MANGANON

MICHAEL STALL

Michael Stall's vision here, incorporating the farthest reaches of the future and the farthest reaches of the past that turn out to be the day before yesterday, contains an evocative creation of the true otherness of a world that, for all Gwent knew at first, could be fact or fantasy, hell or purgatory. For George Gwent and for Hrunting, two men who came to Manganon from greatly dissimilar backgrounds, the axon gateways offered vastly different prospects, aims that they had not so far revealed. There was much more to Manganon than appeared after the enigma had been solved. Manganon, with its facetted sky, its ceramic weapons, its living armour, its vegetables artifacts and the bewildered people of another time, would, as Michael Stall effortlessly points out, be argued over in the very finest academic style by the bedazzled observers. But, then, the true Manganon was none of these things.

* * * *

PART ONE: THE BORROWED SWORD

1

THERE WAS dew on the heather. It was beginning to penetrate the leather bindings on his legs. The Traveller who was currently known as Passer by Gates noted it, and quickly suppressed an associated memory chain. The name he now carried was also beginning to accumulate too many memories, and it had not even been of his own choosing: the other names he had held dredged themselves up: Hraegl, the Aetheling, Siwardsson ... It was a long list, and he took no particular pride in it. But now, in the fruitless search for anonymity, it needed adding to, and the choice was easy: the old words were the best for such things: Hrunting, the borrowed sword.

He looked up: the deep green tracery of the night sky was yielding to the magenta of day. The care they took of their charges, even down to maintaining the circadian rhythms! He looked about, over the plain that yielded in the direction - meaninglessly called the East - to minor mountains, beyond them the sea, and down from their maritime watershed a fair river running its once for all way with villages and hamlets dotted about its bottom lands, and a great city at the merging of the waters. Neither city nor village nor sea interested Hrunting: only the Gate that was there, somewhere, perhaps the great dream of all Travellers: an un-looped Axon Gate!

He looked down at the now sodden leathers on his legs, and they brought to mind a sudden rain in the Morea - in primary time - and his Varangians cutting Hauteville hirelings from their horses, and for a moment his fingers half-felt the form of an axe's haft, before the certain futility of it all recalled itself to him.

He felt a dozen aches: this body had scarcely a good year left in it, but that was only to be expected: he had been walking it now three days with scant rest, and that was the pattern of the past year. He could not wait too long before the next Gate, though his eagerness was augmented by the rumour that this coming Gate had a Magister Portarum.

Without thought of rest, the newly renamed Hrunting trudged forward in an empty direction, laved of hope and beyond despair.

* * * *

2

The road was leading nowhere, only deeper into the Dale Country, away from the warren of cities where Gwent could mantle himself in the nondescript generality - or could have done. There was no pain now, but slowly, almost pleasantly blood oozed through the wad of handkerchiefs out on to the red plastic of the seat. He was dying. He felt little fear: his stomach was too badly torn up by police bullets to tighten, and the numbness that encircled the wound seemed somehow to have spread to his mind. Wearily, he eased off the accelerator and let the car coast to a halt, methodically turning off the ignition and easing on the hand brake. It was not his car: the very least he could do would be to leave it in good condition for its unknown owner: the blood, after all, would wash off, a flake from the snake-skin of reality, like the nine days' wonder of its being stolen by George Gwent, the famed terrorist.

Tiredly, he leaned to take one of the leaflets from the back seat: the bold, cheaply printed 'Free England' banner in red over the black, blood and soil text, stared at him, and had no meaning for him. That was someone else's struggle now. He crumpled it, and wiped ineffectually at the stain on the seat. Then it crossed his mind that if he died in the car, the EPC Auxiliaries might suspect a booby trap and plant a charge. The French Auxiliaries were notably wary, and it was a fifty-fifty chance that they, and not the regular police, would find him first. In his dull, bemused state, the sense of obligation to the car's unknown owner assumed huge proportions. He dropped the dirtied leaflet, and holding the wad in place over the wound, he fumbled the door open and staggered out.

He could see the stars, haloed in his unfocussed vision, and he felt the silence of the night like a blanket held over him, a blanket that magnified the erratic beat of his heart as it relentlessly evacuated the lifeblood in him, turning his trousers into hardening cylinders that impeded knee movement. With his free hand, he delved into his jacket pocket, grasping the ancient Webley. He managed a few paces, out of the zone of brightness he had made opening the car door, before he fell, not in classic movie slow motion but hard on to earth and stone.

He lay motionless for a while, minutes perhaps; it was hard to tell, but finally he noticed the inscribed slab. It had been discarded at the roadside was his first thought - an old gravestone. Appropriate. There was a time of scant consciousness again, then a dull wakefulness. In the low power light of the car interior roof light, yards away, he could make out a few words, in terrible dog latin, old and roughly carved.

'Ego ... Petrus de Wyke, Magister Porte...'

The words held him: 'Magister Porte,' Master of the Gate. It was no title he had ever seen before, and he had read old charters and statutes for years, dredging up pointless precedents and laws for the Movement, in the days before all sides had ceased to respect anything but the gun. Armiger, barone, miles ... they meant something, but ... He was confused, tired; he tried to make out more, but everything blurred, faded into the blackness that disguised hedgerow and distant tree, save for one phrase that penetrated the fog that was settling about his mind:'... hac porta ...' By this gate. What gate, and what by it? He turned laboriously over, so that he could see the stars, but his eyes could make out nothing now but utter, unrelieved blackness, like the blackness before the beginning of things. He wrenched the Webley from his pocket, releasing hold of the soaked wad that pent his guts, and held the pistol in a marksman's double grip, determined to break this blackness by gun blazes of creation, but the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

'...hac porta ...' By this gate. His mind was wandering. Was this death, this primeval numbness that was spreading even to the extremities of his limbs? For a moment, he knew anger.

'I am!' he screamed, or imagined he screamed, and then the numbing blackness seeped finally into his mind, became a torrent, and the universe died, uncreated.

* * * *

3

There was no transition. For the vision blur of the night sky, a canopy of glowing magenta substituted itself. Gwent stood stock still, observing no fear reactions in himself; this was too strange to excite fear. As he thought about it, then his heart would begin to pound, his ...

Stood! He was standing! He hurt no more! A glance revealed his clothes still tattered, but clean, with no wounds beneath them. He had been dying, and he was alive, here! He looked hard at the new sky: there was more difference here than colour: he could make out a faint tracery of lines, as if the sky itself were faceted, and he himself stood in the very centre of an enormous jewel.

Palpably, he did not. All around him, scarcely looking odd even in the reddish light, were the normal accoutrements of the moor, grass, bushes, the occasional tree. It was that normality amidst strangeness that finally set his heart pounding.

How long he stood there, silent, unmoving, he didn't know. Fear mounted in waves, beat a surf of terror over him, then scattered in froth to reveal yet more and larger waves ... With as great an effort of will as he had ever made, he broke the pattern. Whatever had happened had to have a rational explanation, not necessarily a pleasant one, but a rational one. With such thoughts he slowed the trip hammer in his chest, slowing it to a heartbeat.

