She felt at her throat. It was gone, of course. The gaver had taken it when it had taken her head off. “Gone,” she said smilingly, shaking her head. “Too bad. Where’s Zasper?”
Danivon stared at her with his mouth open and his nose quivering. His eyes filled as he heard the pocket munks in chorus repeating what she had said.
“Gone,” they whispered. “Too bad.”
Microdevices moved through the soil of Beanfields, spewing out a million more eyes and ears, a million more miniscule Doors, a million more tiny gravitics, and killers, of course, even though the instructions of the network were clear: Hold certain persons captive, do not kill them! Hold captive Danivon Luze and Zasper Ertigon.
When the network reached the prison at the top of the hill, however, the two were gone. There were only the bodies of two guards killed by one of Clore’s machines, the battered pieces of that machine, and a burned place on the soil. Mechanisms designed to travel overland looked for the two humans but couldn’t find them.
The devices asked the people of Beanfields where the captives were, but the people of that province knew only this mother’s old boy or that mother’s young boy or some other mother’s black-haired boy or yet some other mother’s boy who plays the flute. No one knew who Zasper was or Danivon. No one knew their names. Those who were asked could not answer, and so died.
The network did not stop growing, even while Beanfields was being reduced to a suffering fragment of itself. While parts of it were lethally involved in the villages, the rest of it pushed on toward the west. Less than an hour after Danivon set sail across the Fohm, the network reached the Great Wall and began to burrow through it. Getting through rock was not difficult, merely slow. The network had been extended through rock in many parts of the world.
Patiently it drilled its way, eventually arriving on the other side as infinitesimal metallic points. Each of these points was noticed by the ubiquitous fibers that grew throughout noplace. The fibers attached themselves to the emerging network and disassembled it, molecule by molecule, tiny part by tiny part. As soon as one molecule of it was extruded through the wall, it was corrupted and eaten. No sensor lasted long enough to report this effect. The network simply reached the Great Wall and then vanished.
Great Slitherer and Subble Clore were at first too busy to notice. They were still fuming at the escape of the two Enforcers, at the fact the network had not caught them, at the strange creatures upriver who had not died when the machines were told to kill them. All these matters were distracting them at a time when they wished to think of other things—the rules and ritual of Clore adoration, the catechism and theology of Breaze worship.
Breaze had decided that he would require his followers to believe illogical things as evidence of their faith. He would require them to believe that Breaze had created Elsewhere and all its people in one day, out of nothing, exactly one thousand years ago! But … (a master stroke) he would leave evidence in Files to contradict this! Thus they would have to disbelieve the evidence of their own senses in order to believe in Breaze!
When he got to this point, a small voice asked why he had given men such senses in the first place? Why had he given them intelligence if he intended to forbid its use?
Great Slitherer couldn’t remember creating men, though he knew he must have done so. He couldn’t remember why he had given them the ability to weigh evidence and make judgments for themselves. Why had he given them intelligence?
Preoccupied with such questions, Breaze did not notice the network had stopped at the wall. Preoccupied with similar notions, neither did the others of the Core. As time passed, no word came; as more time went by, even the little mobile ears and eyes beyond the wall fell silent. So long as they had remained aloft or afloat, they had continued to function, but as each of them had touched soil or the branch of a tree or the stony summit of a hill, it had stopped being. Eventually, all had stopped being, and the noisy flow of messages from the west dwindled into silence.
Great Lord Crawler had moved on to inventing a marriage ceremony, something very arduous and esoteric involving ritual defloration and genital mutilation. Clore had devised an ingenious new form of sacrifice. It was some time before they became aware.
They peered, then howled, their noisy protest going out through the network, among the nodes. Messages came back, not so sanguine and dismissive as before. Magna Mater had also run into the wall when she had tried to get through it from the north. Therabas Bland had made the attempt from the south and failed.
The failure infuriated them all. They got into their god forms and stalked toward the center of the continent, trampling the provinces in their rage.
In Tolerance, Jacent crept quietly down a deserted corridor toward his aunt Syrilla’s door. Most people these days were staying in their own quarters. The monitors had given up all pretense of keeping the status quo. Many Enforcers had departed for their home provinces, and the few that remained dressed like ordinary people. Only the Frickians seemed more or less immune to what was happening. Nothing seemed to bother them greatly. Some of them had been killed, but Frickians never made a fuss, even when they were being dismembered. They tended to die silently or disappear as silently. No fun, thought Jacent. No fun at all, which is why the Brannigans left them alone. A phlegmatic people, the Frickians. Boarmus said Frickians would end up being the only survivors and the Brannigans would then be worshiped by Frickians alone. Which was a laugh, because Frickians had been bred to take orders,
