Among the Powers (16 page)

The Powers, then, came from Terra, just as
his own people had; they were not from the world of the dead at
all. Their power came from the magic called “technology.”

“This ‘technology’ thing,” he asked. “Is it
something that people are born with, or something that they
learn?”

The spirits were silent for a moment, trying
to devise an answer that would be correct, informative, and
intelligible, but finally Gamesmaster settled for saying, “It’s
something they learn.”

“Could I learn it?”

Gamesmaster hesitated. “Some of it,” it
said. “Without treatment, you won’t live long enough to learn
all
current technological knowledge. Sorry, kid.”

Bredon accepted that.

He reviewed what he had been told, and
balked at one detail.

“A
vacation
? A holiday? But the
Powers have been here for centuries!”

“It’s been a long vacation. Some of them
have wanted to leave, at various times, but there’s only one ship,
and the rule is that unless there’s an emergency of some kind they
need a majority vote to go, and so far there have never been more
than eleven out of twenty-eight voting for departure at any one
time. If somebody wanted off urgently enough he or she could
transmit a call for another ship, but so far nobody’s bothered to
do that. It’s a nice planet.”

“But
hundreds
of years?”

“Hey, these people live
forever
if
they want to; they can spare a few hundred years.”

Bredon had to chew on that idea for awhile
before he was able to shove it into the back of his mind, still
undigested.

“So that’s who the Powers are, and how they
got here? And who my people are, and how
they
got here?”

“You got it, kid. And you don’t know how
lucky you are to be here, either. Ordinarily, a shipwreck like the
one your ancestors lived through doesn’t leave a viable colony
behind; either the planet isn’t habitable, or it’s full of hostile
native life, or some other such problem. And when the colony
does
survive, they usually rebuild a higher technology in
order to fight off the indigenous life. Your people hit the
jackpot, though; this place had enough sea life to provide an
oxygen atmosphere, and no land life at all. No moons to make tidal
pools, not much volcanic activity, not much land, for that matter,
nothing to help land life along, so the stuff they brought with
them had no competition and just dug right in.”

Bredon did not really follow that, since as
far as he knew there had always been plenty of life on land. He
decided that Gamesmaster was trying to explain something about why
salt-water fish and other sea creatures weren’t edible. It did not
seem particularly important. “Is there any more to the story?” he
asked.

“Not the mainline history lesson, no. That
brings us about up to date on that. But whatever other area you’re
interested in, I can tell you more.”

Bredon blinked, unsure where to begin; he
thought for a moment, and then asked, “Why is Thaddeus the Black
causing trouble? Why is Geste so worried about him?”

“That’s hard to explain without telling you
a lot of stuff about just who Thaddeus is.”

“Tell me, then,” Bredon said. “I’m
listening.” He settled back in his seat, started as it shifted
shape to accommodate him, and then relaxed, his eyes and ears
open.

“
...there before him stood a menacing figure in
black robes, fully three meters tall, with eyes of flame and with
fangs showing between his lips.

“
The apparition spoke, saying, ‘I am Thaddeus the
Black, and like your brothers before you, you have dared to defy
me. Know, then, the price of defiance!’ And he reached into his
cloak and flung something down before Hillowan.

“
He looked down, and saw that it was his brother
Filowan’s head, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth frozen in a
scream of terror. He took a step back, and Thaddeus reached again
into his cloak, and flung another head.

“
This one was Gilloran’s, and most horrible of
all, the severed head was still alive! It rolled its eyes up at
Hillowan, pleading with him, and tried to speak, but of course it
had no lungs to give it breath so that no sound came out. Hillowan
screamed, and stepped back again.

“
And Thaddeus opened his cloak and drew forth a
third object, but this time it was no severed head, but something
that hung limply in his hand, like a rag; and he flung it down
before Hillowan, who saw that it was skin, that it was human
skin—that it was the skin of his third and youngest brother,
Sherowan, somehow peeled from his body in a single
piece...”

—
from the tales of Atheron the
Storyteller

The first known immortal human, Gamesmaster
explained, was the man who now called himself Shadowdark. That was
not his original name, merely the one he had adopted most recently;
it had now lasted a few thousand years, longer than any other he
had ever used, including the long-forgotten one his parents had
given him.

Shadowdark’s immortality was not the result
of technology, but a freak of nature, something he was born with.
For all anyone knew, the same freak might have happened dozens of
times before or since, but only Shadowdark and a handful of his
descendants survived the myriad diseases and omnipresent dangers to
life and limb that presumably killed off all the other people born
with the same peculiarity.

Shadowdark’s great peculiarity was in the
way he grew. Once he reached adolescence he grew very, very slowly,
at a steadily decreasing rate—but never completely stopped. At the
age of thirty he stood less than a meter and a half in height; at
sixty he still looked thirty, but stood just over a hundred and
sixty centimeters, as nearly as he could recall.

Since centimeters had not yet been invented
at the time, and no records existed except Shadowdark’s memory, the
exact height might not be right, but the basic concept was.
Shadowdark’s body never finished growing, never made the transition
from growth to maturity—and therefore to decay.

Bredon interrupted, “Like a tree, you
mean?”

“Yes, pretty much like a tree,” Gamesmaster
agreed.

“But trees eventually die anyway, when they
get too big.”

“I know that; I’m coming to that.”

There were limits to Shadowdark’s growth, of
course, Gamesmaster continued; eventually, when he was slightly
over two thousand years old, his heart gave out and had to be
repaired, and later his skeleton collapsed under its own weight,
and he had to have most of it replaced. Fortunately, by the time
his natural longevity began to fail him, technology had reached the
point where it could take over and keep him going indefinitely.
Otherwise he would have died long ago. If any immortals had been
born much before Shadowdark they would surely be dead by now in any
case, since medical technology had not advanced quickly enough to
have saved them.

