The power boat was taken and burned at Bloody Ford and is, therefore, of little further interest. The galley reached the Yards about a day ahead of time; its courier, a fat little man by the name of Shan, was met at the quay by a worried Techno. The boat put about and started pulling upriver while Shan was taken by carriage to the administration complex on the outskirts of Gateway.
The buildings forming the complex were the tallest to be seen. After mile upon mile of pastel-painted People's houses and shops, gaily ramshackle in construction, it was at once depressing yet refreshing to see the black marble towers; all but the lower stories were windowless, glass still being a rare material. Gold and silver edging ran along the borders of some of the structures; silver-gray marble formed a main court where a fountain stood. But the fountain was dry—refuse had been collecting in it for quite a while.
Shan pulled his army coat closely about him, the winds feeling unnaturally cold even for early fall. He was further chilled by the interior of the central tower where he was taken; while the buildings were of First World design, the insides were lit by smoky pans of oil, giving the windowless floors the appearance of subterranean dungeons. Electric light fixtures stood at every hand, dusty with neglect. The furniture too was a strange blend of this and past ages: stainless steel desks and chairs seated secretaries working with abacuses and inscribing the figures on parchment with quill pens.
Finally Shan was shown into a comparatively sumptuous office where the current director of the Yards, Amon Macalic, was seated behind an ornate steel desk. Macalic was a perfect counterpoint for the chubby Shan; thin, stooped and irritable, he was often compared to old Trebbly both in appearance and in ability.
Macalic had been in direct and personal touch with the Admiralty, and was fully aware of the hurried studies that were shaking its internal ranks. He often wondered how the Admiralty would get rid of him if it decided that he had been responsible for the Victory's growth at the expense of the nation. He knew that the ship had been going up too fast, but he could not have slowed down construction without arousing the anger of the People. Not really his fault, he told himself; he had been told to avoid overt sabotage and merely to use the resources as they arrived. The Admiralty and the Armories were supposed to take care of the rest.
And then there was the matter of the People themselves. Macalic had sent back numberless directives voicing his fears at their increasing solidarity. Instead of individually worshiping the Technos, they had united into a mass and had begun to worship the Victory. Just as the Technos had donned the black and silver of the Caroline to dramatize their new apartness and divinity, and to show their basic loyalty to the nation, so the People had taken to wearing inordinate amounts of white clothing. There were those cursed People's Palaces—God, what a name, he thought—hopefully nothing more than workers' canteens or what they thought ought to pass for nightclubs, but again it was just that the People should not be doing that sort of thing.
Because of all this, it was understandable that Macalic was not in the best of humors when Shan entered the room, sat down and proceeded to tell him that there was a good chance the roof was about to cave in on all of them. Macalic offered him a little brandy; they both morosely toasted the Victory and the furtherance of their own respective lives.
The brandy was beginning to warm their hearts and hopes when a rather agitated young man entered, dropped a sealed envelope on the director's desk and then left. Macalic waited until the door shut and then broke open the seal and read the handwritten note inside; he read it and looked even more miserable than before. "Anything the matter?" Shan asked, immediately feeling stupid.
Macalic looked around the room vacantly, looking for a thing he knew wasn't there. "Well, Shan, it seems that our darling People have decided they deserve the stewardship of the Victory more than we do. They have"—Macalic cleared his throat—"or rather, are now attempting to take over the capital."
"What of the Army?" whined Shan.
Macalic touched the paper lightly with his hand. "The Army, I am told, performed just as I should have expected it to. The officer corps, or that good portion of it that knew of the Victory, held their posts and I suppose died as valiantly as circumstances would permit. Of the rest . . . you know as well as I, Shan, that the enlisted ranks are drawn mostly from the People anyway." Macalic glanced stiffly at the paper again. "It says here that the Government has retained control of most of the arsenals."
"Good. Then there's hope for them . . . us," Shan said, brightening slightly.
"No, not even there. Remember that the benefits of our technological revolution have not yet reached the home Government. The reliability of our Army's weaponry should still be up to its traditional, dismal standards." A vein of sarcastic anger crept into his voice." Besides, the People are literally hurling themselves at the guns. God, I'd never expected them to be so shattered, I guess you would say, to find out our secret. Never! You'd expect the wretches to behave with a little more rationality." Macalic sighed and raised his eyebrows. "But then again, if the People had ever been capable of thoughtful behavior without the Victory, it would have never been needed in the first place. Would it?"
Shan nodded assent sadly. Then the sadness turned to incipient fear as he realized that he was sitting in the very midst of what the People saw now as a huge conspiracy; he felt very conscious of the black and silver uniform he wore.
