The Siege of Wonder - Mark S. Geston, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE SIEGE OF WONDERby Mark GestonFlyleaf:After centuries of fighting wizards, dedicated scientists have found the answer to winning the war: turn magic into science. Reduce it to its final empirical base, to be read and studied.But to gather such information, the Special Office decides a transmitter must be implanted in a legendary unicorn, the prize talisman of the most powerful magician. Then it can spy upon the highest councils of sorcery and the daily transmissions analyzed.Wearing this electronic eye in place of his own, Aden enters the Holy City and carries out the mission. But it leaves him vulnerable to the wonders of enchantment, and he wanders the middle ground betwen two warring forces.Eventually he realizes the eye must be retrieved or the unicorn destroyed before science learns the innermost secrets of divine creation.As scientific rationality picks up momentum and the enchantment of the enemy crumbles away before it, Arden -- and those out to stop him -- races to find the unicorn . . .Copyright 1976 by Mark S. Geston. All Rights Reserved.All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 1976.First EditionISBN 0-385-11359-5Printed in the United States of America'I desire no other monument than the laughter of the madmen I have caused to be set loose upon the universe. .From the testament of Ahmanal-Akhmoriahd, fifth centuryof the Holy Qty, written inanticipation of the battleat Quetez (Heartbreak Ridge)The man was young and thought: they have named this war too grandly, as they have named this place, the Holy City. He reconsidered: but it should at least be denominated as "holy" with a small h, for it is choked with tombs and cathedrals, mosques, shrines, places of adoration and prayer, sacred groves, enchanted grottoes and temples of nameless ritual. Priests were as common here as he remembered soldiers and technicians to have been in his own home cities before he left. Their silken and sackcloth robes bracketed the dull tans and greens of the common folk. Some were indistinguishable from princes in the richness of their garments; pearls and diamonds were sewn in swirling patterns to the hems of their cloaks, their saddles inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver, and their escorts often rode gryphons or lithe peg-. asuses, as suited the varied tones and nuances they wished to lend to their powers.The Holy City had named it the Wizards' War, as if it had already been won and enshrined in its history. It had been going on for almost seven hundred years when Aden left his home, and was known there only as "the war," as were all the wars of his people's history during their prosecution.He stepped from the road and balanced on the edge of a marble fountain while some exalted personage thundered by with his retainers; they were all dead men, which showed their leader to be powerful indeed. Flashes of ivoried bone glinted through seams in their golden armor. The dust their horses kicked up became gold too.Aden held himself against the fountain's rim and easily hid his disgust with the funereal cavalry; he had seen much worse. Outwardly, he mirrored the awe and reverence of the other people on the narrow street. Certain mages, it was widely known, often allowed the dust of their passage to remain gold and diamond chips, instead of transmuting back into dirt, as a reward to the people for their acclaim. Many were that extravagant. Of course, there were others who loathed such obsequiousness, so one had to be careful not to overplay the role.Aden watched the party with his left eye. An adept mage could have detected millimetric variations between the pupil dilation of that eye and his other, just as he could have discovered the coldness and conductivity that underlay the left side of his skull. But in three years, Aden had been careful never to give such persons any reason to look.The crowd solidified behind the party. Trading and haggling resumed. The noise, if anything, was worse than it had been before, as each person sought to compliment the magnificence of the magician's dress and his house's livery to his neighbor. The men of power in that part of the world often kept spies in their pay, some human and some otherwise, and there remained the hope of washing one's clothes that evening and finding the gold still gold at the bottom of the tub. At worst, it assured one that the magician's disfavor would not be incurred.Aden brushed some of the dulling gold dust from his coarse tunic and, as if pondering the magician's greatness, put his smudged left index finger up alongside his nose. His eye watched the dust in the act of its transmutation, sucked dry its spectrums, counted and weighed the opaque interchanges of electrons and subatomic particles, and caught traces of the fading resonances that tied it to the wizard's mind.The information was transmitted through the wires implanted in his skull, neck and torso, and was transcribed onto spheres of frozen helium, suspended by undetectable magnetic fields in titanium cylinders inside his ribs. The natural conductance of his skin also carried quick and subtle messages as his eye spoke directly to the spheres and to the other augmenting devices that were scattered about his body.Aden ran his hand idly along his neck and chest; this concourse between eye and mind and torso itched. Presumably, his scratching had not distorted or confused the messages.Aden had been in the Holy City for a month watching, and he felt the weight of his observations pressing against the interior limits of his comprehension. The balls of helium, frigid, unitary, utterly pure, rotated as miniature universes inside of him, informed by the eye, consoled and spoken to by the hybrid creature of his nervous system. The living dead, the dying life, the constant shiftings and transmutations of substance and reality, the extraordinary _inwardness_ of this world, all taken from the minds and imaginations of its men of power, recompressed by the devices of the Special Office, and then jammed into the cramped spaces of his brain, to wait for the monthly block transmissions, when the Office's satellites fearfully skirted the western horizon and he could rid himself of its terrible density. Aden cowered before the knowledges accumulating inside of him, and, therefore, before the wizards. In this fear, he joined the rest of the people who had allied themselves with this and the other Holy Cities. It was so vastly different from . . .He had trouble remembering.. . . from the precise night of his own world.The itching stopped, Aden imagined he could tell when the electrical currents had finished inscribing the new paragraphs on the gaseous spheres.He pulled his jacket tightly about his shoulders. He had been standing by the fountain for half an hour since the magician had passed by. A few merchants in sedan chairs of satinwood and horn passed along the street. While he thought about his interior circuitries, the eye stirred casually and discerned what it could of their wealth and what they reflected of the economic strength of the Holy City. Such considerations meant nothing to the men of power, and Aden's world knew it, but they still insisted on looking, as if they wanted to find a common ground of normality in the way the wizards fought their war.These were exercises that might have been carried out by any spy, trivial compared to the recordation of the passing magician and his retinue: transmutation, his personal triumph over death flouted before the people, his unarticulated powers outlined by a perceptible nimbus surrounding his head and chest. These were proper challenges for the capabilities of Aden's eye.He had to think that, he realized during the first month of his mission, in order to remain functional. Anything less and he would succumb to the same spell that half of the world had already fallen under. Either that, or he would unconsciously betray the curious arrogance that characterized the proponents of each side in the face of the other, the defensive contempt each cultivated toward the other's conception of the universe. He would dwell constantly upon any conceit or belief that would help hold in his delicate and poorly defined equipoise between half-knowing and half-believing.His mission had been conceived after the philosophers and scientists of his home had, after centuries of war, hit upon the difference between science and magic. Before their realization, the ritual of two worlds shadowboxing across mutually contradictory and invisible frontiers had exerted a certain fascination on both sides. Neither side understood the manners or methods of the other, and so the commonly perceptible forms of sheer movement often obscured the strategic realities of power and death.Inevitably, through all the badly aimed attempts at- attack and occupation, the two incompatible universes overlapped. The massacre at Thorn River had been the last such meeting. Before that had been the battles of The Corridor, Morgan's Hill, Kells, the Third Perimeter, Heartbreak Ridge, the Lesser Bennington Isles, Black Cat Road . . . endlessly fractured dreams through which each world sought to preserve its visions of divinity against those held by the enemy.Those strange times, before the understanding by Aden's world, gave rise to stranger nations and personalities. Science was often confused with magic, as it had been during the latter's first death and the former's birth. Thus arose successions of intentionally equivocal and elusive intelligence and counterintellige...
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