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Battle Begun
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"Good morning, good morning, Mr. Hara," said Emrett. "It is with the greatest regret that I...er, in short, I would not have kept you from your breakfast unless I had felt that in your own interests you should be placed in full possession of the facts at the earliest possible moment. You will, of course, regard all that I am about to say as strictly confidential. The matter is a distressing or at least embarrassing one. I feel sure that as the conversation proceeds (pray be seated, Mr. Hara) you will realize in your present situation how very wise we have been in securing from the outset a police force, to give it that rather unfortunate name, of our own."
Hara licked his lips and sat down. They were in the cargo holder of a large aerial liner, not quite spaceworthy, but it could go weeks without touching land. The Anthien police chief found that in the presence of this gentlemanly killer he was powerless to relinquish any demands given to him.
"My reluctance to raise the question," continued Emrett, "would however be very much more serious if I did not feel able to assure you (in advance, you understand) of the complete confidence which we all feel in you and which I very much hoped" (here for the first time he looked Hara in the eyes) "you were beginning to reciprocate. We regard ourselves here at the Eclipse Alliance as being so many brothers and, er, sisters: so that whatever passes between us in this room can be regarded as confidential in the fullest possible sense of the word, and I take it we shall all feel entitled to discuss the subject I am about to mention in the most human and informal manner possible."
"I thought you wanted to collaborate with me," said Hara, "for payment, of course."
"Well," said Emrett in a voice so low and rich that it was almost a sigh, "I am very glad you have raised this issue now in a quite informal way. Obviously neither you nor I would wish to commit ourselves, in this room, in any sense which was at all injurious to the powers of the Alliance. I quite understand your motives and, er, respect them. We are not, of course, speaking of a Collaboration in the quasi-technical sense of the term; it would be improper for both of us (though, you may well remind me, in different ways) to do so, or at least it might lead to certain inconveniences. But I think I can most definitely assure you that nobody wants to force you into any kind of straight waistcoat. We do not really think, among ourselves, in terms of strictly demarcated functions, of course. I take it that men like you and me are, well, to put it frankly, hardly in the habit of using concepts of that type. Everyone in the Alliance feels that his own work is not so much a departmental contribution to an end already defined as a moment or grade in the progressive self-definition of an organic whole."
The Hood's voice, suddenly breaking in, had an effect not wholly unlike that of a pistol shot.
"You have lost your wallet, Mr. Hara."
"My wallet?"
"Yes. Wallet. Pocketbook. The thing you keep bank notes and letters in."
"Yes, I have. Have you found it?"
"Does it contain three hundred units, counterfoil of postal order for five hundred units, letters from a woman signing herself Myrtle, from the office of Aredia City, from G. Hernshaw, F. A. Browne, M. Belcher, and a bill for a dress suit from Simonds and Son, 32A Market Street, Silvent City?"
"Well, more or less so."
"There it is," said the Hood pointing to the durasteel table. "No, you don't!" he added as Hara made a step towards it.
"What on earth is all this about?" said Hara. His tone was that which I think almost any man would have used in the circumstances but which policemen are apt to describe as "blustering."
"None of that," said the Hood. "This wallet was found in the grass beside the road about five yards away from a boy's body."
"What?" cried Hara. "My God! You don't mean...? This whole thing's absurd!"
"There's no use appealing to me," said the Hood. "I'm not a solicitor, nor a jury, nor a judge. I'm only a private man. I'm telling you the facts."
"Do I understand that I'm suspected of murdering some vagrant?"
"I don't really think," said Emrett, "that you need to have the slightest apprehension that there is, at this stage, any radical difference between your colleagues and yourself as to the light in which this very painful matter should be regarded. The question is really a constitutional one..."
"Constitutional?" said Hara angrily. Emrett's polite manner was reaching the point of effusiveness. "If I understand him, this man is accusing me of murder."
Emrett's eyes looked at him as if from an infinite distance. "Oh," said he, "I don't really think that does justice to the Hood's position. That element in the Alliance which he represents would be strictly ultra vires in doing anything of the kind within the organization, supposing, but purely of course for purposes of argument, that they wished, or should wish at a later stage, to do so, while in relation to the outside authorities their function, however we define it, would be quite inconsistent with any action of the sort; at least, in the sense in which I understand you to be using the words."