Macalic pushed a button on his desk and the aide who had delivered the original communication entered. Macalic issued a set of general orders: all weapons were to be broken out; the Army garrison was to be placed on immediate alert with the officers to pay particular attention to the behavior of the enlisted men; work on the Victory was to be halted and the Yards cleared of all People; all Techno women and children were to be removed to the highlands; the three Palaces of the People were to be occupied by Techno forces.
Shan respectfully noted that this last action might prematurely trigger any planned insurrection, but Macalic told him that at the worst they would lose some men—who would probably be lost eventually any-way—and at the best they just might upset the whole timetable, giving them a slight advantage.
The aide, who had been turning progressively paler, wrote all of this on a pad and then ran out of the office. "And what do we do now?" Shan asked, feeling some confidence return now, knowing that something was being done.
"We shall sit here, Shan, and wait, and think of all the things we might have done to prevent this day from ever happening." Macalic stopped and uttered a low curse; he pushed the button again. "Here is something that should have been done." The aide burst in, almost stumbling over the threshold. "Jennings, do you know who the leader of the People is?"
"Yes, sir, he's a bloke named Coral."
"Good. Do you know what he looks like?"
"Yes, a big fellow, well over six feet tall. Graying hair scarred-up face, all very tough and distinguished. Ex-Army, they say, but I'm afraid they don't say in which army he might have served. I think he's known especially by a big gold signet ring that's engraved with a hand and pegasus or something."
"The crest of Mourne, I believe," Shan piped in. "Home of old Miolnor IV and his ghost."
"And that of General Toriman," Macalic reflected. "A strange nation, Shan, very curious. Way to the north of us, right up next to the Dark Powers, and one of the World's staunchest defenders against them . . . when such conflicts were going on, of course," Jennings coughed nervously; Macalic was shaken out of his little reverie. "All right then, detail a party to find this man. Go with them yourself so there is no mistake—and kill him."
Jennings turned dead white. "Sir?" he asked in a bewildered voice.
"Kill him—as quickly as you can! Now get out." Macalic waved the man away and returned to his broodings.
When the aide had gone, Macalic set up a chess board, both men were too nervous to play a very good game. Macalic won the first match and they were halfway into a second when they were interrupted by the thud of a heavy gun. Shan felt a fear-borne smile twisting his features as Macalic pulled three pistols from his desk, two beautiful First World automatics inlaid with pearl and ebony, and a pitted old revolver of colossal dimensions. Shan was surprised when Macalic pushed the automatics and their holster belt to him, keeping the revolver. "Come on, Shan," Macalic said in" a harsh, grating whisper. "Would you care to see our world die?" Shan toyed with the idea of making light comment on Macalic's indomitable optimism, but soon dropped it for he felt the same way.
The building was deserted as they walked down the spiral staircase, the sounds of gunfire and shouting growing louder as they reached the ground level. The two men ran from the tower and across the courtyard to a coach that was about to leave. The driver was going to the highlands, but a firm word from Macalic (and an ostentatious checking of the revolver's cylinder) convinced the man that honor compelled him to run to the Yards.
They rumbled through the People's districts of Gateway; both the streets and the houses were empty. Ominous trails of smoke and the crackle of gunfire were coming from the direction of the Techno highlands and the industrial perimeter of Gateway.
They reached the Yards within five minutes. They crossed the barren strip of ground separating it from the city; they passed the tombs of George and Limpkin. Above them, covering fully half the western sky, was the Victory; Shan stared up in absolute amazement. The Victory was completed up the point where the hundred foot thickness of its wings was more than half fulfilled. Shan's eye discerned the ugly mortuary temples of the People on the spider web of scaffolding, and then hundreds of the People themselves, dead. An easy five hundred white-clad bodies hung within sight amid the scaffolding and at least as many more lay scattered on the ground.
The coach stopped and both men jumped out, Macalic full of questions and then full of calm orders, Shan still in a stupor.
Macalic was more assured now, taking grim comfort in the fact that he and his men were already defeated; only a formality remained. From what he could gather from the Technos and loyal Army officers, the People had attempted a sudden withdrawal half an hour ago. They were gathering at some point near the mountains, possibly seeking to sweep inward, wiping out all Techno properties in one move. From the amount of smoke in the sky, Shan surmised that they had already begun on the highlands. There was an emptiness in him; he checked his new weapons to see if there were shells in their chambers.
Macalic conferred with the ranking Army officer and redeployed some of their forces; although their heaviest artillery was machine guns and rifle grenades of recent manufacture, the Technos felt reasonably sure that they could, if not defeat the People, then at least extract so dear a price from them that they would be forced to negotiate.
