Лео Франковски - The Radiant Warrior

"Do that, my lord. Who were these people?"

"You don't recognize them? That's Janina's family."

Janina was one of the girls that I took with me to Three Walls from Okoitz. She was running the store there and was a close friend.

"My God. It'll be rough telling her. Her whole family."

"Not quite. Her little sister-Kotcha, I think she's called-had supper and spent the night with one of the other families. The poor child is in a very bad state."

I remembered the kid now. Last winter she had become a good friend of Anna's, and together they had hauled logs in the snow. "Perhaps she should come back with me to Three Walls, my lord. She could live with Janina."

"A good thought. We will ask the child about it after the funeral."

I never did find out what killed those people.

Interlude One

I hit the STOP button.

"So what killed them, Tom?"

"I don't know. I can check it out if you wish."

He turned on a keyboard and began typing.

"With all our technology, why hasn't somebody developed some decent artificial-intelligence programs? It can't be all that difficult. Then you wouldn't have to use that silly keyboard," I said.

"Such programs have been developed. I've just forbidden their use. Machine intelligence is dehumanizing to the people that use it. I like people and I want to live in a human world."

"Aren't you exaggerating a bit?"

"I don't think so. The ballet they put on last night. Did you enjoy it?"

"Sure. It was great. What does that have to do with computers?"

"Everything. That whole show could have been simulated by a computer and displayed in one of our tanks to a degree of accuracy such that you couldn't tell if it was real or not. Would it have been the same?"

"Hmm… No, somehow I don't think so, but I'm not sure why."

"Well I am. What makes ballet or any other art form worthwhile is the fact that it is done by people. When you watched the dancers, you were putting yourself in their place, imagining what they were thinking and feeling. A recording or transmission of that performance would not have been as good, because you would have been farther removed from the people doing it. A mere computer display of the same show would have been absolutely worthless."

"But if you didn't know-"

"Maybe you could have been fooled. But you would have been angry when you found out. Back to that dead family. It was an onion mold got them. Toxin 8771 from mold 15395, extinct in 1462. The really deadly ones don't last very long.

Killing your host, or the people who cultivate your host, is bad ecology and not good for your own survival."

He hit the START button.

My monthly two-day visits to Okoitz were used to supervise the construction there, but just then there wasn't much to do. The cloth factory was shut down until spring. Without glass or a decent light, the only way you could work indoors was next to an open window, a little rough in this weather. At that, you could only get in six hours a day in good weather.

I checked out the wet mill that sawed wood, worked hammers, and did all sorts of work. There were thousands of tons of water in there, and if it froze, the mill would be wrecked. I checked each of the tanks, but everything was still liquid.

The walls of the mill were a half a yard thick at the thinnest, and that much wood is a good insulator even if it is wet. The windmill kept turning even when it wasn't in use, and my calculations had shown that the energy imparted should keep the water warm enough even in the worst weather. But theoretical calculations are often a long ways from reality! I was relieved.

Work was progressing on the grain mill, but it was simpler than the wet mill we'd built last summer, and Vitold, the carpenter, needed no help from me.

Quite a bit of logging was going on, mostly to clear land for pasturing more sheep. Count Lambert had been buying wool to keep his mill running, and he thought that this was stupid. They were using the steel saws I'd shown the smiths in Cieszyn how to make, but they didn't need my help.

So I took a sauna to make sure that I wasn't carrying anything communicable, and then looked up Kotcha.

I sort of fell into the position of Janina's sister's foster parent. Janina was living in my household, and in fact I slept with her some of the time, so I suppose that the relationship was a natural one. Kotcha was silent through the mass and funeral ceremony. The world can be very brutal when you're nine years old. After her family was in the ground, she wanted to talk to Anna.

My mount was not an ordinary horse. She was a bioengineered creation from some advanced civilization somewhere. Or maybe I should say somewhen, because Anna said they were in the distant past and they used time machines, which she didn't understand. She couldn't talk, of course, but she could spell things out. She was intelligent in an odd sort of way, and she was a full member of my household.

She even got paid like everybody else, not that she spends much of it. Most adults wouldn't believe any of this, but a nine-year-old girl has no such difficulty. They were good friends.

"Kotcha, do you think that you would like to come to Three Walls with Anna and me?"

"Where would I live?"

"Why, in my household, with your sister and me and Anna."

"Anna lives in your house?"

"Some of the time, and it's more of an apartment than a house. Anna has a stall in the barn, too, but most of the time she sleeps in the living room.".

"Could I sleep with Anna?"

"if you want to. Or you could sleep with your sister or even have a room of your own, except when we have company over. I bet you'd take good care of Anna. She gets a good grooming in the barn, but I've always felt that she deserves special care."

Anna nodded her head, Yes. Then she tapped her right forehoof and scratched the ground with her left. We had this code worked out.

"You want something that you want to pay for," I said to Anna. "You mean you want to hire Kotcha?"

Yes.

"Well, what do you think, Kotcha? Do you want the job?"

"Yes!"

"Good. Does a penny a week sound all right to both of you?"

Yes and "Yes."

"Then the two of you have a deal, and you might as well start now. Give Anna a good rubdown. If you need anything, I'll be at the castle. Remember that you're in my household now, Kotcha. You can always come to me with problems."

Giving her something to do was probably the best thing for the kid. Physical activity is usually the best therapy for someone whose problems have no real solution. Nothing in the world could bring her family back, and the best thing to do was to forget.

At the same time, it was sort of funny. Lord! It was strange enough when my handmaids got handmaids. Now my mount had a private rubdown girl!

Back at the castle, I asked Count Lambert if I could take off early, since there wasn't much for me to do *

He had other ideas. He handed me a cup of wine and sat me down. "Sir Conrad, last summer you talked of various flying machines, and how most of them were too complicated for us to assay to build. But my mind has been turning over that 'hot air balloon' you mentioned. I see no reason why we couldn't make one."

"I have bolts of good linen cloth, plenty of rope, and most of that barrel of linseed oil left. There is a pile of wicker for the basket you mentioned, and I've a big, light brass serving-tray that would do to hold the fire. My wife bought it but I never use it. What say you?"

Lord. Another fad coming up. I could see it. Now that every knight in Poland was flying kites, Count Lambert had to upstage them all with a hot air balloon. But kites at least were safe. There's no telling where a balloon will come down. A man could drown, if he didn't fall out.