"But it's the outside authorities with whom I'm concerned, I suppose," said Hara. His mouth had become dry and he had difficulty in making himself audible. "As far as I can understand, this man means I'm going to be framed and arrested."
"On the contrary," said Emrett. "This is precisely one of those cases in which you see the enormous value of possessing our own executive. Here is a matter which might, I fear, cause you very considerable inconvenience if the ordinary police had discovered the wallet or if we were in the position of an ordinary citizen who felt it his duty, as we should ourselves feel it our duty if we ever came to be in that very different situation, to hand over the wallet to them. I do not know if the Hood has made it perfectly clear to you that it was his operatives, and they only, who have made this, ah, embarrassing discovery."
"What on earth do you mean?" said Hara. "If the Hood does not think there's a 'prima facie' case against me, why am I being told this in this way at all? And if he does, how can he avoid informing the authorities?"
"My dear friend," said Emrett in an antediluvian tone, "there is not the slightest desire on the part of the Alliance to insist on defining, in cases of this sort, the powers of action of our own police, much less (what is here in question) their powers of inaction. I do not think anyone had suggested that we should be obliged, in any sense that limited our own initiative to communicate to outside authorities, who by their very organization must be supposed to be less adapted for dealing with such imponderable and quasi-technical inquiries as will often arise sometimes within any facts acquired by our staff and military in the course of their internal functioning within the organization."
"Do I understand," said Hara, "that you think you have facts justifying my arrest for the murder of some person, but are kindly offering to suppress them?"
"You got it now, Hara," said the Hood. A moment later for the first time in Hara's experience, he actually lit a cigar, blew a cloud of smoke, and smiled, or at least drew back his lips so that the perfect teeth became visible.
"But that's not what I want," said Hara. This was not quite true. The idea of having the thing hushed up in any way and on almost any terms when it first presented itself a few seconds ago had come like air to one suffocating. But something like citizenship was still alive in him and he proceeded, almost without noticing this emotion, to follow a different line. "I don't want that," he said, speaking rather too loud. "I'm an innocent man. I think I'd better go to the police, my own police, I mean, at once."
"If you want to be tried for your life," said the Hood, "that's another matter."
"I want to be vindicated," said Hara. "The charge would fall to pieces at once. There was no conceivable motive. And I have an alibi; Everyone knows I slept in Anthien last night. You will be forced to tell them!"
"We do not exist," said Emrett.
"And is that really true?" said the Hood.
"What do you mean?" said Hara.
"There's always a motive, you know," said the Hood. "For anyone murdering anyone. The police are only human. When the machinery's started they naturally want a conviction."
Hara assured himself he was not frightened. If only the Hood didn't keep all his windows shut and then have roaring frigate engines that he felt in his bones!
"There's a letter you wrote," said the Hood.
"What letter?"
"A letter to a Mr. Pelham, of your own police force, dated six weeks ago, in which you say, 'I wish Bill the Buck could be moved to a better world.'"
"How does that letter come to be in your hands?" said Hara. "And...Bill! Is he alright?"
"I think, Mr. Hara," said Emrett, "it would be very improper to suggest that the Hood should give any kind of exposition, in detail, I mean, of the actual working of the Eclipse Defense Force. In saying this, I do not mean for one moment to deny that the fullest possible confidence between all the members of the Alliance is one of the most valuable characteristics it can have, and, indeed, a sine qua non of that really concrete and organic life which we expect it to develop. But there are necessarily certain spheres, not sharply defined, of course, but inevitably revealing themselves in response to the environment and obedience to the indwelling ethos or dialectic of the whole, in which a confidence that involved the verbal interchange of facts would, ahem, would defeat its own end."
"You don't suppose that anyone will take it seriously!"
"Ever tried to make a policeman understand anything?" said the Hood. "I mean what you call a real policeman."
Hara said nothing.
"If I might pick up a point made by the Hood," said Emrett, "this is a very good illustration of the immense importance of the Eclipse Police. There are so many fine shades involved that it would be unreasonable to expect the ordinary authorities to understand but which, so long as they remain, so to speak, in our own family circle (I look upon the Alliance, Mr. Hara, as one great family) need develop no tendency to lead to any miscarriage of justice."