The director of the Yards stationed himself in a well-barricaded machine gun position on the second level of the scaffolding, about fifty feet from the ground and directly across from the main gate, two miles off. The defensive perimeter had been tightened up to form an almost solid ring of machine gun and rifle positions around the edge of the Victory's shadow; black and tan uniforms scurried back and forth below, carrying . . .
A faint yell split the quiet clank of metal and the murmur of busy voices. Shan saw a movement near the main gate; Macalic handed him a pair of battered binoculars. He saw the People, their white clothes stained with black and red from their first battles. Flashes blossomed along the line of the fence, and a torrent of white began pouring through the smoking breaches. They ran forward a bit and then divided, hurrying north and south along the edge of the Yards. For two hours they came, running through the holes and then up to the mountain end of the Yards or down toward the Sea. Running, running until some dropped and were crushed in the rushing tide. Shan could see that many of them had traveled far to reach here, for certainly Gateway could never have housed so many or embraced so many different types. And despite the wildly different kinds of clothing the mob wore, almost every item was dyed a deathly, morbid white. Guns, also white, broke up the oppressive pallor of the mob with the gaping black of their muzzles. Pikes and halberds waved above the crowd; some held crossbows, while others grasped kitchen knives or convenient pieces of wood.
Then there were no more, and the immense crowd stood, two miles from the Victory, resting and waiting; their tired, bestial panting sounded like a distant hurricane to the men aboard the ship.
Quiet. Then a new sound, the one Shan had been dreading: engines. The white mass opened at many points and not one, but many tanks of the type that Annandale had described moved forward. And behind them came yet larger vehicles; terrifying in their sheer mass, guns, antennae and flags sprouting from every possible spot, they rolled out in front of the People, who then closed ranks behind them. Dark, rust-pitted hulls contrasted oddly with the satanic whiteness of the People. Shan picked out the iron fist and winged horse on their turrets; this Coral then, was at the head of it all, for they were carrying his crest. He prayed that Jennings had found and killed the man. The juggernauts drove to a point fifty feet in front of the white mass, and then they too stopped and waited silently.
Five minutes passed. Macalic subconsciously complimented the sense of drama of whoever had planned this operation. The wind drifted in from the west, whistling softly through the naked bones of the Victory and bringing with it some small, indefinable trace of corruption.
Then a yell, increasing into an insane roar. Shan swung his binoculars back to the main gate where the People were again opening a path. A colossal tank, three times the size of anything on the field, moved slowly through the passage and continued onward without pausing. The fighting machine was of purest white, edged with delicate gold striping. Shan was paralyzed with fear; every one of its myriad guns seemed to be pointed directly at him. Even at that great distance, the vehicle's engines were easily heard; they sounded like a continuous, never-ending cannonade.
Shan fiddled with the focus of his binoculars and soon made out a man perched on the main turret, his proportions in keeping with the heroic dimensions of the tank—it must have been Coral. The sun sparkled off some object on his right hand; the ring, Shan guessed, thinking how ironical that a single nation should produce a savior, a redeemer, and then a destroyer. In his left hand the man held a glistening broadsword wreathed with blue-white fire.
The fighting machine drove on until it was clear of the masses. The man, his shirt and trousers as white as the metal he clung to, transferred the sword to his right hand and raised it to the sun. Seeming to catch the cosmic burnings, the sword now glowed with a shattering light, yellow flames rising from its tip. "For the Ship then, my People! Kill the bloody bastards who would keep her from you!" The cry drifted across the rapidly diminishing distance with astonishing clarity. The horde picked up the words. "The Ship, the Ship, the Ship . . . !" The chanting swelled with the sound of gunfire and engines until the roaring of the Sea was lost and the wind was silenced in its awful power. "The Ship, the Ship . . . !" Technos and soldiers hunched over their weapons, counting bullets, calculating ranges and arcs of fire. "The Ship, the Ship . . . !" Shan became dimly aware of the hatred that permeated the chanting. "The Ship, the Ship . . . !" A gun was in his hand; he and the men around him began to fall into the brutal tranquillity that Rome had felt at Bloody Ford. "The Ship, the Ship . . . !"
Now it was so clear—here, around Shan and Macalic, the Victory, the Technos, the machinery, the steel and iron magnificently cold and inhuman in the afternoon sun. It was the First World in all its tragic power, standing again upon the hangman's drop, as good as dead yet wanting to go in a ruthless, slashing cloud of jagged metal and cordite. The compounded blubber of Shan's plump body sloughed away as he moved into the same creation that the first Ship might have been conceived in. His right hand gripped the automatic with a mechanical fury; the metal grip cut into his fingers and droplets of red flowed from his hand onto the gun, joining the two.