Am I dreaming? he thought suddenly, but the answer supplied itself: every dream he could recall always had a saving air of unreality that either frustratingly shadowed its joys or thankfully diminished its horrors - an element of conscious reality intruding. Here, sense, feeling, intuition all shouted at him: this is for real!

An alternate world? Another planet? But the facetted sky! Insanity seemed the best bet; but didn't the insane never even consider that possibility, or was that just folk-lore? It didn't matter; he wasn't seriously considering it as a possibility. The truth was he had insufficient data for a useful judgment, so - gather more. He walked.

And as he walked, normalcy enveloped him, words formed themselves in sequential order in his mind - sequential, for causality seemed still to be valid here. He tried to think about it; but his thoughts merely fitted themselves to the old grooves. He noticed a clump of bushes surmounted by a tree, a miniature copse. He sat down on the grass, his back to the copse and wondered what time of day it was. As there was no sun--

The breath came out of him in a single, lung emptying gasp. He'd realized it before, but even in his mind he'd been afraid to verbalize it. Now it was out. He had not stumbled by accident on some bizarre warp or fissure in space-time: his new environment was artificial. This was not elsewhere ... it was a made thing. He-

There was a rustling behind him. He came to his feet, twisting about to see a short, wild figure, all beard and eyes, in a leather jack and russets thonged to mid calf, and all topped by a battered but still serviceable plain helmet. Gwent did not fail to notice the scramasax the newcomer clutched in his right hand.

'What do you want?' he rapped out, without thinking whether the newcomer could understand English.

The warrior twisted his face under the beard: 'I'm going to carve you a little, brother.'

'Why?' Gwent replied, with a dispassionate calm that surprised him.

The warrior looked him over with an appraising eye. 'Good clothes, and jewellery concealed beneath, I'll wager.' He wagged the knife. 'Your effects should buy me a good baked byrnie and sword, and make a gentleman of me.' He began to move forward, menacingly.

And Gwent's calm broke: the huge anticlimax of being robbed and killed at this point was an impertinence he didn't intend to let the universe get away with: he leapt forward, brushing aside a tentative lunge, and then the in-fighting techniques he had been taught in the Movement took over. It was all too much for the warrior, who had obviously expected abject behaviour on the part of his victim; in seconds, Gwent's fingers tightened about his throat, clutching with a wild pressure. Gwent found himself longing to strangle the life of his man, as if to work off the fears and frustrations of the time he had spent in this new world. Instead, when the eyeballs seemed on the point of starting from the head, he unceremoniously dumped the would-be thief on the turf. The other still held the knife, and Gwent bent to take it from him. It was some kind of ceramic, he noted, and as he stood there, examining it, he realized that the language he had been answered in hadn't been English. Nor, for that matter, the language he himself had used. He scowled with annoyance. Was life under the magenta facetted sky to be an interminable procession of double-takes?

'Your name?'

'Wulf, sir.'

'Nationality?'

'English.'

Gwent made a wild guess: 'The year?'

'The Year of Our Lord One Thousand and Sixty Nine.'

Gwent tried to put time travel into the melange of events and make a pattern, but none came. This new world became stranger the more one learned of it. This language they were both using with perfect familiarity - to his mind, it seemed like English, and it was a good bet that to Wulf it seemed like late Anglo Saxon: it fitted both like a perfect semantic glove. Wulf moved, and Gwent moved the knife forward.

'Go on,' Wulf said, fearfully. 'It's what we're here for.'

Gwent backed off a pace, still holding the knife out.

'You know what we're here for?'

'It's obvious.'

'Not to me.'

Wulf looked quite surprised, but volunteered no further information. Gwent felt himself growing impatient: this could go on all day, if that was the right word. He leant forward, almost jabbing the other in the face with the knife.

'Where are we?'

'In Hell, of course,' the beaten man said, as if shocked at having to say it. 'Where else?'

* * * *

4

It was night, of a sort. And there were stars, of a sort. The vertices of the milliard facets glowed balefully out of the green; it was as bright as a new moon night. Wulf slept soundly; he was happy enough, now; he had refound his true vocation. He had been a thane's servant, dispossessed of his master in the New England, and mortally wounded in the Harrowing of the North. How he had come here was a little vague to him.

Gwent smiled to himself. He had met a real, live Anglo Saxon, and he found himself with particular interest in the fact. There was no question on that score he wanted to ask: the differences were small, human, accidental, of no account. The only important question was on the nature of this ... device, that they both occupied. Wulf could believe it to be Hell, if he chose; but his new servant was hardly well informed. He would have brooded more, but he fell asleep.

* * * *

Morning came with a tropical suddenness. The green spotted grey of the fell was brighter than it should be under the red arch of the facetted heavens. Wulf called it the Fell of Transfiguration, a hard place, and advised against seeking help in the houses whose smoke floated wispily to the sky every half mile or so. 'It's too easy to die under someone else's roof.' Although he was the willing servant, in the question of their destination he had been the master. 'There's nowhere else to go.'

What precisely the Folk Field was, Gwent had difficulty in deciding; direct questions yielded the answer that it was a field of people, camped out, but Wulf fought shy of revealing for what purpose. When Gwent asked if there were no cities, Wulf blanched like a maiden and begged him to be silent on that, here on the fells.

He did gather that they were people of Wulf's time at the Folk Field.

'There are priests there,' Wulf admitted. 'Some think we're in Hell, and some for lack of pains think we're in Purgatory, and there's one, Piers, that denied his faith. There's no bishop to settle the matter between them.' He paused. "We may be in Hell, but it's sinful to despair, so I act as if I weren't.'

It was in the late afternoon - according to Wulf - when they saw the running man.

* * * *

5

The Field of Folk spilled out on both sides of the river. Hrunting had seen such gatherings before, and never had the consequences been happy. His first thought was to ease his scramasax in its small scabbard, and to move his money supply to a safer concealment. He wondered whether there were any other Travellers here - and whether, this time, he might escape notice as one himself.

He was bringing his mind to the purpose of the gathering - of perhaps two or three thousand souls - when he saw a figure detach itself from the collage of tents and huts and screens, coming out across the rich valley land to meet him. He didn't vary his pace, but rested his hand on the hilt of his scramasax.

After they had moved for several minutes, he could make out that the figure was in a rough and ready priestly garb. His hand rested on the hilt of the scramasax still: the primary catchment area of this sector was the English Eleventh Century, and he knew it, and its priests, only too well.

'Welcome, brother,' the priest said. 'I am Father Piers.'

Hrunting nodded introducing himself with his new name.

'Are you come to join the Great Venture?'

Hrunting smiled: it was to be a great theft. 'I know nothing of it.'

It was the priest's turn to smile. 'It is my profession to dispel ignorance, brother. Our city has refused us access to the Gate. Even the sick and dying ...'

'So?'

