we have captured the Prince of Roum and hold him here for pickup.”

  “I should go?” I blurted. “Why send an old man as a messenger in the night? An ordinary thinking-cap transmission would be enough!”

  “Too risky. Strangers may intercept cap communications. It would not go well for our guild if this were spread about. This has to be a personal communication.”

  “But to choose an unimportant apprentice to carry it—it seems strange.”

  “There are only two of us who know,” said Elegro. “I will not go. Therefore you must.”

  “With no introduction to Manrule Seven I will never be admitted.”

  “Inform his aides that you have information leading to the apprehension of the Prince of Roum. You’ll be heard.”

  “Am I to mention your name?”

  “If necessary. You may say that the Prince is being held prisoner in my quarters with the cooperation of my wife.”