Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Many artists conceal works that they do not feel are up to their personal standards; many of these works may be lost forever if the artist leaves behind no record. Hannto had used his power to summon forth memories from the very bones of the great, and eventually his personal collection had swelled with uncataloged works by major artists. He could provide no provenance for any of them, and thus could never receive the full value of a painting or sculpture in a sale, but what mattered that?

  He had never intended to sell them.

  Hannto had his own feelings about art. Art was not merely the creation of beauty, for him; neither was it merely a reflection of reality. It was not even the depiction of truth.

  Art was the creation of truth.

  It is a truism that when one is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The glory of art is that it can show this proverbial hammer how everything looks to a screwdriver—and to a plowshare, and to an earthenware pot. If reality is the sum of our perceptions, to acquire more varying points of view is to acquire, literally, more reality.

  Hannto had wanted to own the universe.

  The precise point where he had passed from collector to creator was a mystery. Perhaps truly passionate collectors are always artistes manqués: perhaps they choose to buy what they have not the gifts to create. Perhaps touching the minds of all those countless artists had molded him in some way; perhaps seeing the world through the dream-eyes of artists had given him, over time, some vision of his own.

  Tan'elKoth was more than the sum of his experiences; he was the grand total of the sums that were the men who lived within his mind. For fifteen years and more he had lived by his absolute control of these self-created shades. What will could possibly have touched this sculpture, other than his own? What will could have altered the curve of his David's stance, could have angled the line of his David's jaw down toward resignation and defeat? What will could possibly drive his mallet to his chisel without his consent—without even his awareness?

  Faintly, distantly, muffled in the depths of his apartment below, the annunciator on his deskscreen chimed.

  2

  Tan'elKoth fairly flew down both flights of stairs into the darkness of the ground floor; he skidded to a halt. in front of the desk, then spent a bare moment to order the lights on and straighten his clothing.

  The Adventures Unlimited logo flashed in the message box of his screen.

  With ponderous dignity, he lowered himself into his chair. "Iris: Acknowledge," he murmured. "Audiovisual."

  "Professional Tan'elKoth. You are instructed to remain at your current screen. Hold for voice communication from the Adventures Unlimited Board ° of Governors."

  The screen wiped to the Adventures Unlimited logo: the armored knight upon the winged horse, rampant.

  "Professional Tan'elKoth." A subtle change in the voice: where before it had been purely mechanical, now it had the faintest hint of self-awareness, the consciousness of power.

  There came next from the speakers deep in the floor beneath his desk a recording of Tan'elKoth's own voice. "Tell your Board of Governors this: in exchange for certain considerations, I shall undertake to solve their Michaelson problem."

  Tan'elKoth smiled.

  The voice of the Board of Governors said, "What considerations?"

  So: no preamble, no throat-clearing. Clean and direct without a wasted word. Tan'elKoth nodded to himself. He could do business with men such as these. "An alliance, gentlefolk. Return me to my land. Leave the Empire and my people to me; you may use the rest of my world as you desire. Within the Imperial bound, your interests will be better served by the power of Ma'elKoth than by the weak minds and wills of your Earth-bred satraps. We have a common goal, do we not? To ensure the future of humanity, both here and on my world."

  "And in exchange?"

  Tan'elKoth shrugged. "As I said: I shall undertake to solve your Michaelson problem."

  "Our Michaelson problem is hardly worth such a price."

  He snorted. "Come, gentlefolk. This protest is fatuous; were the problem in question so insignificant, we would not behaving this conversation."

  "Michaelson is no one. We created him. He is exactly what we made him: nothing. A cripple, wholly owned by the Studio."

  Tan'elKoth let a smile creep into his voice. "And yet, within a handful of hours, this wholly owned cripple has ripped your plans asunder and cast their shreds to the winds of the Abyss."

  "You are overdramatizing. This is no more than a public-relations gaffe,"

  "You," Tan'elKoth replied with clinical exactitude, "are fools."

