The Heretic

Rapid individual conveyance is a building block of technological civilization.

So this or something like it?

Yes.

But this is as close as I will ever get. Simulation.

Yes.

Then, thrice-damn it all, take me back. Set me free from this dream, or I’ll want to drive forever.

He was back in the valley of execution. The wind touched his face again, and the sun-baked skin of the dead flapped in the breeze.

He went to the end of one of the execution stones and kicked it, hard. Dust fell away, a few stones. He kicked it again.

The shine of chrome glinted through.

Silver knife.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said to no one in particular.

The expedition moved on. Abel debated routing most of his squads around the area but in the end decided to bring them through it. He doubted these men would take fright. It was more likely the case that such a site would create only more resolve in them to get the job done and get home with the information.

They avoided fighting whenever possible, but they could not avoid the fact that half the desert dwellers knew that they were there, somewhere out there, even if they didn’t know precisely where the Scouts were at any given moment. This meant that they had to keep moving at all times and must take a circuitous trail that had subterfuge as its object as much as reconnaissance.

They had brought along enough food, but there was the constant need to find water. The men of the Delta proved to be the better of the water finders. Some of them used dowsing rods to lead them, but the best of them merely looked at the landscape and predicted where they would find a sink, a tanaja, or even the occasional slow burbling spring.

The Delta men possess this particular skill because they spent childhood around water, said Center. There is, for example, water everywhere in the tendrils of the River’s final journey into the Braun Sea. Some have been sailors and fishermen, or knew people who were.

The only fishermen that Abel had ever met were the stock fish growers who tended the carp pens on the far side of Lake Treville.

For food, they had hardtack and pickled dakbelly for almost every meal. Occasionally they slaughtered a weaker dak from the train to divide among themselves. This proved very useful in both feeding them and reducing their footprint across the land.

Abel had to admit that this was far from the lightweight expeditions the Scouts usually engaged in. It was more like the movement of an army, and Abel was learning valuable lessons every day about what a packtrain could and could not be made to do.

Mostly, it could not be made to leave no sign of its passing. While he drove his Scouts onward at what would have been a breakneck pace for an army, he could not help but feel that a malevolent eye was upon him, that someone was slowly working out from sightings here, spoor left there and there, his exact location-or at least a fix on his position that was close enough to permit attack.

He was determined to see it coming, if so, and disbursed the Scouts to the farthest limits he believed advisable, communicating by one-flag wigwag the simple instructions they would need for the day.

He’d skirted the Redlands, stayed alive and relatively intact, and managed to roughly count concentrations and resources of ten nomad groups. The one consistency among them all: they were Blaskoye vassals now. They may be Tamers and Jackflits and Wei Weis and Miskowskis still, but within each encampment were a group of outsiders, men who were not Tamers or Jackflits or Wei Weis or Miskowskis. They wore the Blaskoye white, and in several instances Abel or his Scouts had observed these men beating, and even once dragging to death, a local tribesman.

These were subjugated peoples, and the men in white were their overseers.

And then it was time to use Gaspar to lead them to the Great Oasis, the prime watering hole, believed to be one of two or, perhaps, three, that the Redlanders possessed on the Eastern side of the Valley. On the western side, there were no oases at all, and precious little water to be had anywhere. So Center’s orbital survey had confirmed prior to the crashlanding of the capsule that had brought him and Raj to Duisberg.

Which is why Redland strength has always concentrated in the west, Center said. We will confirm the specifics in Lindron when we get there.

When are we going to Lindron? This was entirely news to Abel.

I am waiting for a series of dependencies to resolve, said Center. I assure you, you will be the first to know, Abel Dashian.

Thanks.

I suggest you concentrate on resolving the most pressing of those dependencies at the moment.

What would that be?

When and where the Blood Winds will begin to blow. Every indication is that it will be sooner rather than later.

5

Observe:

Gaspar was not truly sorry for what he was about to do, but he felt a tinge, a small tinge, of regret. It was the same regret a man might feel when he must run a dont through the Voidlands knowing there was no water for the animal, and that the trip would kill it, but dependent on that animal while within the those stinking reaches, and living with it day after day, long enough to form a bond, especially if it were only the two of you against the world. Yes, form a bond, but the man always knowing the water in his belly was the only water there was.

That it, the dont, was a tool-a tool that had been bred a tool and nothing more.

The Farmers of the Valley were no different than a dont or a dak, when you came down to it. The only difference is that they could be clever, and might figure out that here, in these lands, they were mere tools. And they might not be pleased when that realization dawned upon them.

Better to keep them in the dark.

And when he was tempted to think that they were men like him, that there might be some other way, he remembered his family clinging to life in that little defile with its uncertain seep, and the daks clustered in the huts with them, and all of them, the tribe, the last of the Remlaps, waking to the paltry milking, the feeble attempt at cheese-making, the rare quickening and birthing of calves. He remembered the endless hunt the men must engage in with only scrawny beasts to show, and the perpetual scavenging of the children. Yes, the children, the ones that remained untaken, forced by circumstance, by hunger and the inability of their parents to provide, grubbing under rocks for the crawling beasts, the hard-shelled insect that at least provided a dollop of protein and fat. Yet they must always be careful, so careful, for everything in the Redlands cut, burnt, or stung-usually to the pain, but often enough to the death. An adult too, might die of such a hard life, but with a child something much more precious was lost, for the Remlaps were failing, forced into the Voidland, the last stretch of waste that a human being could theoretically live on-but more often than not couldn’t.

Gaspar cursed the fact that he was born into days such as these.

But here he was, and a man had to do what he had to do.

Which was, at the moment, make his way stealthily out of the Farmer’s camp after the setting of the big moon, Churchill.

It was not difficult. These Farmer Scouts were excellent desert travelers for Blacklanders, but they were not of the Redlands in the way he, Gaspar, was. He had escaped Blaskoye pursuers. He was confident he could throw these mere Farmer Scouts off his trail. In fact, they wouldn’t even realize he was gone.