'So we take what is rightfully ours.'

'And the city?'

'One with Sodom and Gomorrah.'

* * * *

6

Shouting, Wulf scurried off in search of non-existent cover, taking the knife with him. Gwent looked about, as if for help of some kind, but there was no help against the running man. Gwent stood his ground and waited a short eternity while the green clad figure of the running man drew near. This was a fighting man he could see: the green was not clothing, but some kind of armour; it encased him like a knight's plate armour in the dying days of chivalry, but it in no way impeded him. When he was so close that Gwent could see grey eyes peering out of the green, the runner gracefully extracted with his right hand a glittering gold ceramic sword, and a silver gleaming ceramic misericorde with his left.

Gwent felt a sudden panic. Was it to be death at this man's hands for enmities not his, and with so much to learn? No! He stripped off his jacket, and, holding it by the collar, waited. Without change of pace, the running man came at him. Gwent noticed how the armour moved with him, like a second skin. When they were five yards apart, he flung the jacket. As if mechanically, the running man slashed at it, but it tangled on his misericorde, and made him mistime the sword stroke. Gwent's muscles remembered the long hours spent at combat judo in seedy backrooms, and he caught the arm on the down swing, gripping it with both hands. He swung it up and sideways, kicking himself backwards as he did so. The green runner jerked into the air, out of Gwent's grip, to crumple on the turf three yards away.

Gwent had gone back too hard, winded himself. He could vaguely make out the green runner stirring, but his body refused to do anything about it. He'd almost won; he couldn't give up now. He rolled on to his face, gasping for breath, and pushed himself up on his arms. But it was unnecessary. Wulf stood over his opponent, brandishing his own knife. The green runner made an ineffectual one-armed grab - the other arm was broken - at the servant, for both his weapons had spun beyond his reach, but Wulf was quick. He jumped out of reach, only to dive back, the knife darting for the unprotected eyes, once, twice, and then deep. Gwent eased himself back to the earth, not watching. Even dying, the green runner maintained that almost inhuman silence.

Gwent finally struggled to his feet. Wulf paused a moment in his stripping of the dead man.

'My lord, no one else at Folk Field has a harness of living armour. You'll truly be a great man, a leader.' He turned back to the delicate job of stripping the now limp, green harness from its bloody-faced former owner, only adding casually: 'Serving you will be an honourable estate.'

* * * *

PART Two: To THE CITY

1

'HERE, there are no coincidences ...'

Hrunting's words, uttered in passing to him just before the strategy meeting he was currently enduring, haunted Gwent; they were like a key he had been casually handed, but without the location of the appropriate door, or a hint as to what lay beyond it.

'... and so, if I may summarize our resolutions?' The Elder paused to brush back his long, white-blond hair and let his glance play over the council of the Folk Field, squatting before him in the makeshift council tent. The question was pro forma: he reflected the general will of the meeting too accurately and too forcefully for there to be any dissent. 'So, the assault which I shall lead, with Traveller Gwent accompanying me, shall in its earlier stages be a decoy only: the city is impregnable from the landward side alone. We have, therefore, accepted Traveller Hrunting's plan for an attack from the sea, which he has graciously consented to aid my daughter in leading...' The Elder's words droned on, and Gwent felt himself drawn in against his will into this petty struggle, with aims he scarcely understood. He was a little amazed at being accorded the title, 'Traveller', which seemingly was the due of Hrunting and, from what he could gather, of all those who had passed more Gates than those of initial transfiguration.

No coincidences. What did Hrunting mean by that? There was the matter of the citizen who had, apparently co-incidentally, donated the superb harness of living armour he now wore. (He had had it stained a decent red.) Wulf had explained how it worked - it was a plant that lived symbiotically with him, on him, his sweat and evacuations, and the idea had appalled at first. After three weeks it no longer did so: he knew that when he peeled it off, he would be cleaner than ever before in his life, his skin as clean as a surgeon's fresh gloves. And his new hide was tough: it could take a sword thrust without penetration. But the running man, alone on the fell...

The meeting was winding up: the leaders of the Folk Field, earthy people in drab garments, were getting to their feet as quickly as their rheumatic limbs were able, readying themselves to shuffle back beneath the hellish sky to their tents four hundred yards away, across the heather. Gwent had no wish to join them: he rose from his squat and stalked arrogantly to the North, where the dim shapes of the high fells jutted upwards at the sunless sky.

After a while, he was aware of rustlings in the heather: he was being followed. But the nature of the rustlings reassured him, and he kept his hands from his two swords, and went on to the base of the flint-dark outcropping. She joined him there.

Gwent looked at her, at her long, light brown hair draping the shoulders of her sheer, white dress, and tried to analyse the emotions she roused in him. Love? - an overblown word; he wasn't about to go and slay dragons for her. Or was he? Was she the reason he'd allowed himself to be ensnared into this war? Her feelings for him were more obvious: even meeting him here was not quite in keeping with the mores of the valley farmers who made up the Folk Field.

'You are troubled,' she said, in a kind of Middle English. She always eschewed the use of Gate Language with him, and he understood her well enough. But his attempts to use that language puzzled and amused her: it was hard to remember which commonplace words were old, and which had been coined in the centuries that separated their speech.

'The fighting...'

'You are not afraid.'

He smiled: it was not wholly true, but she was so firm, he agreed. 'It's just that, sometimes, I wonder if I've picked the right side. From all accounts, the city has a very advanced biotechnology.' He paused, then descended to tautology: 'In fine, they seem to be more civilized.'

'At our expense!' she flared. 'Do you think they made all that: they found it! For many years, they were content to trade with us in the valley, to let the old and sick and Travellers use the Gate - but now they've gone mad. Was the citizen whose suit you wear more civilized than we, who have welcomed you to our homes?'

Her anger made her beautiful, and he toned down his objection until it faded away into meaninglessness. But all the time, his mind was working overtime: the citizens had found their city. So who had made it? Not for the first time in these past weeks, he was appalled at the extent of his ignorance. He had drained Wulf dry of knowledge and fable. Jehane's father, the Elder, and his clique of major farmers, were a little better informed than the common run; but their preoccupations were economic, not philosophical. Hrunting the Traveller could tell him more; but he was strangely reluctant to do so.

The sky was changing: a faint greenish cast could be seen: night was at hand. He looked into Jehane's waiting, deep, dark eyes. And he was afraid, afraid for her, for she would accompany Hrunting's party - as if she were the Elder's son, for the valley people would not follow even this Hrunting of the Many Names and fabled reputation without such a gesture. But surely he would see her safe. He was truly afraid of something else, of forming attachments, putting roots into this artificial soil. It would be so easy!

'We'd better be getting back,' he said, avoiding her eyes.

* * * *

2

Hrunting was not happy about the meeting. It was inevitable, he realized, but he liked the idea none the better for that. Tact was not one of his strong points. Of course, Gwent was a Traveller; even the ciphers could see that. That potential might be delayed in realization, especially if the Elder's daughter had her way, but not forever. And new Travellers should be allowed to bring their own insights to the Great Problem, and not be given the accepted ideas too quickly.

'Where?' he temporized. 'I suppose that's the question you've come to ask.'

'Among others.'

'Where do you think?' Hrunting looked hard at him: he was not a handsome man; there was a coldness in his grey eyes, and a hardness in his features: an archetypal villain! Also, rather like a younger version of himself.

'It's a thing, isn't it?'

'Res extensa, res cogitans - the difference seems profound, but in fact is subtle and not helpful. If we live in a dream, technological or spiritual, the question still is - whose?'

Gwent seemed scarcely to hear. 'It's a device!'

Hrunting smiled. This was turning out easier than he had expected. 'That's the accepted view, but we lack confirmation.'

'We?'

'The Fellowship of Travellers - it's not an organized band, but we know each other, and others know us, however much we try to be inconspicuous. And we help each other.' He paused. 'We travel the Gates, not when we're dying and afraid like the ciphers, but with a purpose - to learn the purpose of the Gates, and the sectors they join, and of their makers. We chart them through dozens of metalless worlds like this, and all the Gates we've found are looped together, with the furthest forward catchment area in the 21st century. Our aim is to break through this loop, so we may know the purpose of Manganon.'

'Manganon?'

Hrunting smiled again, briefly. 'It's an old word, and it means "device".'

'And I'm one of you?'

'You will be.' Hrunting spoke now with absolute assurance. 'But first I'm going to tell you why you're going to fight. Not through simple inertia, or for an Elder's daughter: but because the city controls a Gate.' He paused dramatically. 'An uncharted Gate.'

* * * *

Afterwards, Hrunting felt a little guilty. The Gate wasn't in Travellers' Tales, so in that sense he had spoken the truth; but it could hardly be uncharted with a Magister Portarum in residence, and he knew there was one, he could feel the draw of one, subtle and impossible to pinpoint, but there with a surety one couldn't doubt. But it had been the right thing to do. Gwent had to learn for himself, as he had done. It hadn't been hard, of course, to cut the flow of questions. He'd used the old and trusted trick of Travellers, and casually answered the patently unasked question.

'You realize,' he'd said, almost offhandedly, 'that by travelling the great Gates, we become, effectively, immortal?'

* * * *

3

It was time. Hrunting had no watch - in all Manganon there were no watches - but like all Travellers he had a sense of time, necessarily. He rubbed his eyes and slipped from the vegfoam bunk, reaching out. to touch the closed sphincter that served the half-alive cabin as a port hole. At his touch, the sphincter slowly opened, with all the grace of a flower opening under a dawn sun, dispelling the green gloom as it opened on the blood red midday sky.

The surface of the sea was covered, as ever, with the omnipresent sungreen: the tideless ocean was like one vast Sargasso. In the distance he could just make out the coast with the imposing vegmuscle structure of the City drawn up on it like an abandoned ship: which perhaps was not too far from the truth.

He grew aware of the ache in his left arm and found himself half-wishing he'd accepted Gwent's offer of his living suit. But the barge had been successfully, if painfully, taken, providing them with living suits in plenty, and now there was little chance of Gwent dying uselessly in the taking of the City.

The City was an old problem, much dealt with in Traveller's Tales, being found in many guises in many Gate sectors. The problem was, why did they allow such high levels of biotechnology, when they effectively banned any significant level of conventional technology by making Manganon completely metalless, except for trace elements?

The usual answer was the blanket selection answer: that Manganon was a device for selecting the best and the fittest, for some unknown purpose, and guns and bombs were too indiscriminate as a means to that end. There were suspicions as to what that purpose was: the abuttal of the concepts of entropy and time travel leading to the hugest project capable of conception; but like all hypotheses in Manganon, it was wild, unconfirmed ... How could it be confirmed, when they were as silent as the maker of Paley's watch?

But now was no time for speculation. Hrunting quickly donned the suit of living armour, grown of the same living vegmuscle as ship and City, opened the large sphincter of the door with a touch, climbed through and walked the length of the orange leaf corridor to where grew the spiral staircase that led down to the upper deck.

He burst into the brightness of the deck, half expecting to be met by some of the boarding party, but there was none, and he looked leisurely about him. The barge consisted of a vast, flat-topped hull of vegmuscle which sucked water and sungreen in at the prow, and with a spasm of its internal chamber, jetted the water out at the stern. A system of filters extracted the sungreen on the way, to be used as food for the whole structure, the hull, the upper decks at stern and prow, and the whole elaborate panoply of rooms, small holds and minor decks that surmounted the upper decks in ragged pyramids.

The barge almost looked like a natural thing, a freak of nature rather than a biological artifact. He was beginning to appreciate the subtle artistry of the colours. At first, he had only noted how the deep chlorophyll green of the hull gave way to rising, lighter shades, variegated with tiny splashes of orange and red; now he felt the pattern. However crude the citizens might be politically, they had no peers in the art of growing ships and cities.

On the walkway thirty yards below, there was more colour and movement: Jehane in a green and orange living suit. She was on her way to join him, and she would need careful handling. Rumour had it that Gwent had rebuffed her, and he certainly didn't want to be her target on the rebound. A Traveller could not love and remain a Traveller, and he was deep set in his ways. It was, in fact, an embarrassment having a woman on such a venture, but thankfully, she seemed competent enough. Whether she was or not, the ship would be in her hands when he led the crucial assault.

'All's well?'

She nodded. 'Everyone knows their parts. There's just the fear that we should make some recognition signal as we enter harbour ...'

That was it. There was some reassurance to be gained from the consideration that never before had a ship been taken, or even attacked. That was what had made the assault on the Northern Outpost so easy and cheap in lives: ships were useless to the valley people: the city's colonies traded only with the city.

'We can safely discount that.' He smiled, reassuringly, and was suddenly personally aware of her beauty. Ciphers we call them, he thought, because they are content simply to live, while we must explore and quest endlessly; perhaps we are truly the ciphers. His eyes dwelt a moment on the peach skin of her face - all that the suit revealed - almost envying Gwent his chance. After a moment, he averted his gaze, and forced the thoughts down: he was too deep set in his ways.

* * * *

Seen from the sea, the City was a green horse-shoe, both ends jutting into the sea itself. Between them, separated from them by the glaucous water, rose a tall island of green veg-muscle, and this was connected by the narrow umbilical of bridge to the citadel tower that rose, a third, but vertical prong from the very centre of the City's seaward wall. Perhaps other arteries and veins ran beneath the sea's surface, through the huge suction pad by means of which the City clung to the coast, all now hidden by the opacity of the slimy ocean.

The City grew large, enormous, dwarfing even the great barge they rode in, its matt green yielding to a chromatic symphony of blending greens, a creation of breath taking beauty that they were about to steal, and perhaps destroy in the act of stealing.

The barge, its biological engine pumping at maximum pulse, veered close to the sheer walled island of vegmuscle that served the City as heart and breakwater. The steersman, and Jehane, who now commanded him, were navigating well. But Hrunting had other things to think of - of the assault team who stood with him at the pinnacle of the barge's top-heavy superstructure, of what to say to them. He looked over the thirty faces. They were expressionless. He considered a short, rousing-speech, and it died still-born in his throat. They had all been carefully instructed. There was nothing to do now but wait, and fight, and hope.

Already the citizens had sensed the wrongness. Several times they heard the whistle of stone chips shuttering above their heads from the mangonels of City and island. Hrunting looked again at the assault party and noticed Piers among them, a godless priest with a face of carpentered wood...The barge was slowing. The low part of the bridge near the island loomed below: if it held and did not shear!

Slower and slower the barge glided. Finally came the impact, the superstructure cutting into and through the hollow bridge with a savage, tearing sound of ruptured vegmuscle. The mangonel barrage became particularly intense: chips buried themselves in the half-living but unfeeling vegmuscle. Hrunting didn't heed it. Now! he thought - and leapt from the sagging tatters of the barge's superstructure down on to the slippery, curved surface of the broken bridge. The bridge shook as the stream of concentrated sungreen, the life-giving sap of the City, jetted uselessly down over the maltreated superstructure of the barge.

He lost his secondary sword, needing the hand that held it to steady himself on the swaying, seawet surface; but he held on. The rest of the assault party overcame their difficulties with like determination.

The stone chips hailed at them in a constant stream now, but only from the citadel; the heart island's mangonel couldn't be brought to bear. Hrunting looked about him; on the faces of the assault party, sternness was yielding to stark fear. How best to impel them to action? An impassioned harangue. No. There was only one way.

'For the Gate!' he screamed, and began to race down the truncated stump of the bridge for the heart island.

* * * *

He heard the sound of movement behind, and looked back to see the ciphers running wild-eyed in his wake. Behind them, the great ship was alive again, her jet beating up the waters to a fine frenzy as it forced the longer element of the bridge away at an angle. If a repair of the bridge could be effected, the island could be reinforced, and they were dead. Otherwise...

But he had no time for speculation. His men were about him now, and he greeted them with a grandiloquent onward motion of his sword. An unspent chip caught him in the right upper arm; he almost dropped his sword, but the long training of his youth told, and he ran on, forcing the pain out of his mind, and with it, almost everything else but the urge to give battle.

The bridge gave on to a downward stairway at the island end. He took the stairs by the half dozens, almost falling at the end; but he was on his feet when he was confronted in the well of the stairway. The wattle-faced man swung at him wildly. He parried the blow in the high line, recovered with practised ease and struck at the pale oval of his opponent's face with arm-wrenching force. The blow bit through cartilage and bone; the citizen jerked, then fell like an abandoned puppet, splaying his limbs.

Now he was no longer in the lead. Assault group ciphers had flowed about him as he fought, down along the corridor that led to the heart chamber stairway. He followed them. At the head of the stairway he paused; he could make out the sounds of fighting, the raspings, grunts and smothered curses as both sides clawed for dominance in the life-generated flourescence of the heart chamber, and the spaced-out bursts of the tin-can rattling of knife and sword work, terminating in screams.

Inevitably, he leapt down the stairway, avoiding a pair of broken legs only by the best good fortune. A thrown knife bedded in the vegmuscle nearby, perhaps flung in haste by one of his own side from the position they held behind the tendon posts, where the white-green tendons that regulated the spasm of the city's heart chamber were fixed to their controlling levers. Sense told him to take cover; impulse sent him in full fury at the nearest citizen hiding behind one of the unused ceramic posts. The citizen, unarmoured, twisted fearfully about to face this new challenge. He parried Hrunting's first blow, but not well enough; deflected, it severed the left upper arm, and the citizen fell, his stumped arm issuing blood in great, pulsing gouts.

Hrunting paid him no further attention. A sword swished past his own ear, and he heard a screech of agony that could only have come from one of his own men. Ignoring it, he ran on, wielding the sword like a meat cleaver, drinking the heady melange of blood, fear and death about him, exulting in it, yet knowing with some remaining sane element of his mind that afterwards, if he lived, he would despise himself for this indulgence.

Suddenly, he caromed against one of the tendon posts, slipping in blood he had shed. A green shape loomed - an armoured citizen. Hrunting's sword was struck from his hand; a blade, reflecting the odd white of the tendons, swung at him. So they must finally still the heart without him. He hardly felt afraid, just curious: how would it feel when it bit... ?

* * * *

4

The Elder was the handsome father of a handsome daughter, and accoutred as he was, as a warrior, ready to give the signal for Gwent to lead the first attack, he held all eyes. But Gwent's eyes unwillingly: the vast bulk of the green ramp that led to the open city portal, with the over-scaled frieze brooding over ramp and portal, lured them to fleeting, fearful glances.

The watcher stationed by the coast lowered his arms. That meant he could no longer see the barge: it was in the harbour. The Elder shouted. Gwent started like a hare, racing up the ramp, half the young blood of the valley people behind him, racing to be in front.

Out of his eye corners, Gwent could see them draw level with him, all sword waving and fury. His own sword stayed firmly scabbarded: if all went well, there would be no use for it. The great portal drew closer; he could see quite clearly the flower-like heads that made up the detail of the frieze; he saw them move, braced himself. And suddenly he was running into the wall of sea that issued from them, and water was all over him, crushing the air from his lungs; he was drowning - and then, just as suddenly, he was lying with a small host of others on the ramp, wet, winded, dead if the citizens chose to counter-attack. But with the bulk of the army still untouched, no counter-attack spilled screaming through the portal.

Wearily, he got to his feet, looking at the tempting, open portal with a kind of hate. It was a trap. There was positively no way past that wall of water. If Hrunting had failed ...

The Elder was signalling again. This was the full attack. Gwent motioned his still dripping men onward, drawing his own sword this time. They had scarcely managed more than a few paces when the water again struck them. But without quite the previous violence. Digging their swords in the rubbery ramp, they held their places. Slowly they continued their upward passage. The water struck a third time; but the force of it had ebbed. The heart of the city had been broken! The main body of the army was screaming its charge, and Gwent impelled his own men upwards, faster and faster - so they would escape being impaled on the weapons of their rearward comrades.

Then they were through the portal, a toll taken of them by a flight of arrows, one bouncing harmlessly off his living suit, past the flaccid petals of the frieze of water into the bloody, mindless business of hand to hand fighting. Citizens and valley people alike slid into the redder, hazier waters of psychogenetic rage ...

* * * *

PART THREE: THE GATE

1

HE WAS dying: it was no new sensation. He tried to open his eyes, but only pain sprang at his consciousness. He held on, and, gradually, the memory of a sword slashing down at the only unprotected part of him - his face - came to mind. He no longer had eyes. The question was: had he a face? He moved his lips, forced out a word.

'There?'