  Only silence greeted this pronouncement; apparently, the Board of Governors was unused to hearing the truth. "Caine is against you, now," Tan'elKoth said. "Without my help, you are lost."

  "You fear Michaelson so much?"

  "Bah." How do men of vision so limited come to wield power so vast? "I fear Michaelson not at all. Michaelson is a fiction, you fools. The truth of him is Caine. You do not comprehend the distinction; and so he will destroy you."

  "We are gratified by your concern for our welfare,"

  "I care nothing for your welfare," he said through his teeth. "I want my Empire back."

  "This seems a steep price for so small a service: to crush a powerless cripple."

  "Doubly fools," Tan'elKoth said. They were repeating themselves; redundancy is the hallmark of muddy thinking. "He does have power. One power: the power to devote himself absolutely to a single goal, to be ruthless with himself and all else in its pursuit. It is the only power he needs—because, unlike the great mass of men, he is aware of this power, and he is willing, even happy, to use it."

  Tan'elKoth leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers before his face; he had been a professor for enough years that he fell into his lecture mode without thinking. "Men like Caine—and, if I may say so, myself—exert a certain pressure upon history; when we set ourselves a goal and ex-tend our energies to achieve it, the force of history itself organizes into a current at our backs. You might call it destiny, though that is an inadequate word for a power of this magnitude. On Overworld, one can even see it: a dark stream in the Flow that organizes the interplay of historical necessities—the interplay which the ignorant call chance."

  "Then we need do nothing at all; he is one, we are ... several; if what you say is true, we can think him to death."

  Tan'elKoth clenched his jaw. Could they possibly guess how this sophistic jabber wore on his nerves? "Will without action is mere daydreaming; it is as useless as the blind spastic twitching that is action without will—which, I might add, accurately sums your efforts so far."

  He leaned toward the screen and lowered his voice as though sharing a friendly confidence. "You are helpless before him. He demonstrates this even as we speak. You would have stopped that broadcast if you could; I know that your machines monitor the net, and intercept even private messages that might so much as hint at what that recording explicitly spells out. How, then, did you come to fail? Do you think that recording reached a worldwide audience by chance?"

  "Coincidence. A meaningless blip of probability"

  Tan'elKoth forebore to point out that coincidence is only another name for bad luck the eternal excuse of the loser. "You may scoff at the power of Caine," he said, "but there is one whose power demands your respect: one who can stop you with a mere gesture. I speak, of course, of Pallas Ril."

  "Pallas Ril—Shanna Michaelson—is merely a woman, while here on Earth. She can be easily dealt with."

  "Mmm, true," Tan'elKoth said slowly. "And you could have done so, had you not awakened Caine. Pray, tell me now: Where is this mere woman at this moment, as we speak?"

  "She is appearing at a convention in Los Angeles."

  "Is she? Are you certain?"

  "What are you saying?" For the first time, Tan'elKoth thought he might even be able to detect a hint of expression in the digitized voice—and the emotion thus expressed warmed him inside. "She is on Overworld? Impossible
. Her next shift isn't until September twenty-first."

  In answer, Tan'elKoth gave them only a tiny smug smile.

  "She must be found. She must be stopped."

  "And how, precisely, will you do this? She is already beyond your reach; there, she is a goddess, and as near to omnipotent as any living creature has ever been, including myself. You have been completely out-fought," Tan'elKoth said. "Caine is too fast for you; your corporate group-think is slow and innately predictable. But your difficulty is by no means insoluble."

  "What solution do you propose?",

  He straightened again, and let a gleam of his passion flash into his eye. "You must submit yourselves to a single organizing will—give over the direction of your campaign to one lightning mind. To put it bluntly: Your only hope is to call upon me."

  "Why you?"

  "I am, false modesty aside, Earth's leading expert on Caine and Pallas Ril. I have in my library every cube either of them has ever recorded; the primary use of my ammod harness is to allow me to leave the Curioseum long enough to review their Adventures. I daresay I know more about their abilities—and their psychologies—than they do themselves."