Across the Yards came the People, wild, raging with a passion that could never know the precise, crystalline exactitude that had fallen over Shan. Warm, panting and sweating they ran on, their eyes glazed, their feet moving in long forgotten patterns, their mouths forming a single oath, "The Ship!" Right now, Shan reflected, not a single one of them knew what he was actually doing, while he and all those around him knew exactly what they were about: they were purpose, determination and knowledge, unhindered by clumsy, mindless emotions. The shambling mass that was rushing at them was the World, and that was the kindest thing one could ever say about it.
The tanks, though, were something of a puzzle, for while they seemed to be related to the Victory, there was a sense of infinite corruption about them and their crews; but anything that might cause questions about the masses or the tanks was utterly crushed by the concentrated power of Coral and his machine. Of all the thousands of People running toward Shan, only this one could not strike any sort of fear into him.
The wave was less than a quarter of a mile away when both sides fully opened up. A solid sheet of yellow flashes leaped out from the Victory's defense perimeter; a thousand People fell, and several of the smaller tanks vanished in a torrent of heavy grenades. "The Ship, the Ship . . . !" The cry melted into the crashing of big guns, automatic weapons, and bombs.
The nearest tank, the white one bearing Coral, was now less than a hundred yards off; explosions swept away the black and tan uniforms that stood before it. Flame flowers blossomed on its mountainous flanks, but nothing could seem to damage it or touch the giant atop its main turret, his hair plastered back from the muzzle blast of the tank's main batteries.
In an irregular curving line beginning at the main quay on the Tyne and running across the Yards to the Sea, the two forces joined. Macalic was shot through the head, half his skull and brain splattered upon the clean hull of his wondrous Victory.
Shan pushed the body of his late superior down into the tempest below, to get a clear field of fire. He used only one of the guns, holding it steadily in both hands and taking dead aim; ten short cracks, reload, ten more, another magazine, ten more. . . . There were no more clips and Shan felt as if the life had been sucked out of him; he felt starved and sick.
He turned to the machine gun position ten feet to his left. The two attendants were dead amid a clutter of empty ammunition boxes, but the gunner was still alive. Shan stared at him, so amazing was his appearance. The man was screaming like a maniac, his reddened eyes bulging from their sockets but still riveted to the sights; his twisted mouth was dripping foam. Even over the thunder of battle, Shan could hear the man's piercing shrieks, revolting and tinged with madness. But the man's body was as cool and mechanical as Shan had been a moment ago. Calmly his hands sighted the gun, pressed the trigger and cleared the action of faulty slugs, while his torso and legs sat rooted to the floor plating. A bullet whistled by Shan and clipped the man lightly on the arm; he swiveled his raging head and glared at the wound briefly before returning his eyes to their work. His arm had not flinched, his body had betrayed not a single evidence of pain. There was only his possessed head that fought to be with the People and with the warm comfort they found in the Myth of the Ship; from the neck down one might have supposed that the man was an accessory of the gun and of the physical thing that was only the Victory.
Shan was gripped by an urgent need to fire a gun, that its strength might be his again. He got up and moved quickly toward the raving man. The maniac saw him coming and swung his weapon around, his eyes an extension of the iron sights. A burst tore past Shan to strike musical notes on the Victory's hull; a bullet ripped his feet from under him and he fell into the battle. The man snapped back into his former position just as a shell from Coral's tank punched him and his gun into the Ship's silver skin.
Shan fell, it seemed to him, with extraordinary slowness, drifting like a fat, bloody feather down into the fire and swords. White, black, silver, tan, and red: he alighted on a pile of bodies and bounced off onto the concrete. There was no noise now, not the slightest sound; the whole battle was being performed in pantomime. The colors swirled around him with quiet ease until the black occupied all of it.
* * *
Shan awoke some time later. It was dusk and the engagement was over. He was paralyzed, with only his eyes retaining any sort of functional ability. He was propped up against the mound of corpses on which he had landed and could see that his left leg was shattered below the knee; better that he should feel nothing.
All around him lay the wreckage of the battle. Coral's white battle machine stood, still untouched, in the middle of a clutter of burned-out tanks. The dead, arrayed in all manner of uniforms, were scattered over the Yards. The columns of smoke were still spiraling up from the Techno highlands, and some fairly large fires were raging in the factory districts. He could not see the Victory—it was behind him—but he was sure that any damage even this force might have done would be lost on her vast flanks. The shadow of the Ship cast the whole area into a premature night.