"You really advise me, Sir," he said, "not to go to my police?"
"To the police?" said Emrett as if this idea were completely new. "I don't think, Mr. Hara, that anyone had quite contemplated your taking any irrevocable action of that sort. It might even be argued that by such an action you would be guilty, unintentionally guilty, I hasten to add, of some degree of disloyalty to your colleagues and especially to the Hood. You would, of course be placing yourself outside our protection."
"Well, what do you suggest I should do?"
"Sit tight," said the Hood. "Do you know where this ship is going?"
"To Anthein City?"
"Yes," said Emrett. "And when we get there we don't want to meet any physical opposition. There are, of course, certain lines of conduct and a certain mode of procedure that it would be theoretically possible for you to adopt and which would make it very easy for us to achieve our objectives in Anthien. I am sure the Hood agrees with me."
"Really," said Hara, "I should have thought it was excusable to..."
"Pray compose yourself, Mr. Hara," said Emrett. "As I said before, we look upon ourselves as one family and nothing like a formal apology is required. We all understand one another and all dislike, er, scenes. I might perhaps be allowed to mention, in the friendliest possible manner, that any instability of temperament would be viewed by the Association as, well, as not very favorable to the confirmation of your appointment as Anthien police chief. We are all speaking, of course, in the strictest confidence."
"I'm sorry if I was rude," he said at last. "What do you advise me to do?"
"Don't stick your nose into when our men arrive in the city," said the Hood. "Your police force is to stand down. Dissolve it, even. This should not be a serious hardship since you have the proper incentive. For a duration of several days the city will be under our control. All of its faculties will be available to us so that we would be able to destroy the energy core, if we so decided to do so."
"You won't get away with this just by using little old me," said Hara.
"We will. You are one piece of the plan. Don't imagine that all of our designs rest on your decision. There are other members in the Anthien police force that we have properly motivated to not interfere with matters that shouldn't concern them. Namely, around the museum."
Before Hara had recovered from this staggeringly new conception, Emrett rose and put one hand on Hara's shoulder.
"You must be hungry for your lunch," he said. "Don't let me delay you. The barracks and mealroom are three floors up on the upper decks. Behave with the greatest caution. And..." Here his face suddenly changed. The widely opened mouth looked all at once like the mouth of some enraged animal: what had been the senile vagueness of the eyes became an absence of all specifically human expression. "And be sure to succeed. Find Bronze Tercano, as well. Make plans to bring the boy to us. The Djinn...he's not patient."
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The visions had been reaching a breaking point. When waiting for his turn to battle the Gym Leader that Bronze saw a tall, stooped, shuffling, creaking figure, humming a tune, barring his way. Ancestral impulses lodged in his body, that body which was in so many ways wiser than his mind, and he directed the blow which he aimed at the head of his senile obstructor. But there was no impact. The shape had suddenly vanished and he was left standing in the Gym lobby, covered in sweat.
Those who know best were never fully agreed as to the explanation of this episode. It may have been that Bronze, both then and on the previous day, being overwrought, saw a hallucination of Emrett where Emrett was not. It may be that the continual appearance of Emrett which at almost all hours haunted so many rooms and corridors of the world was (in one well-verified sense of the word) a ghost; one of those sensory impressions which a strong personality in its last decay can imprint, most commonly after death but sometimes before it, on the very structure of a building, and which are removed not by exorcism but by architectural alterations. Or it may, after all, be that souls who have lost the intellectual good do indeed receive in return, and for a short period, the vain privilege of thus reproducing themselves in many places as wraiths. At any rate the thing, whatever it was, vanished.
"Come in," said Stephan to Bronze. He had just finished with his last fight for the day and was intending to start out for home in a few minutes, but then he saw Bronze in the waiting list and decide to give him a go.
"Oh, it's you, Tercano," he added as the door opened. "Come in."
Stephan tried to speak naturally but he was surprised at the visit and shocked by what he saw. Bronze's face appeared to him to have changed since he had last seen him in an Association photograph; it had grown leaner and paler and there was a new hardness in the expression.
