Elder Race(37)

And Lyn had the profound satisfaction of standing before her mother and the whole court and saying, “Well?”





Nyr


THE SATELLITE ISN’T TALKING to me anymore.

I don’t know exactly if this is because, once it exercised the Ultimate Anti-contamination Measures, I just don’t exist to it anymore. After all, as far as it’s concerned, it’s just obliterated my body to stop the locals getting hold of it and all the precious technology it contains.

On the other hand, it might be the locator. It wasn’t my heart I actually ripped from my own chest, after all, but it was my beacon, that let the satellite know exactly where I was. I was right there, where the gateway stood, as far as it was concerned. And now I’m not here, because I don’t have a beacon anymore, so the satellite ignores my requests to link with it. My familiar spirit has been cut from me.

And if my Explorer Corps colleagues return, somehow, after so long, if Earth signals me or sends a ship to bring me home, I won’t know, and the satellite will tell them I am dead. And probably tell them I was a very poor anthropologist, even for second class. And the first might be false, but the second will very definitely be true.

I thought the worker robot would get Lyn out. When I linked to it and found it had rebooted itself, I gave it that command. And somehow it came back here and Lyn told the outpost to admit her, and it did. I have gone back over the records. It’s when she basically hauls my unresisting body upright and leans me against the door, like some kind of grisly farce, that my blood chemistry gets recognised by the outpost systems and it opens up. Then she just shouts at the walls and eventually the tower systems work out what the situation is and put out a healing capsule, and Lyn bodily rolls me into it.

When the clear lid comes down and it retracts, with me inside, she sits with her back to the wall and weeps. I don’t think it’s for me, exactly, just a release of all that pent-up grief and anger and sheer soured adrenaline. Just a lot inside her to get out, and of all people I can certainly understand that.

Eventually, of course, she goes home.

Somewhat more eventually, the outpost wakes me up, and I sort through the torrid history of tolerance warnings and medical tuttings until I concede that I am still alive and functional and totally isolated from the wider universe. I send a long-range drone west, and the next time I let the DCS down I hope that some part of the cocktail of emotion that assails me is a profound satisfaction that the plan worked. The land the demon took will not be well for a long time, a great blighted scar across the Ordwood, and in the minds of its people. Whatever the demon was, though, it is gone, the signal cut off where it entered our . . . world? Universe? Reality? I cannot guess.

And by then it’s time for me to flush out my mind without the benefit of the DCS, and it’s still bad, all that pent-up negative stuff. Just because I did good doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad, because the feeling bad, it’s not particularly because of anything that’s happened; it’s just the way I’m wired. But in the midst of it I think about Lyn and Esha and Allwer and the whole mad business, and I can smile a bit, and think, Those days, eh? Just as I did with Astresse and Ulmoth.

And I should go back to sleep, really, to wait for . . . what, though?

When Ulmoth was defeated, I remember parting from Astresse. I would return to my outpost, to wait for my colleagues and my people and word from distant Earth. But she could call on me, of course. If she had need, or if her line had need, Nyrgoth Elder would be there for them. Nyr, as she called me. And that was as far as I was willing to bend the rules, and it was an unforgivable breach anyway. Staying with her would have been a step too far. And now . . .

She’s dead these hundred years. And while she lived, she never did quite need me enough to come to the outpost and wake me. I made that promise to her bloodline, and she took me at my word, very seriously indeed, when actually I had been asking her to come back for me, to save me from myself.

Or else, once she was immersed in the running of the kingdom, her adventure with the sorcerer had gone from memory to myth inside her mind, and eventually she put away childish things.

And where does that leave me, now?

I repair the robot, or enough for one more flight, and send it to deliver a message. And then I wait.

*

Later, after they arrive, I watch Allwer regrowing his lost fingers and hope I can store up the joy for later use, and that it won’t just sour into dismay as these things so often do. And I stand with Lyn and look out of the outpost’s eyes at the entourage her mother gave her, to come here. Not just two ragged travellers this time: an honour guard and courtiers who are also spies for the Crown, tents, flunkies, riding animals, all that. And I force them to stay outside and camp in the hard places because I can be petty like that. Only Lyn, Esha, and Allwer get to come in. My companions, the demon-slayers.

And I decide, with my most rational mind, that I am no longer an anthropologist. My failures of objectivity and detachment surely mean that anything I wrote would be hopelessly contaminated by my involvement with the culture I purport to study. Similarly, this place is no longer an outpost. To be an outpost requires some larger thing to be posted out of, and I can be honest with myself: there is no larger thing; not for any practical intents and purposes, and most likely not at all in any way. This is nothing but a tower, and I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician.