The Book of Fire (73 page)

“You, like, sleep at the console?” N’Doch pulls up a chair from one of the desks and kicks back. “Man . . . that’s dedication.”

“Da kids help, y’know,” explains Luther. “Dey make shur he’s eatin’, and if a vishun come by, up deah onda wall, well den, dey wakim up.”

“The visions never come when he’s napping,” Leif puts in sternly.

“And they come, like, actually on screen?”

“Not then,” explains the Librarian. “Now. Yes.”

“Too cool! Dragon vid.”

Luther is almost purring. “It wuz da One ledyu ta make yer move, Leif.”

But if the visions are random in their occurrence, their subject matter is not. Mostly they focus on the dire condition of the planet, which is, of course, what’s encouraged Luther, as well as Leif and his rebels, to believe that when the One who Comes arrives, she’ll know exactly what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. N’Doch can only hope they’re right. He’s run pretty short of ideas himself.

He decides it’s time to head the conversation where it needs to go. Time’s awasting. He can feel it in his gut. He waves Köthen closer so he can translate, then sets Erde up and gives her the floor. When she’s done explaining her plan, most everybody’s still nodding.

Except Leif Cauldwell. He’s dead against it.

“Drop the cordon? No. No way. I can’t allow it!”

The meld was exhausting, mentally and physically. Erde’s sense of time and place is entirely in flux, with the present more present than ever and her own past beginning to seem like a tale someone else has told her. But this is the least of her worries.

The discussion has hit a snag. Leif Cauldwell is backed up against a desk, declaiming like the ex-military man that he is. Her plan has vaulted him out of his wait-and-see calm. His big hands clench and unclench fitfully. She catches his anguished glance at the small girl asleep against a partition. He doesn’t understand. “How can you even ask it? You’d expose our stronghold? Risk the lives of six hundred people? Of all our children? Our only chance of success rests on there being some place the Beast cannot get to! Or even know about! If he flushes us now, we’ll take
heavy casualties and be forced into a ground war we’re not equipped to fight!”

“But this might work. And it might work now. No drawn-out guerrilla struggle.” N’Doch is trying to sound rational and empathetic while he wolfs down pieces of apple.

They are all exhausted, Erde realizes, as exhausted as I am. We need rest and sustenance and there is no time for either. We must get out of this muffling cave and back in contact with the dragons!

“He’ll be down on top of us in a minute!” barks Cauldwell.

“Maybe not. We’ll never know ’less we try.”

“Easy for you! These aren’t your people!”

“It’s my world, least it was. You’re not exactly seeing the Big Picture.”

Luther hovers, a dark silhouette against the blue screen. “Leif, we bin talkin’ ’bout how we gonna free da One fer ten yeer nah. If dis bring us closa to da ansa . . .”

“We might as well open the doors and invite him in! Luther, we haven’t survived this long by being reckless!”

“Lotta dem down in camp wuld wanna try it, probby,” Stoksie offers. “It ain’t all yer call, na.”

A brave thing, Erde thinks, for a little man to say to a giant. But though Cauldwell’s jaw tightens, he listens. He is bigger and louder, but this is, she realizes with interest, a debate among equals.

“Okay, it’s not all my call. But I have to deal with the military consequences, and—damn it—someone’s got to be the voice of reason here! Paia says he always knows where she is. So no matter how briefly the Librarian’s jamming signal is down, the Beast could still hear her, and if he does . . .”

“He will hear our summons as well.” Erde savors the feel of this very “modern” language on her tongue. She can at last give voice to her impatience, but she doesn’t want this earnestly misled man thinking that time or space have anything to do with these matters, now that she’s been freed of them herself.

“But if he’s occupied with battling Earth and Water,” Paia points out, “how could he come right away?”

“Right.” N’Doch swallows his apple. “So we should have
time to try to contact Air. Now there’s four of us, we might actually get results.”

“And we can let the other dragons know we’ve found Gerrasch.”

“And maybe just lend a hand, y’know? Right now, they’re fighting this war all by their lonesome!”

“And we must do it quickly!”

Cauldwell looks assaulted. He whirls on the Librarian, who is listening quietly. “You agree with all this? Should we take this insane risk? Is it worth it?”

“Big chance. Yes.”

Erde notes how this reply could easily be read two ways.

“Da only chance, mebbe,” says Luther.

“Your embargo’s a risk, too,” adds N’Doch. “Who knows how long his people can hold out?”

“I know! I know every ounce of grain in the Citadel!”

“He’s got wings! He can reprovision! You could end up starving yourselves in your precious hole in the ground!”

The rebel leader drops into a chair, his eyes wild. “If! If! This is madness!”

The Librarian gets up slowly, comes over to lay a wide soft palm on Cauldwell’s head. It seems to calm him a little. “Come. Each one. A lesson.”

He gathers them around his big console, then directs their eyes to the wall screen while he fiddles at his touch pad. Paia knows the blue of that screen so very well. Was it here the message on the monitor originated? It’s as good an explanation as any right now.

“Mattias!” the odd creature calls. “You tell!” His voice is rough. He’s unused to speaking aloud. And he moves like a man feeling his way through a fog. Paia cannot imagine how she could have thought him dangerous.

The oldest boy, the one who’d guided Paia into the room, lopes forward from the shadowed group of desks where the children have retreated. Paia chides herself to remind them of the God’s repopulation program, one vote in his favor, at least. She’s sorry there have been so few children around
at the Citadel, but for the occasional festival. They’re so bizarre and funny, so sure they’re being grown-up, as she no doubt was when she was their age. Like this Mattias, who rests one skinny arm atop the console and clears his throat importantly, waiting to be taken seriously.

The Librarian taps at his pad. In the center of the screen, overlaying the blue tracking diagram, appears a map. It’s an old map, the hand-drawn sort with antique Latin lettering and little drawings of castles and cathedrals where the towns are. The contours are unrecognizable, except to Baron Köthen, whose name Paia has finally absorbed even if she has not quite come to grips with his point of origin. He has seen such documents in his lifetime, and says as much, while N’Doch translates.

However, the boy Mattias has been asked to “tell,” and he intends to do it himself. He puts on his best false-adult Standard English. “This is a map of Ancient Europe, centering on the German duchies of the tenth century.” He glances over his shoulder, kidlike again, and catches his audience’s eye. “He show us dis alla time, doan know why. He say, we gotta know dese tings.”

“Mattias!”

“Yessir.”

The map zooms outward. The German duchies are now a tiny glow in a larger landscape traced by fanciful coastlines and dotted with puffy-cheeked wind gods. A good deal of it is blank parchment, labeled
Oceanus
or
Mare Exterius
, or simply,
Terra Incognita.

“A tenth century European map of the world. The second century mathematician and geographer Ptolemy did a whole lot better.”

Paia suffers a brief memory quake, an upsurging of ancient history studies. The House Computer liked this map, too. She’s sure it’s the very same. Somewhere on it is the legend:
And here there be dragons.

Before she can look for it, the image cross-fades to a crisp and colorful, mechanically produced map dated 1900.

“Another oldie,” says Mattias. “Now, watch carefully. He’ll do the overlays in ten-year increments.”

Sure enough, the map begins to evolve. National boundaries appear and vanish, often to reappear two or three
increments later. Names change. Empires dissolve and re-form in altered configurations.

But one element of the change is gradual and consistent. N’Doch spots it first. “Okay, everybody—check out the coastlines . . .”

The years click by in the label window in the lower right corner: 1990—2000—2010.

“There! That’s me! 2013. That’s my time. Can you freeze the frame? See? The water’s rising already.”

2020—2050—2080. The inexorable creep of blue, swallowing up the green and yellow and brown. The Netherlands. Belgium. Northern France. The Mediterranean flows unimpeded into the Persian Gulf. The Amazon and the Congo are inland seas. A whole lot of India, vanished. All gone to water.

2120—2150—2180. Entire island chains have disappeared. The contour of North America is blunted by the loss of the eastern and Gulf coasts. There is no sign of Florida.

Leif has his brow pressed tight against his fists. “I know, I know . . . but the risk! The risk!”

Luther says, “If da One can’t makit heah ta help us, it woan mattah if da kids grow up or not.”

2200—2210. The clock edges up to 2213 and freezes. There is so little green left, N’Doch has to search for it. 2213. No further.

“That’s it?” asks N’Doch. “That’s where we are now?”

There’s not much more yellow and brown than there is green. The entire world is being sucked back into the oceans.

“2213. I was sure it woulda been further. To get so bad, y’know?” He sits back, looks at Cauldwell. “That make any difference in your thinking?”

“Makes me think how precious our lives are. Not to be thrown away on grand gestures and guesswork!”

N’Doch leans forward again. “But what if that’s all we have?”

“Yu tellit yerself, Leif. How da One’ll show us da way.” Luther eyes the disconsolate rebel leader in quiet challenge. “Wheah’s ya fait’?”

Paia has thought she would resist them, that she must resist them, out of duty to Fire, her dragon. A clear and present duty, even when redefined by what she knows now about the nature of their connection.

Instead, she cedes the floor to Luco—or Leif Cauldwell, as she must now learn to call him, her cousin Leif—as he resists their plan for entirely different reasons. For the cause of sanity. For “his people,” who she used to think were her people, or the God’s. And for the lovely sleeping child he’s picked up to cradle in his arms.