Baptiste's raised voice from inside the tent.
'That's it! That's what I want, and that's what will be done. Tomorrow we look for the generator and take it down.'
That was too much for Reave. He might have become inured to the death and the violence, but this was something else. The idea of taking down the stasis generator and letting the whole valley revert to nonmatter was close to blasphemy. The world had lost enough to the nothings, and if the stories about the disrupters were to be believed, more was lost every day. For a human being to wantonly revert stabilized matter had to be a betrayal of the whole physical universe. Something crystallized within Reave. Not only was he going to get away from Vlad Baptiste and his madness, somewhere along the line he was going to do his best to see that it was stopped forever. He wondered what would happen if he simply pulled out a pistol and shot Baptiste on the spot. It was a dashing, romantic idea, but he was well aware that there was still enough blind loyalty among the men for him never to walk out of there alive. He could not even make a run for it without a stasis generator of his own.
Reave had noticed before that when a resolve really crystallized the way his had, a means of making it happen often was not slow in presenting itself. And, indeed, he had to wait only a couple of hours. The pseudosun had gone down behind the mountains, and the still-smoldering ruins of the stasis town had become a scene from hell. Although he had kept out of the murder and torture, Reave had not refrained from making a fair start on getting as drunk as he could. It was one way to put a certain distance between himself, the gruesome images on every side of him, and the unrelenting throb of the victory drums. He was looking for a second bottle of the fiery malt when he spotted one of the scouts riding in, coming through the blackened and blasted stone wall where the first clash with the militia had taken place. The man had a stasis generator, and his female mount also had one on its chest, held in place with a martingale strap. Reave knew that his chance had come. He had only to unseat the man, take his lizard and SG, and hightail it for the nothings before a pursuit could be organized. He estimated that the nothings were no more than seven or eight minutes away at a flat-out gallop, and once he was in the nothings, they would never be able to find him.
The scout was riding slowly, and Reave changed direction so that their paths would intersect. It did not require any acting skill on Reave's part to appear a fraction drunker than he really was. As the scout approached, Reave stumbled and swayed and brandished his almost empty bottle.
'Hey, buddy, y' wanna drink?'
The scout shook his head. 'I gotta report to the chief first. He'll have my head if he smells booze on my breath.'
Reave had come right up beside the lizard and its rider. At the last minute he lurched and pretended to fall against the side of the beast. The scout, already in an evil temper from having been ordered out on patrol when everyone else was whooping it up, snarled at him.
'Watch what you're doing, you shitfaced asshole!'
Reave grabbed the stirrup and pushed upward. The move was so unexpected that the man came completely out of his saddle and crashed to the ground. He lay winded for a few moments; then, gasping a string of foul obscenities, he clawed for his sidearm. Reave killed him with one shot, hoping that the flash of his pistol would not be noticed in the general mayhem. He thought he heard a shout as he swung into the saddle, but he did not look back. He had a return of the impulse to charge back through the town and kill Baptiste, but self-preservation prevailed. He put his spurs to the lizard and set it racing up the road to the pass and the nothings beyond it. He reached the pass unscathed. As he hit the stasis controls and plunged into the nothings, he realized that he did not even know the name of the town he had just helped destroy.
As with the nothings, there is still a great deal of speculation and argument regarding the true nature of Stuff Central. The distillation of all the surviving legends is that a place existed somewhere in the Damaged World that was the ultimate source of all material things. Its roots obviously lay in the matter transporters that came into regular use even before the development of the Mahler drive. The matter transporter was capable of moving people and cargoes over short distances in space. Its essential principle was that it disassembled the basic subatomic structure of any solid object in its send chamber and broke it down into a complex microcode. This code was then transmitted to the receiving unit, which, using that code, reassembled a perfect replica of the object from available local matter. Despite the obvious moral and philosophical problems and some sensationally unpleasant early accidents, the matter transporter rapidly become part of human technology and quickly expanded its capabilities in terms of both range and the size of the objects it could handle.
By the start of the Thousand Years War the technology had been perfected whereby, instead of simply transporting matter, the microcodes could be recorded on permanent templates, and multiple facsimiles could be created at will of any object — including animals and living human beings — for which there was such a template.
The constant references to templates in all the hundreds of stories referring to Stuff Central make clear that if it existed at all, it must have employed some advanced form of this technology, and it is probable that much of the hardware, the flora and fauna, and even sections of the human population in the Damaged World were products of these templates. What is not clear is whether Stuff Central directly transmitted the required objects, or whether it only supplied a file of templates for later use. Unless the legends are totally fanciful, it would seem that we have to assume that there was some kind of center that had the capability of transmitting microcode signals with great accuracy through the chaos of nonmatter to the scattered stasis settlements of this strange era.
Unfortunately, much of this will have to remain pure speculation. The hard archaeology for this period is so flimsy that it is unlikely that any of the theories will ever be confirmed. Not one copy of the often-mentioned Stuff Catalogue would seem to have survived the Final Cataclysm and the Reformation.
CHAPTER THREE
Novice Wellblessed sat on the rail of the half bridge,only a matter of feet from the start of the nothings. He was eating a limon and tossing the pieces of green and yellow rind into the shimmering nonmatter, watching the way they smoked and vanished as they touched it. It would take only three steps and that was it. He had no portable stasis generator, and he, too, would be one with the non and all his troubles would be over.
The Half Bridge was one of the most disturbing pieces of architecture in all of the Sanctuary. Its name described it perfectly. It was a simple wooden footbridge that arched — or, more precisely, half arched — across the stream that marked one of the boundaries of the Sanctuary. On one side of the stream there was a serene normality; on the other there was the nothings. The water simply went to the edge of the Sanctuary's stasis field and stopped. The bridge did exactly the same thing. It reached its apex and stopped. Novice Wellblessed had yet to learn the secret of why the bridge did not just topple over with no far bank to support it. As it was, it gave the impression that over in the nothings there was some sort of spectral nonbridge that perfectly complemented it and held it in place. Novice Wellblessed knew that was impossible, but he still could not shake the idea. The novices were supposed to use it as a meditative aid, an idea made solid with which they might contemplate the transitory nature of the material world. All Novice Wellblessed used it for was to sit and stare and contemplate suicide.
Of all the novices in his admission group, Wellblessed had made the slowest progress. He retained little of the instruction that he received, and his masters constantly accused him of resisting enlightenment. He had spent more hours than he could remember assuming the Attitude of Submission and accepting the Penitential Ministry. Lately he had even been cutting classes. It was really no surprise that Wellblessed was doing so badly. He had no vocation. It had been only the direst necessity that had forced him to come begging to the Sanctuary to enroll as a novice. Back in another lifetime he had gone by the name of Billy Oblivion, and he had roamed the Margins and the stasis towns, the kind of footloose rover who managed to stay one step ahead of serious trouble. Eventually, though, serious trouble had caught up with him. Aledya, his longtime traveling companion and probably the only