  "Knowledge is meaningless without power."

  Tan'elKoth sat silently for a long moment, staring fixedly at the mirror as though some message could be read between the reflected pixels. Finally he said, "Indeed."

  He shifted his weight and allowed some of the fire in his heart to reach his eyes. "To amend my previous statement: Pallas Ril is beyond your reach—but not yet beyond mine. I can stop her for you, gentlefolk. Give me the opportunity, and I shall."

  "At what price?"

  "Her I would kill for free; I despise her. Breaking Caine, however—that will be expensive. Caine's innate ruthlessness makes him extremely dangerous. In his limited fashion, he is frighteningly resourceful, and an exceptionally flexible thinker. In any situation that he can frame in terms of combat, he will not lose."

  "A substantial claim."

  "Is it? Let me provide a salutory example: one that is--I think pardonably—still fresh in my heart. Once, not so long ago, he set his will upon the life of Pallas Ril. Though a living god stood against him on one side—" He modestly placed his palm against his chest, then opened it toward the screen. "—and the most powerful bureaucracy this world has ever known stood against him on the other, he—one single, solitary man—overcame us both."

  "There were special circumstances—"

  "Puffery. Mere details. When saving the life he willed to save required that he defeat in single combat the greatest warrior of his time, he did so. Forget that this man was Caine's master in every form of battle; forget that Berne, even unarmed, could have killed him in his sleep without breaking the rhythm of his snoring. Remember that Berne wielded a weapon that was legendary: Kosall, the unstoppable blade. Remember that Berne was Gifted with Strength far beyond human, and defenses that could make his skin impervious as steel. Remember that when Caine faced him he was bruised, and battered, half crippled---and poisoned—and still ..." Tan'elKoth let his voice trail away significantly.

  "Luck"

  "Luck" Tan'elKoth spat the word with vehemence surprising even to himself. "Luck is a word the ignorant use to define their ignorance. They are blind to the patterns of force that drive the universe, and they name their blindness science, or clear-headedness, or pragmatism; when they stumble into walls or fall off cliffs, they name their clumsiness luck"

  "We can settle for removing Pallas Ril, perhaps a median price can be negotiated."

  Tan'elKoth snorted. "Clearly, you surmise that killing her will save you and your plans—but the truth is precisely opposite. I stand before you as a testament to this. You wish to interfere with Pallas Ril? Destroy Caine first" "And again, why do we need you for this?"

  Surely even men-as dense as these should see a simple truth, when it is painted before their eyes. "Because," he said patiently, "there is no one else who truly understands what Caine is. Without me, you will learn, but too late. He himself will teach you—but it is knowledge you will carry to your graves. You will die cursing your own foolishness, should you reject my offer. Hmp. You wish to understand the fate of those who set themselves against Caine? Ask Arturo Kollberg."

  "Arturo Kollberg?" There came a long, long considering pause—far too long in response to a rhetorical question.

  "The perfect choice," his interlocutor said. "We will."

  3

  Arturo Kollberg clutched the melamine surface of his work space, sweat trickling from the scars that pitted the remains of his hairline. His skin had gone to paper, these past years: age-yellowed pulp, dry and crumpled over the bones of his face. Only his spoiled-liver lips retained their rubbery thickness, and the teeth around which they tightened were traced with carious brown.

  I am dreaming, he thought. This can only be a dream.

  A shining disk blinked in the mailbox corner of his screen. Within the disk, an armored knight rode a winged horse, rampant. A message from the Studio.

  This must be a dream.

  But it didn't seem like a dream. The cubicles here—in Patient Processing—were crystal clear, and bitterly familiar. The moaning of patients in the examining rooms came thinly through the walls, and some-one sobbed with endless psychotic monotony in the lobby. A pair of enormous houseflies, grown fat and clumsy on a diet of blood, buzzed lazily across the fluorescent bands of ceiling lights.