There was an answer of some kind, but it dissolved in a miasma of pain. A moment or an eternity later, he spoke again. The pain was less this time.

'Who?'

'Gwent.'

'Ah ..." It was a sigh of relief. The city was taken: there was a Gate for him. Before him, only the little death of the Gate ...

* * * *

Gwent looked down on what had been wrought with a dulled horror. His sword had wrought as much and worse only hours before. Jehane knelt and dabbed at the mangled redness, and he walked away, to the window, whence he could see the wreck of the great bridge, the longer remnant swaying gently in the sea breeze. He stood there a long time, the lassitude of battle won leadening his limbs.

He felt his arm being taken. He half turned and saw Jehane's face, caught in the window light, all grace and beauty caught in an instant of time. The instant lengthened into a moment, a duration; it could stretch into a lifetime, ruling this city with her; unbidden, his mind began to picture it. Then the weak voice of Hrunting ended the moment.

'An end to entropy ...'

For a moment again, the words seemed without meaning, and then things began to fall in place in Gwent's mind, the hints, the nuances, the half completed assertions. Entropy, time travel, Manganon ... A passing thought: the words spoken no longer mattered: he knew. Manganon was the creation of eternity! He knew it - not how, or why, or by whom, but what!

Jehane knew: not the fantastic idea blossoming in his mind, but of her danger of losing him. He could see it in her eyes. She was like nothing in the primary world, he thought suddenly; and he realized how distanced everything there was, had been from the beginning. Had the Gate of Transfiguration done more than he had suspected? Or hadn't all that blood and soil ranting, street fighting and the easy, amoral cameraderie of the Movement really mattered much to him? Just a way of easing boredom under the New Order? Was she just another, passing comrade? His hand brushed her cheek, tentatively then tenderly.

Then Hrunting moaned again, piteously, and she was drawn back to her charge. As she knelt over the wounded Traveller, Gwent slipped silently out of the room.

Wulf, resplendent in an apple green living suit, awaited beyond the sphincter door.

'The Gate!'

Wulf nodded, and led him down dim green corridors that towards the end, in sight of the huge flap door, were littered with refuse and offal. In the chamber, beyond the door, there was more, but seemingly without smell - the citizens had been excellent bio-engineers.

In the centre of the chamber, as if sculpted from the veg-muscle of the floor, was a deep green flower, slightly speckled over with red; from petal to petal it was larger than a man, but the indentations were shallow, and gave it an ornamental aspect.

The citizens were grouped about the flower in a great inward shuffling spiral, tired men, naked now of their armour, their eyes almost dead. The guards, just as tired, but obviously exultant in bizarre compromises of their own and living armour, prodded the unfortunates, moving the spiral inward. One prisoner was almost upon the flower centre of the chamber.

'We have to pass this way,' Wulf said, almost guiltily.

A guard ran to the prisoner nearest the flower, gestured at it with his sword. The prisoner looked at the sword, then at the flower, and spoke softly in the silence.

'Crystal splintered,

shards glittering fell;

hoarse the screaming day

welcomed night's advent:

the city panted:

living gods were sundered:

the green bridge

veining with black

folded into the silent torrent...'

The guard smiled, made to jab the man with his sword, but the prisoner anticipated him, and stepped on to the inset petals of the flower.

Gwent, whose arms were still rimed with the blood of citizens, whose arms ached with slashing into their flesh, froze with horror. For, unhurriedly, the flower ate the man.

Slowly, with infinite delicacy and grace the petals did their work and for the most part of a dilated minute, Gwent was held rigid by the horror of it, towards the end, what remained of the man over the reddening petals uttered a small cry, and Gwent grasped his sword hilt, whether to end the man's sufferings or begin those of his murderer, he had no idea. But whatever his intention, enough of it was divined to frustrate it all. The strong arms of Wulf engulfed him in a bear hug.

'No, master. The Elder ordered this.'

The grip eased, and, unprotesting, Gwent was led on through the chamber - one of the city's refuse disposal chambers, he realized with sudden clarity - as the process continued.

'... the crack-faced gods,

despoiled of their sublimity,

wither to their stone shells:

like animals submit

the former images of man ...'

The words themselves died as new flap doors closed behind them; but they lingered in his mind a few moments longer: there was something odd about them. For a moment, he thought they were English, an odd, clipped English with a strange intonation, but it was easy enough to mistake Gate Language for one's primary tongue. Yes, that was it; had to be.

* * * *

2

Sunlight was a rebirth, its warmth a benediction: it faded the reds and browns of trauma into a soft beige, soon to be dissolved in the Lethe waters of Sanity.

Distanced - by space, or the fury of battle - the citadel tower rose imposing; now, seen from its plaza, the towering green height and the smooth green bulk of its curving surface was an imposition, a blow between the eyes. Gwent stared at it, wondering at the men who had built this city, in whose wanton destruction he was playing a part.

Whump! A mangonel stone crashed into the citadel's base, and then another, and another, all into the same place, which in no way betrayed any signs of a door; they all bounced off without causing any obvious damage. Gwent turned to see the Elder ordering a battery of mangonels at the perimeter of the plaza.

It had the air of a pointless exercise, but an unasked Wulf voiced a contrary opinion.

'We'll have it before sunset.'

The Elder was tired, bloody, sweaty. He still wore his own improvised armour, leathern jack and cap, and the sword that swung from his hip was his own. His eyes were harder than before, betraying a fixity of purpose Gwent had not suspected - although it had been obvious all along, he realized. It was as if he were seeing the Elder for the first time: the previous weeks since his transfiguration could have been a dream, with the world revolving around his consciousness. They had ended in nightmare, debouching him into reality.

The Elder greeted him, smiled at Wulf in his stolen armour, and looked back at the citadel.

'They built that over the Gate,' he said. 'They used to let our dying in, for the new life; then they went mad. Now we shall have that without their charity!'

The battering continued; the valley people slaved at the mangonels, forming human chains to bring stones to them, and Gwent just stood watching, feeling his apartness, and knowing wonder and horror and awe as he hedged about the idea Hrunting had half suggested, as if he were luring him into it by degrees, and near completed in his delirium. Their purpose.

Not necessarily the true purpose; but the one Travellers believed in: an end to entropy. Not as a doctrine of means, not in everyday affairs, but a doctrine of ends, a teleology, and perhaps, in its ramifications, a kind of theology.

Gwent felt suddenly tired of it all. The shiny newness had worn off things. He had had fantasies of ruling these people, or of becoming a Traveller and learning the secret of this pocket universe, but they had been fantasies in a fantasy -and suddenly there was no more fantasy left. He had killed, seen pain and death and sacrifice to this abomination of victory. More would die in the citadel. And the Travellers were other than he had believed. Here and now, this was reality; he had to accommodate himself to it, and there was a room he knew where someone tended the sick who could make that accommodation worthwhile.

The sun was setting when the concealed base sphincter's biological mechanism finally broke down under the bombardment, and the hordes burst through, silent now, but still ignorant of mercy.