He could see horsedrawn wagons and motor trucks moving through the Yards, their crews wearily loading white-clad bodies into them and sprinkling shovels of lime on the black and tan ones.
Torn banners stirred sadly in the light evening breezes, their brilliant gold and white stained by smoke or blood. A horde of seagulls circled and dived over the field, trying to beat the graves' details to the eyes of the dead.
Shan wished with all his soul that he could cry, but he had by then almost lost the power to even blink. The heap of cadavers shifted and he fell helplessly on his side.
He now saw a large group of Technos directly ahead of him; several thousand, he guessed, for they seemed to be backed up all the way to the main gate. There were many women and children among the captured, so it seemed that the People had not gone on the rampage in the highlands that they might have. A big man, Coral perhaps, was standing on a wagon with a bullhorn held before him. Although he could not hear a word, Shan could easily guess what was going on. The surviving Technos were being given a choice: they could remain and serve the Ship's new captains and escape with them to Home. Or they could leave.
Shan looked closer, for the darkness was getting thicker, and was shocked at what he saw. Many of the Technos were, predictably, weeping or simply sitting on the ground, stunned with sorrow or pain; but one by one, as the tears dried and the sorrows fell into a numb coldness, they raised their eyes, not to the World or to the evening stars, but to the Victory. Almost every member of that crowd, Techno and People alike, was entranced by the Ship and with the reality that Coral and his men had suddenly given it.
The choice of leaving must have just been given, for the prisoners were stirring uneasily. Some managed to tear their eyes away from the Ship and looked to their burning homes in the highlands. Others talked earnestly, not looking at each other.
The man with the horn made an appealing gesture. The crowd shifted again and the dying Techno realized that not a single person had stepped forward. How? he asked himself, remembering the iron determination of just a few hours ago. Then he remembered his own exact feelings and saw that the courage was summoned in the name of the Victory, not for any noble schemes of World reconstruction. The ownership of the Victory had shifted and the Technos followed like trained dogs.
He looked up again to see that a single person had stepped forward—a girl, certainly not old enough to be called a woman. Even though her uniform was torn and dirtied, she was still an exceedingly beautiful creature; fair skin, fine features, long gold-yellow hair, she did not belong in this ruin. Hell, Shan thought, she did not belong in the World at all: a First World princess would have been closer to the mark. But her face did not retain the regal calm that her movements expressed. She was confused, and moved her olive eyes first to the Victory, then to Coral, to the highlands, and finally to the night sky; she was crying and tried to cover her face with a bloodied right hand. She stared for a second at a young man in the front rows, but he did not see her, so intently was he regarding the Ship.
Shan tried to call to her, but all he could feel was a thin stream of warm blood forcing its way between his lips.
Coral faced her, a curious smile on his face as if he were happy at her leaving. He gestured and a dark coach and two horses trotted up. She boarded and the coach moved off. It was now virtually night, half the sky being richly strewn with stars.
Shan began to forget the girl and worry about his own impending death. No need to trouble myself about that, he thought, here it comes now. A short stocky man in white was moving along the line of bodies that marked the defense perimeter; he held a pistol and his chest was strung with clip bandoliers. A lime truck and crew followed at a distance.
At each corpse he bent down and felt about the neck for a pulse. If none was found, he passed on; if he found a living Techno or soldier he put the gun to his head before going on to the next. Shan saw only two of the quiet muzzle flashes as the man approached; Shan wondered if a gun were capable of killing someone if he could only see and not hear its shot.
The man was in front of Shan, but all the Techno could see from his position was a pair of boots, painted a dirty white. A hand reached down, but Shan could not feel it touch his neck; he expected the gun to follow but instead the man's tired face came into view. The face saddened and Shan thought he might be saved. The face and boots disappeared. The man moved Shan around, settled him back against the pile and carefully adjusted his head until he was staring almost straight up.
In front and rising out of sight was the ship, now a pale bronze in the twilight, completely filling the world. The starboard wing root began at his extreme left, more than a thousand feet above the Yards; the constellation of Eringold was dimly reflected on the Ship's polished hull.
Shan waited, trying to decide whether to hate or love the Victory. At last the man came back, looking as if he had just granted the Techno some divine favor. The man placed himself squarely in front of Shan, his skin now the same color as the Ship's. With an air of infinite benevolence he swung his gun up until it was within six inches of Shan's face. The next thing the Techno saw was a noiseless flash spreading outward from the gun, hiding the man and his Ship behind its brilliance.