David Drake: Tyrant

Her father clucked his tongue. "Odd, really. She's normally rather bright."

O.

"Not as bright as her father, of course."

O.

"Which is as it should—"

He got no further. Helga had the baby down on the bench and was clutching her father. Not even clutching him so much as jiggling him up and down, as if he were an infant himself. It was a wonderful moment for him, one of the best in his life.

Not perfect, true. There was still the dull, aching sadness of knowing that it would all be swept away, soon enough, by the coming time of blood and iron, fire and fury.

Chapter 3

It was a strange place. Even after all this time, and the familiarity of the many hours Adrian Gellert had spent here, the place still seemed. . foreign.

I never got used to it either, really, came one of the two "spirits" which had created that strangeness. Even after years had passed. And I only had to share my brain with one other, not two.

Adrian shook his head slightly. Then, through the slight haze of the "trance" — as if he were seeing it on another's face rather than feeling it on his own — sensed his lips curling into a little smile. It's not sharing my "brain" that's the problem, Raj. I wasn't using a lot of it anyway. It's that I'm always a little confused whose soul is working at the moment.

i do not have a soul.Center's statement, as always, came so firm and certain that it reminded Adrian of a level plain. A sheet of granite, covered with only the thinnest soil. No hills, no gullies — no mountains, certainly, nor valleys — gave that "voice" any relief at all. Sometimes it was tiring; and it was always a bit annoying.

He sensed Raj Whitehall chuckling. "Sensed" it, only, because in the end Raj was as disembodied as Center himself. But Whitehall, at least, had once been a human being.

He annoyed me a little, too, back in the days long ago when I was alive and he was my adviser. Damn know-it-all. And what's worse is that you can't really trust that knowledge — as he's the first to point out.

of course.

Center's "voice" had no emotional flavor or penumbra. It was always a bit of a shock, that. There was never the little moment of preparation that a human gave another when he was about to speak — a smile, perhaps; or a scowl, or a tilt of the eyebrow. Just. . that flat, level voice. Blowing in as suddenly as a wind off the plain slams open an unlatched door, startling the occupant of the house within.

stochastic analysis deals with probabilities, not certainties. certainties do not exist, outside the fantasies of philosophers. neither do souls, as an objective reality subject to stochastic analysis. you humans have souls simply as referent points to yourselves.

Adrian wondered, for a moment, what his former teachers at the Grove would have said to that. Many of them, he suspected, would have agreed. With the proposition concerning certainty, at least, if not the rest. Privately, of course. In public, no professional philosopher would admit to any doubts on any subject in creation.

The thought was whimsical, not harsh. Whatever their faults, those teachers had shaped his mind. And, on balance, shaped it well. So, at least, he thought.

And so do we, lad , said Raj softly. Or we wouldn't have selected you for your mission in the first place.

Ah, yes. "The Mission."

Raj Whitehall and Center had come to Adrian two years earlier, manifesting themselves in his mind in a manner which Adrian never really had understood clearly. They were incorporeal "beings." Projections, essentially, from a reality which existed on another planet. Center made reference to something he called "software" to explain it, but Adrian found the explanation too confusing to follow.

On that planet, Raj's home world of Bellevue, Whitehall had stumbled across Center by accident. Center was a battle computer, created by the now-long-gone Federation of Man which had once ruled the stars. It had, miraculously, survived the great wars which destroyed the Federation. Wars, and a Federation, which were now so ancient that they had been completely forgotten on those planets which had not been destroyed outright.

Between them, centuries earlier, Raj and Center had transformed Bellevue and set it back on a track which would, eventually, lead toward the reconstruction of the Federation of Man. Since then, they — or, rather, their recorded mentalities projected onto other worlds — had been attempting to duplicate their success elsewhere. On Hafardine, they had chosen Adrian Gellert as the instrument for that mission. And he had, not without some trepidation, agreed to the project.

Through the slight trance-haze of his vision when he was "communing" with the two intelligences which shared his mind, Adrian's gaze moved slowly across the landscape before him.

The heat and moisture struck him first — even physically, for all that his senses were somewhat shielded by the trance-haze. The southern half of the continent was mostly sub-tropical in climate, verging on full tropics in the southernmost regions. In the summer, as now, hot and humid.

Rain fell almost every day, this time of year, at least for a few hours. It had taken Adrian and his brother Esmond some time to grow accustomed to that. The Southrons seemed to take their semiaquatic existence for granted. But the Gellerts came from the northern half of the continent, whose climate was mild and generally dry. According to Center, much like places on Old Earth called "Greece" and "Italy."

His eyes fell on a woman walking past at the base of the slope on which Adrian had pitched his tent. She was apparently returning to her own tent, somewhere in the sprawling mass of barbarians who had gathered here outside the port city of Marange for their great annual conclave. A clay-covered reed basket was balanced atop her head, presumably carrying water drawn from the nearby Blood River.

Adrian sensed a little smile on his face. No woman of the north, not even a prostitute, would have paraded about publicly in such a costume — bare from the waist up, and with nothing more than a string loincloth elsewhere. Watching her heavy buttocks sway as she waddled past, he sensed the smile widen. Certainly not a woman with such a dumpy figure.

The men wore even less. Nothing more than what Adrian thought of as a codpiece. Not even in battle, often enough. The warriors of most Southron tribes tended to scorn armor, other than whatever protection was provided by the quivers which held their arrows and, of course, the great velocipad-hide shields they favored. They considered armor effeminate and cowardly. Going into battle stark naked, covered only with wild and extravagant paint, was by no means uncommon.

The semi-nudity of the Southrons was natural enough, given the climate. At first, Adrian had assumed it was because of the heat. But after experiencing the constant rainfall, he and his brother had shed most of their own clothing. Skin dried quickly, once the rain stopped. The humidity was bad enough without being covered in soaked garments.

If he hadn't been in the trance-haze, he would have sighed then. In truth, he detested the south — the barbarism of its inhabitants even more than the climate. What made it worse was that Adrian could not simply relegate the Southrons to the status of "barbarians" and then ignore their crudities, much as a man ignores the toiletry of animals.

Adrian could see past the surface, in a way that most civilized people could not. The Southrons were not "barbarians," really. At bottom, they were people not much different from Adrian himself. The same intelligence — capacity for it, at least; the same emotions — mixed slightly differently, perhaps, but the same for all that. Hopes, fears, yearnings — all the same.