* * * *

PART FOUR: THE CASTE

1

IT WAS Father Piers who came to fetch them. It was past noon of the new day, and the window light caught his face, revealing a mixture of envy and bitterness as he spoke the words:

'We have found a Magister Portarum. You are to come, and bring Master Hrunting with you.'

Gwent saw stark fear in Jehane's face. He wanted to comfort her, but words wouldn't come, and he just nodded to the priest. Piers smiled bitterly, and Gwent now knew the cause of that bitterness: Travellers were the true priests of this world; they eschewed preaching, but it was they who sacrificed at the Gates.

The speaking of the Latin name seemed to give new life to the dying Hrunting. He climbed miraculously to his feet, and stood, precariously, waiting to be led. The bloody bandages on his face were already drying black.

'Shall we go?' said Piers, matter of factly.

* * * *

The city had been cleaned up; but here and there were still traces of blood, and every so often, one saw the tired, furtive face of a city-born child, spared after the waning of the bloodlust, but enslaved.

After a few hundred yards Hrunting stumbled and together they had to carry him - awkwardly. But they were already at the plaza. It had not been completely cleared: around the base of the citadel, bodies were stacked, still in their living suits, suits already bloated and loathsome from feasting on the corpses they enwrapped.

The sphincter had jammed open. None had known how to repair it, and that would be the way of it, Gwent realized. The conquerors would live in the now heartless city for a year or two, not repairing it, or even tending it, and it would die, street by street, and one by one the valley people would drift back to their farms and homesteads, until finally only the Gate was guarded, and desolation reigned.

They went down a spiral stairway, into the gloom, and then at Father Piers' touch of an unidentified section of the wall a small sphincter opened, and the Gate glowed behind it. Piers avoided even glancing inside, but stalked back the way he had come.

The Gate itself was only a point in space, but points need pointing out - by a plaque, or an arrow painted in red on a brown wall, or as in this case, by a chair. A throne, more aptly. At first, Gwent thought it was an exception to this metalless world: a frame of gold and silver, once dipped in a tub of jewels, but closer inspection revealed it as even more remarkable. It was a single plant, and the colours were soft, butterfly colours, but glittering and glinting as if the energies of the Gate shone through. Perhaps they did.

'Pretty, eh?'

Gwent looked, into the shadowed corner of the room, and made out the face of a man - the Magister Portarum.

'Yes,' he answered simply

'A pretty trinket, no more.' The Magister Portarum stepped out into the light, and Gwent saw a youth before him, in a dark one piece suit, just like a living suit, but of simple material.

'So you are Gwent.' The youth smiled; but it was not the smile of a young man, and neither was his voice. Both hinted at vast experience; this man had held power for generations, Gwent's intuition told him, for all that appearances were to the contrary; it was an intuition he trusted.

The youth watched him, his eyes seeming to divine his thoughts. Perhaps they did. Finally the Magister Portarum broke the developing silence.

'Put Hrunting in the chair.'

Gwent obeyed, carefully easing the now scarcely conscious man into the delicate tracery of life that the other dismissed as a mere bauble. Gwent felt cold fear, expecting the Traveller to disappear before his eyes, but he merely sprawled. The Magister Portarum laughed.

'Axon Gates are subtle, unlike the Dendrite Gate you passed through. There are degrees of interpenetration, and control, for those who learn how to exercise it.'

He paused, then: 'Of course, you are a Traveller, although you scarcely know what one is, or grows to be, which is why Hrunting remains: two Travellers are formally necessary for an induction. But first, you have some guesses?'

Gwent was beginning to find this knowing, utterly self confident seeming-youth annoying, very annoying. He had been too well anticipated, so he decided to try another tack.

'The guards who were in here, with you. You stopped them from using the Gate?'

'Am I responsible for the stacked corpses without? In a sense, yes - but not in the sense you mean. I encouraged them to go through, begged even, and for all the respect they bore me, not inconsiderable, they scarcely listened.

'I am the author of this destruction - but only because I had no other choice. The city went mad; it turned away from its Gate, and the chance of eternal life, retreating into a dream, the old heresy, that this is a variant of the primary world, and can be lived in as such.'

'It's a way station?'

'Less - a filter.'

Hrunting groaned in the chair. The Magister Portarum looked at him, and for a moment the shape of the wounded Traveller seemed to blur, then return to reality, and the sprawling was no longer born of weariness and pain, but a relaxing of the spirit.

Gwent's annoyance faded too, and he realized the significance of the words the Magister Portarum had just used: filter, axon and dendrite. He had compared this ... sector with a nerve cell that received information by several incoming pathways - dentrites - integrated them chemically, then passed the integrated message on through a solitary channel, the axon. A nerve cell - also a brain cell. Gwent didn't proceed far with the thought, but far enough to see the implications of such an analogy, indeterminate, diffuse, overwhelming.

'I have seen a hundred sectors,' the seeming-youth said, 'like small universes all of them, and ciphers in them more than half believing them so. The human mind is very conservative; evolution in millions of years in the primary is not brushed away like cobwebs from a stairway. So people and cities reject their Gates; Tithonus rejected immortality without eternal youth of the body: real people reject eternal youth of the body if it doesn't bring with it eternal youth of the mind. Form without renewal.' He smiled, wanly. 'But you were about to tell me of your guesses.'

'Manganon is the creation of eternity,' Gwent heard himself saying, and the Magister Portarum smiled again, and began to speak, softly, persistently, using Gate language, but heightened in some way, so that it seemed to impinge directly on Gwent's consciousness, a great dialectic of gaudy, fragile butterfly wing images capped by a synthesis of Heisenbergian indeterminacy. And through this, Gwent saw them, felt what they felt when the anentropic phenomenon of time travel showed them the end of the singular outfolding and infolding of energy that was the universe and that ylem barrier to human progression, and felt the pointlessness of it all, in that it would end, and felt with them the surge of their spirits as he was shown how it could be, how the past could be drained of energy to maintain expansion until the last witness quasar hid behind the curtain of light, and beyond to the age of iron, and beyond, when mankind inhabited a universe of dying dwarfs and Schwarzchild singularities and beyond again, until the tail of the snake was eaten, and mankind must resolve its problems anew.

And he knew the why of Manganon, knew it for the cage it was to ciphers and the maze it became to Travellers, who would go on to make this be.

* * * *

The Magister Portarum stopped talking: the spell broke, and Gwent found himself breathing hard, as if he had been engaged on the hardest work.

'I offer no proof,' the Magister Portarum said. 'What I say, I offer more as a myth than a hypothesis ...'

'A myth ...' Gwent began, uttering sceptical words utterly without scepticism:'... has vague beginnings.'

'And yet, Travellers believe it, and have believed it through a thousand transfigurations, the only meaningful way to compute time. If you designed this ... Manganon, for a purpose, and rumours circulated in it that were at cross purposes to your purpose, wouldn't you end them? Don't doubt that they have the power to do it. But mightn't they even start them?'

