The Siege of Wonder

by Mark S. Geston

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

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 places 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 between two warring forces. As scientific rationality picks up momentum and the enchantment of the enemy crumbles away before it, Aden - and those out to stop him - races to find the unicorn again.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 190

Sample

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 pegasuses, 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 shadow-boxing 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 counterintelligence organizations in each world, such as the one Aden worked for, some maintaining so precarious a balance between the universe that they tried to protect and the one they attacked that they spent their whole existences fighting themselves, awarding their own agents decorations when they killed their comrades and erecting monuments to the failure of gallant, purposely suicidal missions. Thus also, the weird romance of the war itself and of the literatures it spawned.

But no one in Aden’s home could find anything in the war sufficiently romantic or fascinating enough to dull their grief and sorrow. Instead of composing heroic romances, illuminated by artists (who, it was reported, were often driven selectively insane by their patron magicians in the hopes their talents would reach peaks not otherwise attainable), the men of Aden’s home thought more and more deeply upon the nature of their enemy. At last they conceived that their own dreams, those which they retained, were, in the very texture of their construction, tied to objective understanding. Magic and science alike, when they strove against each other, hypothesized similar accomplishments and ends. It was in the methods that they differed.

Science could be understood and therefore controlled. The mechanisms and the sources of its power would be subject to a final switch, accessible to any man, or to any trained ape or dolphin for that matter.

Magic, as it gradually defined itself in the funereal hazes over the Burn, Devils’ Slide, Cameron and two hundred other disasters, could never be understood. By its very definition, it had to remain no more objective than art. Its practice must always be intuitive, given only to persons chosen by unknowable entities according to secret elections.

From this proceeded the comparative dullness of Aden’s world, and also its tired grace, its acknowledgment of universal things, universal weariness, universal frustration, universal defiance. Contrawise, it also explained the awesome personalities the enemy’s world had thrown up, with their barely pronounceable names and tangled genealogies, interwoven with beings of questionable humanity. Their world blazed with baroque, liquid fires, while the men of Aden’s world concerned themselves with blackout curtains and light beams so perfectly coherent as to be invisible unless one was their target. The magicians paraded in raiments stitched with gold and silver thread, studded with precious stones, costuming themselves more gorgeously than the inhabitants of myths, for they conceived themselves to be made of the same stuff. It was easy to become lost in their world, when one’s own offered so little to stand against it. There was a damp warmth about the magicians’ kingdoms that hung about their places and works like the intoxicating sweat of lovers.

Aden’s world dressed in white: starched, spotless, undistinguished except for cut and tailoring, which sometimes showed obsessive attention to detail. Almost by way of petulant counterposition, Aden’s world became progressively colder and abstracted. Everything must be understood, and they found it an unexpectedly easy step; they had always secretly believed that everything could be reduced to component parts of the utmost simplicity, if sufficient energies were devoted to their study.

The men of power wrapped the world in silks and incense, which hid the poverty of their feudal society and cushioned the jarring discordancies of pleasure and horror that it contained. That, too, formed part of their world’s charm.

Three hundred years before Aden’s birth, the nations of his world had begun to replace their guns and missiles with antennas of increasing subtlety and precision. The computers grew to process the accelerating influx of information that they stole away from the hidden kingdoms. New inquiries and postulates proposed themselves and more antennas, satellites and robot reconnaissance ships were built to confirm or deny them. Most were destroyed; their lubricants were turned to powdered diamonds, air suddenly ceased to flow faster over the tops of their airfoils than it did underneath, finite masses were subjected to infinite stresses.

But enough of the devices survived to feed the computers and the persons who habitually dressed in white. These people sat before the readout consoles and blackboards in underground bunkers, refining their inhumanity, drawing further away from the wild vitality that had murdered so many of their fellows; their hands were the color of pale marble, veined with red porphyry.

They learned. Within the aching sterility of their silences, the content of magic was reduced to philosophical syllogisms, then to historical commentaries, then to equations.

The first breakthrough, after the initial realization of the difference between science and magic, was in the discovery of multiple spectrums, paralleling the electromagnetic along which all forces and presences had been previously thought to manifest themselves. The electromagnetic spectrum, it was discovered, did not extend indefinitely. At one end, it stopped with the attainment of absolute zero; at the other, it consumed itself in the high-energy situations that comprised the non-dimensional cores of black holes.

By accident and tradition, the wizards had intruded into the parallel spectrums and manipulated them through the sheer force of their possibly divine personalities. Thoughts of a particular nature that coincided with certain gestures and tones of voice granted them access into the parallel spectrums, even though they had not the slightest idea that that was what they were doing.

Propelled by the inertia that the idea of absolute understanding carried with it, the enemies of magic also entered upon the parallel spectrums, not merely blundering across their lines by a gesture and remembered set of mental attitudes preserved and taught for centuries, but quite deliberately invading them, coursing up and down their twisting limits on forces of inflexible constancy. They found they could turn the gold back into dust at will.

The horror that lurked in this was ignored during the first grand decades, when men found that they could strive against and sometimes defeat the nightmares and beauties that the magicians hurled against them. Then it was revealed that Heisner and his staff had found that love was explainable through the application of simple equations to specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum and the next two that paralleled it. The equations were the thing that people really felt. It was not a simulation. It was an explanation of a given phenomenon in objective terms adaptable to any time and place.

Heisner was elected to the Royal Academy for his achievement, but committed suicide before his formal installation.

The Discovery, as the histories generically referred to Heisner’s finding and those that followed, cast an unexpectedly ominous tone onto the new way the war was being waged and, many said, won. The men of Aden’s home began to wonder what the universe might look like when they had understood all of magic and all the forces and emotions it had controlled. Magic was art; it lived and died within each individual who practiced it. When a young person sought to know its manipulation, he started with the same fundamentals and elementary skills that his teachers had. In the understanding of numbers, stored and locked inside computers, engraved inside spheres of helium, time meant less; each man stood on the shoulders of his predecessors, gifted and condemned to a more complete span of vision.

They looked, and the ones that came after them looked. Deeper mysteries solidified into geometric masses, the gesturing sweeps of the wizards’ arms were quantified into series of parabolas and their radii plotted on spacetime graphs of infallible precision.

The tangle of grid antennas and tropospheric scatter units outgrew the walls of barbed wire upon which the skeletons of hooded basilisks and minotaurs had bleached for centuries. But the suspicions that Heisner had confirmed grew also. The war cooled. Magic, half in fear and half in self-fascination, turned in upon itself, cultivating stranger and more bizarre talents. Its lands were stalked by impossibly shaped beasts; death and life were toyed with by the men of power as if they were flower arrangements, to be composed according to their personal aesthetics.

Aden had known this history when he had begun to work for the Special Office at fourteen. By the time he was sixteen he knew part of what it meant.

When he was eighteen, he was trained, modified, his abilities at analytic thought surgically blunted, and he was sent against the enemy.

He stepped into a side street paved with glazed turquoise bricks. The houses leaned high above him; some had beautiful rugs hung from their upper balconies, out of thieves’ reach. His left eye searched the glowing patterns as they shifted heavily in the late sun, his natural eye keeping pace, covering; the eyes of the Holy City were numerous and often as perceptive as his own. He searched through conjunctions of arabesques, twisted vines, heroic battle scenes and erotic myths until he found one with a triskelion of three armored legs, bent as though running. From a distance of thirty meters his eye could see that each foot had a spur tipped with a six-pointed star.

His chest itched underneath the lice in his shirt. He adjusted his clothes to seem presentable and walked into the shop below the rug. The man inside had been waiting for him for seven years.

The air inside was thick with fragrances and the hushed, careful idiom the City’s men of commerce often affected. Everyone except for Aden and the serving boy was well dressed. From the cut of their robes, several might have been high civil officials or apprenticed mages. Some turned to him when he entered, but then looked away with cultivated disinterest. The serving boy refrained from bringing him the customary glass of mint tea.

Aden wandered about the shop, examining the less expensive rugs and making what he hoped were appropriately respectful noises as he passed by those of better quality. The very finest, he knew, would not be on display for they had some intrinsic magic woven into their patterns.

At length, the shop emptied. With the evening, the greater wizards of this City and the . . .