old men and boys were among the fallen, killing the wounded and taking their clothes and weapons and whatever else could be found. War brings ’em, like crows to carrion. So there I lie, expecting to die-hoping it doesn’t take long because it hurts in waves like the sea, each one pounding through me and I’m thinking, this is the one that carries me off into death, but it didn’t. I hear footsteps, I look up, and there’s this huge woman standing over me.”
“Leaky,” said Umbo.
“Of course it’s Leaky, you daft boy, but I’m telling the story and I decide when to say things out loud.”
“Sorry.”
“So I look up and she’s looking down and she says, ‘You’re a big one,’ and I didn’t say anything because it was a fool thing to say, what does it matter how big a dead man is? Then she says, ‘You’ve stopped bleeding,’ and I says, “I guess I’m empty.’ It comes out as a whisper but she heard me and she laughs and says, ‘If you can talk and you can joke you aren’t going to die.’ Then she pulls away my armor-which the other fellow’s sword had sliced through like butter, that’s what happens when your armor is built by somebody’s cousin and he makes the steel out of tin-plated dirt. Anyway, she stitches me up-and a right lousy job she did of it, I’d say, but the light was failing and I was going to die anyway, so who cares? She says to me, ‘The skin’s all cut but the stomach and bowel look to be unhurt, which is why you didn’t die. A knuckle deeper and you’d already be dead of it.’ So she hoists me up on her shoulder-me! heavy enough even without my blood-and takes me home and says that by scavenger law I’m her slave. Only when I got better, we were in love like a pair of heroes and we got married and I went home and tossed my old wife and sold the house and land and took my vast fortune and built the tavern in a scabby little mushroom village and turned it into a town and a regular stop for the river traffic. So her not killing me and taking my stuff, but taking me instead-that changed the world, my lads.”
“Hard on your first wife,” said Rigg.
“I was away eight solid years the last time, and when I got home she had three children under five that looked like three different men had done me the service of a substitute. You telling me I did wrong?”
“At least she waited a couple of years faithful,” said Umbo.
“And at least I didn’t kill her, which was my right. I only tossed her out instead of killing her, because Leaky says, ‘Let’s not start with blood,’ and also because I vaguely remembered we were in love once. And besides, I never fathered a child on her, no more than I have on Leaky, so I reckon a woman has a right to her babies, don’t she? Wherever she has to go to get them.”
“A tolerant philosophy. But she’d kept the farm for eight years and you took it right away from her.”
“The servants worked it,” said Loaf, “and it was my farm, just like she was my woman, and those weren’t my children. I didn’t lay a hand on her, but even a saint would sell the farm and take the money from it. She could go for shelter to the dad of one of her little ones, if he’d take her.”
“You’re soft, then,” said Rigg, but he smiled so that Loaf would know he was teasing.
“Yes, boy, jest all you like, mock me hollow, but I am soft. That’s what Leaky did to me. That and the one that gave me this scar. They took the war right out of me. But I still train for it. When I’m on land, that is. Train every day, an hour or two, using all the weapons. I can still put an arrow where I want to, within twenty rods. If I hadn’t slipped in horseflop on the battlefield he’d never have put his sword in me, that’s how good I was. And I still am, barring the changes that fifteen years of not having an opponent better than a drunken riverman makes in an old veteran.”
It was good to know that Leaky was the one who talked him out of killing his old wife. She could brag about how she would have thrown Rigg and Umbo in the river, or tossed them out on the mercy of the rivermen that first night-but Rigg understood now that Leaky and Loaf were kind people, and only had to look and talk tough because of their clientele.
“Does Leaky train with you?” asked Umbo.
Rigg expected him to get cuffed for his impertinence, but Loaf only laughed. “Who else?” he said. “No, she’s no fighter, not like me, but she puts on the pads and helps me through my steps and stings. Nobody else I know can match my reach, except her. I’m right big, you know. So we’re out at dawn, practicing an hour in full light. And it’s not a bad thing if rivermen see us at it, them as aren’t nursing hangovers. So they know that even when I’m not there, she holds her own.”
In the early afternoon of the fourth day, they saw it: the Tower of O, rising above the trees that lined the river. It was almost invisible against the lead-grey wintry sky, but they could all see it, a steel cylinder rising up and rounding off in a dome at the top.
“So we’re there,” said Umbo, and he and Rigg headed for the ladder down to the main deck.
“Wait,” said Loaf. “We won’t reach O till tomorrow noon, or later.”
“But it’s right there!” said Umbo.
“Look how hazy it is. This is clear air, and if it was as close as you think it is, it wouldn’t look that way.”
If the tower was still a day’s journey away, Rigg wondered, how could it rise so high above the trees? “How tall is it?” he asked.
“Taller than you imagine. Do you think people would make pilgrimages to see it, if it was just tall? Besides, the river takes a wide bend that way, and we’ll lose sight of it for hours, and then we come back at it from another direction before we get to see how big it really is. It’s a wonder of the world, to think any nation or city had the brains and the power to build such a thing. And yet it’s completely useless. They say it takes a day to climb to the top, but I don’t know how anybody would know that, the whole thing’s sealed off, and not because the Council of O made some law-no, it’s sealed off inside so you can’t get deep enough inside to figure out even what they built it for.”
Rigg watched the Tower of O until the light gave out so completely that it was invisible. He wondered what his father might have known about the Tower of O. He knew everything, or so it seemed. But he’d never thought to give Rigg a lesson about this place.
CHAPTER 7
O
“Was it the fold or merely a fold?” asked Ram.
“The fold was there,” said the expendable. “All nineteen of the ship’s computers report that the fold… was jumped.”
Expendables made no careless decisions about sentence structure. Nor did they hesitate, unless the hesitation meant something. “‘Was jumped,’ you said, but you didn’t specify that it was jumped by us,” said Ram.
“Because apparently we did not do the jumping,” said the expendable. “We emerged in exactly the position we were in at the beginning of the jump.”
“And were we still moving?” said Ram.
“Yes.”
“So what position are we in now?” asked Ram.
“We are two days’ journey closer to Earth. The physical position we were in two days ago.”
“So we came out of the fold reversed,” said Ram. “Heading the other way.”
“No, Ram,” said the expendable. “We came out facing away from Earth, just as we were when we went into the fold.”
“We don’t have a reverse gear,” said Ram. “We can only move in the direction we’re facing.”
“All the computers report that we are proceeding forward at precisely the same velocity as before. They also report that our position keeps progressing backward toward Earth.”
“So we’re moving forward and backward at the same time,” said Ram.
“Our propulsion is forward. Our motion is backward.”
“I hope you will not remove me from command if I admit to being confused.”
“I would only question your sanity if you were not confused, Ram.”
“Do you have any hypotheses that might explain this situation?” asked Ram.
“We are not hypothesizers,” said the expendable. “We are programmed instruments and, as I pointed out to you before, decisions about what to do after the jump are entirely up to our resourceful, creative, highly tested