"I've come for a battle," said Bronze. "Do you accept?"
"Yes, I suppose that's my job," said Stephan. He was a forty-year-old with a courtly manner. His face was clean-shaven and very large indeed, with watery blue eyes and something rather vague and chaotic about it. He did not appear to be giving Bronze his whole attention and this impression must, I think, have been due to the eyes, for his actual words and gestures were actually very polite. He said it was a great, a very great pleasure, to welcome Bronze. It added to the deep obligations under which the Chairman had already laid him. He hoped Bronze had had an agreeable journey. Stephan seemed to be under the impression that Bronze had arrived at Anthien by rocket, and once this was corrected, flying Pokemon.
Surprisingly Stephan offered to give Bronze his badge without a fight and bring him to comfortable quarters. Bronze declined in favor of a battle. By now he was getting almost tired of the constant and exceeding generosity of the Rorian Gym Leaders. Soon they were both drawn up in the arena and two Pokemon were decided upon.
...
Bronze first sent out Electabuzz while Stephan went with Archeops. Stephan saw Bronze hold the Pokemon, and curiously saw him press a dagger into its palm, saw it heft it, testing the weight and balance. Unknown to him this dagger could pierce the skin of Pokemon. And it came to Stephan that Bronze and his Pokemon had been trained in nerve and fiber, that he had been taught fighting in a deadly school. Stephan was a legend in his own city but Bronze was a legend of his own lifetime. The boy knew the devious ways of the ancient Rorian arts from his father and he looked supple and confident.
Archeops flew up several feet and began sidling to the right along the edge of the arena ring opposite Electabuzz.
Electabuzz crouched, realizing then that it had no shield or defense, but was trained to fight the subtle field of electricity around it, trained to react on defense with utmost speed while its ranged attack would be timed to the controlled slowness necessary for penetrating the enemy's own defense. In spite of constant warning from his trainer not to depend on the electrical field's mindless blunting of attack speed, it knew that shield awareness was part of it. Bronze knew this too.
Fear coursed through Bronze. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull yellow light within this ring. He felt that Arceus was hinting at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real now. This was defeat hanging on an infinite number of minuscule mischances. Anything could tip the future here, he realized. Someone coughing in the troop of watching guards, a distraction. A variation in a light's brilliance brilliance, a deceptive shadow. He realized that he was afraid.
In the middle of his thought Archeops pounced. Bronze saw the motion and stifled an outcry. Where the Pokemon struck there was only empty air and Electabuzz stood now behind the Pokemon with a clear shot at the exposed back. Its motion was slowly timed, beautifully fluid, but so slow it gave Archeops the margin to twist away, flying and turning to the right.
Bronze recognized the slow timing and it came over him what a two-edged thing that was. Elactabuzz's reactions were those of youth and trained and modified to a peak Stephan had never seen. But the attack was trained, too, and conditioned by the necessity of charging up electricity for a stronger blow. It needed control and trickery to defeat such a strong enemy in one blow.
Again Archeops attacked, milk-white eyes glaring, its body a yellow feathered blur under the lanterns. And again Electabuzz slipped away to return too slowly on the attack.
And again.
And again.
Each time Electabuzz's counterblow came an instant too late. Now the two figures on the floor circled each other: Electabuzz with modified knife hand held far forward and tipped up slightly; Archeops flying high out of range. Again, Archeops pounced, and this time its twisted to the right where Electabuzz had been dodging.
Instead of faking back and out, Electabuzz met the creature's beak on the point of its own blade. Then the Pokemon was gone, twisting away to the left and thankful for Bronze's gift. Arcehops backed into the center of the circle, rubbing its face with its wings. Golden blood dripped from the injury for a moment and then stopped. Its eyes were wide and staring, two white holes, studying Electabuzz with a new wariness in the dull light of the glowing lamps. This was no soft outsider in the ring, easy prey for its attacks.
Archeops leaped high, feinting and striking down with its right wing, but then it suddenly withdrew and was filled with no power but wind. The hidden Razor Wing that made the real attack had been shifted to its left wing. But Bronze had seen Archeop's mistake: bad wing-work so that it took the Pokemon a heartbeat longer to descend from its flying leap, which had been intended to confuse Electabuzz and hide the knife shift.
Electabuzz shifted its own knife and charged fist in a blurred motion, slipped sideways and thrust upward where Arcehops's chest was descending, and then away to watch the Pokemon crumble. The residual trails of energy coursed around Electabuzz's body like rain. Arcehops fell like a limp rag, face down, gasped once and turned its face toward Bronze, then lay still on the rock floor. Its dull eyes stared out like muddy carvings of glass.
The next Pokemon, sent out without even a minute time of delay, was a Skarmory. It leaped, feinting with its right wing, but the blow came, again, from the left. Bronze had seen enough for a first approximation. Skarmory preferred to attack with the left side, presenting the right flank as though the hard metal flesh could protect its entire side. It was the action of a Pokemon trained to attack and with potential weapons in both wings.
Expecting the slight hesitation, Electabuzz almost failed to evade the downflash of the wing, and felt its tip scratch its left arm. It silenced the sudden pain there, its mind flooded with realization that the earlier hesitation had been a trick: an overfeint. Here was more of an opponent than it had expected. There would be tricks within tricks within tricks.
Bronze saw the elation on Stephan's face, and wondered at it. Did a scratch signify that much to the man? Unless there was poison on the blades! But how could there be? He had not smelt or noticed any, not seen an unnatural sheen. He was too well-trained to miss something as obvious as that.
He remained silent, probing Electabuzz's wound with his eyes, examining the blood from the nick, and sensing a trace of soporific from the Skarmory's wings. No doubt his Pokemon would have changed its metabolism to realign with the soporific, but he still felt a thrill of doubt. Skarmory had been prepared with soporific on its wings. A soporific! Nothing to alert his senses, but strong enough to slow the muscles it touched. His enemies had their own plans within plans, their own stacked treacheries.
Again Skarmory leaped, stabbing. Electabuzz feinted with slowness as though inhibited by the drug and at the last instant dodged to meet the down-flashing wing on the Logarian knife's point. Skarmory rolled sideways in midair and was out and away, its wing-focus shifted to its left side, and the measure of it that only a slight paleness of jaw betrayed the acid pain where Electabuzz had cut it.
Skarmory began closing the space between them, edging in, knife-wings held high, anger showing itself in squint of eye and set of jaw. It feinted right and under, and it and Electabuzz were pressed against each other, hands gripped, straining.
Electabuzz, cautious of Skarmory's right hip where he suspected an attack coming from the base of the feinting wing, forced the turn to the right. He almost failed to see the trace beginnings of an Air Slash flick out beneath the wing joint. A shift and a giving in Skarmory's motion warned it. The attack grew from its tiny point in the microwormhole under the wing and missed Electabuzz's flesh by the barest fraction.
On the left hip! Treachery within treachery within treachery, thought Bronze.
Electabuzz sagged to catch a reflex in Skarmory, but the necessity of avoiding the tiny attack point under its opponent's hip threw Electabuzz off just enough that it missed its footing and found itself thrown hard to the floor, Skarmory nesting on top.
And Skarmory began twisting itself around, forcing the attack point closer and closer to Electabuzz's face. "I will not lose!" cried Bronze, speaking for the first time in the battle.
Skarmory gaped at him, caught in the merest fraction of hesitation. It was enough for Electabuzz to find the weakness of balance in one of its opponent's wing muscles, and their positions were reversed. Skarmory lay partly underneath with its right hip high, unable to turn because of the wing-point caught against the floor beneath it.
Electabuzz twisted its knife hand free, aided by the lubrication of golden blood from its arm, and thrust once hard up underneath Skarmory's jaw. The point slid home into the flesh. Skarmory jerked and sagged back, still held partly on its side by the metal wing embedded in the floor.
"Stephan," Bronze said, speaking with deliberate slowness, "your force is reduced by one more. You have not defeated even one of my Pokemon. Shall we now shed sham and pretense? Shall we now discuss what must be? Your badge given to me, paving the way for me as Champion of the League?"