“Are you sure?” Bredon asked.

“No,” Gamesmaster answered. “Who’s telling
this, you or me?”

“You are.”

“Then shut up.”

Bredon shut up, and Gamesmaster went on with
his story.

In his early years, before he fully realized
just how unique he was, Shadowdark had tried to lead a normal life.
His peculiarity forced him to relocate every twenty or thirty
years, establishing a new identity each time, but in between these
moves he did his best to maintain a home and family and
business.

Later on, he found the constant loss of
wives, friends, and children to be too depressing, and experimented
with a variety of lifestyles. By then, however, he had left behind
a good many children, and a few of them had inherited his abnormal
growth pattern.

Most of these died eventually, by violence
or from disease, but a few managed to survive. Daughters did very
poorly; bearing children in those primitive times significantly
increased their risks.

His son Peter was the oldest survivor. He
was born when Shadowdark was less than a century old and still
living in his native land.

The second was Thaddeus. He was born in a
land that had been conquered and abused by Shadowdark’s people;
Gamesmaster provided the name and date, but neither meant anything
to Bredon. He ignored all the names and dates on Terra as
essentially meaningless; the only important fact was that this land
was being mistreated by Shadowdark’s countrymen.

Shadowdark had fled to this place at the age
of a century or so, no longer welcome in his own country, and had
taken a local woman as his wife. The marriage had not been happy,
and Thaddeus was not a happy child—particularly not after his
father abandoned him and his sisters.

Gamesmaster displayed an image of Thaddeus,
and Bredon asked, “Why is he called Thaddeus the Black? He isn’t
much darker than I am.”

“
I
don’t know,” Gamesmaster said. “I
suppose it has something to do with his temper, or his record.”

“Oh.” Bredon shut up, and Gamesmaster
continued.

Shadowdark and Thaddeus found each other
again decades later, and were, in time, apparently reconciled with
one another, their disagreements not so much forgotten as
temporarily set aside. They saw one another off and on over the
centuries, sometimes travelling together or even living together
for a time, but the relationship always had its unpleasant side.
The only thing that really held them together, far more important
than their blood relationship, was their shared memories. They were
the only people still alive who remembered the land of Thaddeus’s
birth and the people they had known and loved there. Peter, the
only other person of approximately the same age, did not visit that
land until centuries later, when everything had been altered beyond
recognition.

When he was nearing two thousand years of
age, Shadowdark went through a bad period. Gamesmaster could
provide no details, but apparently the enforced isolation and
duplicity of being an immortal in a world of mortals had driven him
temporarily insane. When he recovered, he decided that he needed a
goal, something worthy of an immortal, something that would
distract him and that might somehow put an end to his
loneliness.

What he hit upon was the accumulation of
wealth and power. He had pursued both before, but had never
bothered to hold onto them for long. Neither greatly interested him
in and of itself.

Now, however, what he intended to do was to
buy himself into a position where he could reveal his immortality
without fearing that jealous mortals would kill or imprison
him.

At first he had planned on an island, where
he could establish himself as a god-king, but before he could
achieve this modest goal humans began to make their first steps
toward travelling to other worlds, and the idea of having an entire
world to himself appealed to him. He set his sights on ruling his
own planet.

When he had his planet, finally, he needed
something to do with it, and therefore set out to conquer others,
as well. It gave him something to do to pass the time, something
that he had not done before.

The end result was the Imperium, which at
its peak united twenty-four worlds under Shadowdark’s absolute
rule. This, Gamesmaster noted, was long after Denner’s Wreck had
been found and then lost again. In fact, even the first planet,
Alpha Imperium, had not been found until after Denner’s Wreck had
been lost.

“Why didn’t he go to another world sooner,
then?” Bredon asked. “Why didn’t he come here?”

“Because he wanted a world of his
own
, not just to be a member of a colony.”

“But if he’d lived so long, had so much
experience, couldn’t he have conquered a planet like this one?”

“Well, yeah, he probably could have, but he
didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m just a dumb
machine; all I know is what’s in the records or what people have
told me, all right?”

“All right,” Bredon said, somewhat cowed by
this outburst.

“May I go on?”

“Please, go on.”

“Thank you.” Gamesmaster paused, in
imitation of a human gathering his wits, and then continued its
tale.

Like everything else, it explained, even
absolute power will eventually bore an immortal. Furthermore,
during Shadowdark’s reign on Alpha Imperium artificial immortality,
using tailored symbiotes and genetic reprogramming, had been
developed and become widespread, so that he no longer needed to
disguise his agelessness. In time, he lost interest in the Imperium
and left.

Before leaving, however, he located his son
Peter, and appointed him as the new ruler in his stead. To leave
the empire without a monarch would have been unnecessary cruelty;
he had set the entire system up so that it revolved around himself,
and with his departure the whole structure would have collapsed
into anarchy and civil war had he not appointed a replacement.

Peter, however, found he had little taste
for power, and furthermore was not very good at wielding it. After
less than a century he grew tired of the whole thing and turned it
over to Thaddeus.

Thaddeus enjoyed power very much.
Unfortunately, he was far worse than his father or half-brother at
using it. His brutal abuse of his subjects and utter ineptitude in
running the economy and foreign policy resulted in a messy
revolution. He was overthrown, driven from his palace, and he
seemed to vanish. No one knew what had become of him.

Sure enough, as Shadowdark had feared, the
Imperium immediately collapsed, and Alpha Imperium sank into
barbarism. Stupid little wars between different factions destroyed
almost its entire civilization.

Centuries later Thaddeus reappeared, still
on Alpha Imperium, at the heart of the fallen empire. He tried to
conquer the planet and to restore the Imperium to its former power
and glory.