  He risked a glance to either side, after first checking that his supervisor wouldn't catch him looking away from his work. At their adjoining cubi­cles, the clerks beside him hunched over their keyboards, ticking franti­cally away. Here in the Mission District Labor Clinic, the data entrars were paid by piecework: one-tenth of a mark for each completed form. They stared with manic fixity at their screens, and the room reeked with their acid, frightened sweat.

  His years in the Temp ghetto had sucked the meat from his dead-stick arms and twisted his once-nimble fingers into arthritic claws; he barely recognized the hand that he moved to shift the cursor into his mailbox, because for this single, long, achingly sweet moment, he remembered what he had once been.

  What he had once been

  He remembered sitting in Corporate Court, watching the evidence mount against him, watching the parade of Actors and technicians, Social Police and rival Administrators as they each came to throw their handful of earth into his living grave. He remembered watching Ma'elKoth testify against him; he remembered the imperious disdain, the impenetrable dignity, the thundering moral righteousness of the ex-Emperor's denunciation.

  During those endless hours of humiliation, Kollberg had been able to do nothing save sit at the defense table, numb and hopeless. He'd known full well he would be destroyed: the Studio—the power that could have saved him, that could have stood by his side, could have rewarded his devotion and selfless service—had turned against him. To save itself, it had savaged him. Raped him. Gutted his life. It had stripped away everything that gave his existence meaning, and had cast him into the gutters of a Temp slum.

  He keyed the icon, and a dialog box unfolded in the center of his screen.

  LABORER ARTURO KOLLBERG: YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO REMAIN AT YOUR CURRENT SCREEN. HOLD FOR COMMUNICATION FROM THE ADVENTURES UNLIMITED BOARD OF GOVERNORS.

  Kollberg could no longer breathe.

  They remember. They've come for me, after all these years. A progress bar flicked into existence in the center of his deskscreen, filling slowly from left to right as something large downloaded from the net They've come for me at last.

  Six years—nearly seven—on the Temp boards. Six years.

  Six years of standing in line at a public access terminal, begging for work, lucky to get four or five days a month; six years of standing in line at slop kitchens, to act grateful as his bowl was filled with his daily share of the befouled swill that he must choke down quickly or gag on the taste of rot; six years of being shoved and jostled and pawed by people who stank, whose breat
hs reeked of cheap liquor and tooth decay, whose clothes had the barnyard odor of days-old sweat and imperfectly wiped assholes; six years of hot-bunking at a Temp flophouse, time-sharing a single bed in eight-hour shifts with two other Laborers, sleeping on sheets damp with their polluted sweat and the stains of their diseased bodily fluids.

  Kollberg's ragged fingernails scritched across his work space, and his lips curled into knots against his teeth.

  The progress bar was nearly full.

  If this is a dream, Kollberg decided, it will end when the progress bar fills. That's how I'll know.

  Soon—too soon, bitterly soon—he would be jerked or slapped awake, to find himself in his tiny cubicle at the Labor Clinic, facing his flickering, blurred deskscreen. He'd have to look at one of the Labor trash who were his coworkers and shrug apologetically, would have to smile sheepishly and mumble something about insomnia last night. Or, worse yet, he might wake up to find his office manager leaning over him, that stuck-up Artisan bitch with the plastic tits, the cracks in her face spackled with the makeup she troweled on every morning. That vicious cunt would dock his pay an hour for sleeping, even if he'd only nodded off ten minutes ago.

  For this was his life.

  After five years of enduring the soul-killing humiliation of the Temp boards, Kollberg had found a job, a real job. It paid less per hour than Temping, but it was steady; over the course of the sixty hours he spent each week inside his cubicle entering patients' data into the Labor Clinic's main core, he made enough to rent himself a room at an SRO only three blocks from the clinic, to rent a netscreen, and even to buy private food three or four times a week He was, in the brutally limited way only another Temp would really understand, making something of himself.