Stephan took several short steps through the arena and whispered into Bronze's ear. "I've never lost a battle this week. Perhaps I was tired. But I'd be no match for you anyway." He pressed the badge into Bronze's hand. "But I am going to give you some advice."
"And what is that?" said Bronze.
"Get more Pokemon," said Stephan. "We were only allowed to fight with two. But you only have two. In the League all the trainers will have six. You might be disqualified. Go out the door and walk twenty feet down the hall. You'll find a locked door with a chip reader. Use the badge to unlock it. You'll find a monster of a Pokemon there, but I'll trust you can catch it."
"What Pokemon is it?"
"I can't tell you. Now go!"
...
Bronze sighed, left the room, crossed the hall, and saw a door in the wall. There was a chair beside it. It was only an object to rest his weariness and conceal it from other men. He sat down, pulling his robes around his legs and loosening his hood at the neck.
After he was rested he opened the door. Inside was a large storage room, perhaps thirty feet broad and fifty feet wide. Some of the shelves and furnishings had been overturned and smashed. He touched nothing and hoped that no sly trap had been planted for him by this Pokemon or one of its slaves. He walked over to the massive crates of spare parts for the arena machinery and began fanning through the room.
He soon encountered several Magnemite swirling across his path. They skittered away into the shelves and did not offer battle. Now Bronze knew this place was inhabited, and his own presence could not be taken casually. Both of his Pokemon were guarding his sides, Charmeleon augmenting the tired Electabuzz. Any Pokemon could surely hear Bronze and his entourage approaching now, the Magnemite beginning to hum a tune that did not come from lungs of flesh. There came a murmur of sound behind one shelf. Electabuzz conferred with Charmelon in its own language, then moved to Bronze's side, a strange look in its eyes.
A distinct cry was now audible. The sound was quite astonishingly unlike a voice. It was perfectly articulate: it was even rather beautiful. But it was inorganic. We feel the difference between animal voices (including those of the human animal) and all other noises clearly, though it is hard to define. Blood and lungs and the warm, moist cavity of the mouth are somehow indicated in every Voice. Here they were not. The syllables sounded more as if they were played on an instrument than as if they were spoken: and yet they did not sound mechanical either. A machine is something we make out of natural materials; this was more as if rock or crystal or light had spoken of itself. And it went through Bronze from chest to groin like the thrill that goes through you when you think you have lost your hold while climbing a cliff.
Bronze hoped it did not have any ranged attacks, and was then proven wrong. There was a faint change in the light, and Bronze lept aside. Where he had been the air seemed to have momentarily departed, leaving a vacuity of space, which then closed in a sudden flash. He felt the energy of the attack and when he rose again it was pale and panting. The shelf was splintered in half with abrasions at the edges of the two pieces which suggested extreme heat.
In that instant, appearing in the hazy place where the shelves had been cloven, a huge Magneton sent three roaring paths of flame at him. There came a blasting of metal and stone behind him after he rolled away, and the cramped shelves around Bronze were suddenly full of fighting Magnemite. The poise and readiness of his enemy warned Bronze that this was a trained Pokemon.
This moment argued extreme caution. He could tell by sound alone that at least part of his cover had been vaporized. There were more inorganic gruntings, too, the noise of several struggles behind him. He had one opening and threw the knife. Another blast from Magneton bathed it in lightning but did not shatter it or knock it aside. The blade pierced the many folds of hard flesh above the upper head's eye.
No other weapon could have stunned it so. With the dagger still buried in the coating of metal Bronze cast a Poke Ball. It did its work. There was a stab of white flame and the Poke Ball fell to the floor along with the blade. It rattled and quivered a moment before going silent.
The Magnemite dispersed, and something similar to relief came over Bronze. Had he really captured the alpha with only the dagger? The whole thing had been almost easy. This troubled him. If he began to envision battling as the conquering of thresholds, the gaining of skills, and the increasing of prowess, then, he thought, if he ever encountered an enemy he could not defeat, then it would be because he was incapable of even conceiving of how high the scale of skill rose above his own level? Was he so far below the real skill of his foes, that as he accumulated power and hardened his ability, he would only see greater and greater bridgeheads and breakers with the distinction between him and them becoming eternally sharper, more greatly developed, and so much vaster from rung to rung of the ladder of battle that he would, in the end, be asked to submit before his own inability?