'Which would be no guarantee of their truth.' The words surprised Gwent; how could he doubt?

'Precisely,' the Magister Portarum said, 'and if the truth were too great, one would start with little truths, building towards the great truth.'

Gwent knew he was caught, trapped into a grand design and he could be either an unwilling tool or a believing disciple. Whichever, he already had the gift of immortality, and then the choice was made, and not even the shadow of a shadow of doubt remained: he believed.

'You are inducted,' the Magister Portarum said formally, and Gwent saw that Hrunting was no longer in the chair. Now its tracery glowed invitingly at him.

'There's all the time in eternity,' the Magister Portarum said kindly. 'Go back - live, rule here if you can, until you can bear it no longer. The Gate is always waiting.'

* * * *

PART FIVE: MAGISTER PORTARUM

THE MAGISTER PORTARUM - he had no need or use for any-other name - watched Gwent leave, abstractedly. Gwent didn't interest him particularly: he had inducted many Travellers, and Gwent was scarcely exceptional. He would take a few years in this sector still, and it would be many transfigurations then before he would add significantly to the great book of Travellers' Tales, and his copy, carried in his head, for memory was the only commodity that could be taken by axon transfiguration from sector to sector, would grow slowly, building the sustaining myth.

And how many more years would he, the Magister Portarum, have to wait before a Traveller of sufficient seniority and experience transfigured all unknowing into this sector, for unwelcome promotion? A year, a century - time was not of the essence. But truth was.

How much of it had he told Gwent? He looked at the chair, and where the chair was, looked through it, at the Gate. Some Travellers saw only an emptiness, tugging reality into it; ciphers and young Travellers saw nothing at all; but he saw such beauty as scarce his mind could hold. Truth, beauty - beauty, truth; and by way of a very devious and tortuous argument, the benignity of them. There was a whole philosophy built on that premise, but not one the Magister Portarum cared for.

He had told Gwent no knowing lies. Gwent would believe, and believing he would have a foundation to build on, later, to question and qualify. There was much for him to learn, carefully placed clues he had failed to appreciate -how he, the Magister Portarum, in the fastness of the city had bent first the Elder and then the ciphers to his will; how he had brought the rook of Hrunting into that game, and the knight of Gwent. And that most intriguing of all problems, the lack of coincidence in Manganon; one could call it the lack of synchronicity or seriality, but it boiled down to the fact that in Manganon, bell shaped curves used descriptively were always, painfully, perfectly bell shaped.

Except when a Magister Portarum worked his will, the universe of Manganon was strictly causal: the diagonal of acausality that blurred the edges in the primary world didn't exist here, save in an attenuated form about the Axon Gates.

For a moment, he thought of his city people, his devoted city people who still had dammed the flow to the Axon, and of what had been - yes, the passive was the best way to express it - done to them. But only for a moment. Then he let his private vision expand, out beyond the city walls, beyond the valley, past the limited discontinuities of Dendrite Gates into the regions where Manganon blurred into the dubious reality of the primary world.

Who was he? Oh, he could remember his past, if it were his; his Travellership, everything. But belief and memory and truth are not necessarily linked. Where do we end, and they begin?

In Manganon - a device, a thing, he told himself, but a fearful, transcendent, awesome, beautiful thing!

* * * *

PART SIX: HERESIES

Travellers' Tales: being some of the better known aphorisms and assertions of the School of Itinerant Wisdom in the sector known as Inusyeyash, or Gaetor.

* * * *

1

MARGENSTAERN: Our speech on such things is pointless. My esteemed colleague has paraphrased Mr. Dirac in saying that in one's ideas one should hold beauty more important than experiment. However, the originator of that assertion hardly envisaged a situation in which no experiment is possible.

GARNET: My colleague disposes of experiment merely because he can think of none.

MARGENSTAERN: Can you?

GARNET: Off the cuff, no. But I do not therefore deny the possibility of such experiment. You raise our limitations into an insuperable barrier to knowledge; I would sooner just raise them.

* * * *

2

BENBABUN: The trouble with the general explanation is its overweening arrogance. They are not engaged on any small task. No. They are prolonging the life of the universe. You and I know very well that a great many of the fraternity of the Magistri Portarum actually believe that they by prolonging are also creating the universe. Do not be shocked! If you too believe in the 'Essential Mystery', then fear not to bring it into the light of day. So that we can see it for the farrago of misconceptions and simple fantasies that it is. It has the same proof as the basic, less elaborate theory from which it sprang: they permit us to believe it, so it must be essentially true.

Even they are an assumption. Only Manganon we know. But considering Manganon, they are a valid assumption. You ask me what is my explanation. I have no explanation, but if you wish me in indulge in speculation, I am willing to do so.

The purpose of Manganon. To save some sample of humanity. In the general fantasy, to prolong itself, the universe has to eat the energy of its historical tail. Manganon is outside time, but the Gates provide a kind of time and the progression through them a kind of evolution and history. We become they when their work has eaten their other ancestors. I'm sure an argument could be made that from us, they could get the same genetic endowment as from the whole of humanity. How that applies to actual existing people - a difficult point, but not one to stay any theoretician who has reached it.

Now, the general fantasy: the extension of the universe. Rather a large undertaking. Let's make it smaller: the preservation, say, of our spiral arm when the galactic core is exploding. A force shield is created about the arm. To provide that, the past is drained of energy. The jewels of Manganon night and day are this force shield, flourescing under the bombardment of the nonthermal radiation from the synchrotron the core has become. Manganon, instead of being parallel with linear time is at right angles to it, co-temporal with their time. One could go on. But why bother? The fantasy has been made smaller, not less improbable. You ask me what to believe. Whatever you like. I favour thought rather than belief.

* * * *

3

SANDAGE: Let us consider the matter from a totally different angle. Let us explore a concept touched on simply to pass over: the concept of Dendrite and Axon Gates, the comparison with the nerve cell and the nervous system. Now the Gates, qua Gates, are for all their technologically advanced nature, simple things. They get one from A to B, renovating one in the process. That in itself is a huge assumption, but I'll make it. Therefore the gates are not in themselves a nervous system. The analogy breaks down. The messages - if they exist - are concealed from us.

Now I do suggest that Manganon is a nervous system, a brain, and perhaps ultimately a mind, that messages exist, and that their concealment is by an old technique - that of the purloined letter. We, people, are the messages. Not abstractly, symbolically, but literally. Free agents, but messages: an element of acausality introduced into mind. This is hard to grasp. I can see you think I hide behind words. I do not, but reality does. If message impulses are free agents, then the composite is at least acausal with respect to structure. But I see I cannot usefully continue at this time.

GWINDALF: I adhere to the despair philosophy. They, discovering time travel, saw their own doom, and despaired. Not completely enough to yield outright, but enough to lose that confidence needed to confront and confound that doom. So they chose to recruit the vigour of their past to confront that doom for them. These in their turn now saw and despaired, and adopted the same technique. And so on...