He picked up both device and dagger and departed from this viewpoint and the room. He was now conceivably halfway to the fulfillment of his plan. Was he really fighting for the Plan anymore? Or just the destruction of the Alliance? He did not know how to accomplish the latter.
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After Bronze had left Gerald's house on schedule for his battle, Jake took Tess back to Anthien Square once the sun began to set. Some scattered rioting had broken out in the streets and the Rorian administration tolerated it no longer. The festivities were halted and the worst offenders were jailed. It had been rumored that Pokedex Holders fought among the ranks of policemen, but they had no name.
The two wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column that was in the center of the city, at the top of which Arceus's golden statue gazed northern towards the far-away Hisuian skies where He had vanquished the powers of Death two thousand years ago. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Emperor Haurgon of Logaria.
They walked slowly up to the north side of the square and Jake got a pale-colored pleasure from identifying the Anthien Museum. It was an enormous building in the ancient Kalosi Rumhoth style with high marble pillars and an outhrust portico. Then he saw Yellow and another girl standing at the base of the Haurgon monument, reading a poster that ran spirally up the column. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the plaza.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the central square. Jake, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, and squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd. Tess was following him within arm's reach, but the way was blocked by an enormous man and an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh. Jake wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little. Tess had simply gone around. They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with submachine guns standing upright in each corner, were cutting across the plaza. In several trucks nearby little men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed.
"Who are these?" asked Tess.
"I'm not sure," said Jake. "They're prisoners from the riots, probably."
Riots! Tess decided that she hated Anthien more than Rosecove. The obscenities, the noise, the smells, the people…the people! She hadn't even thought they had people that bad in Roria. It was like they had never won the Terramist Wars and Anthien was under enemy occupation. The dragging away of the prisoners in leg irons was too much for her. The strange uniforms of the guards were equally terrible. Nearly all tenebrous black, and strips of orange around the shoulders…
Was everything the same in every city? The iron beds, the blank marriages, the madmen, the crime, the people broken on false promises and filled with intolerable miseries, the greyness, the poison? The gangs weren't bad in Anthien because everything was on high security, but Bronze had told her that it was just worse in the big cities: the criminals had more guns, more drugs, more time, and fewer fathers. It seemed as though the evil that had been brewed in all of modernity had soured and festered till it lurched itself over all the world.
Tess realized that Bronze was getting at something with his view of a Dark Lord. Lucifer was more real than Roria itself. If men decided that Roria was now Kalos, it would be Kalos. But evil would always be there. When Roria was gone the Dark Lord would be alive and well far longer. It was a nobler fight to go against the Alliance than anything else. It was the product of these cities, she thought, so let it be damned!
"It's awful," she said. "I don't understand how…"
For a moment both their hands met and Tess gave a fleeting squeeze. It could not have been five seconds, and yet it seemed a long time to Jake that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and the eyes of an aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Jake through nests of hair.
They pushed through the mob again and entered the white museum. There were planters filled with bluebells around, so thick that they could not be naturally grown. Tess picked one partly to satisfy a sudden impulse in that direction, and partly because she might give it to Bronze. It was the best thing to do.
The double doors resolved into a bright, open space with scattered masses of people milling around various exhibitions. They went straight past the first floor and up a flight of stairs to the second with their heads held low; more apelike black-clad men and their security Pokemon were stationed at the pillars that upheld the high roof. Nothing was said but they both thought of the Eclipse Alliance and their dark livery.
Jake saw that the upper deck was deserted. They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer to Tess now. She stood beside him very upright, with a smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though, he thought, she was wondering why he was so slow to act.
"Would you believe," he said, "that till this moment I didn't know what color your eyes were?" They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes.
Tess halted and stood with her back to a pillar. "Now that you've seen what I'm really like," she said, "can you still bear to look at me?"
"Yes, easily."
He was glad that this sudden talk was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women: he did not know the reason.
"It's the bloody thing about this whole matter," said Jake, "that you can never rest. Someone's always telling you where to go."
"Oh, you don't mean Bronze?"
"That I mean," said Jake, and suddenly in the next moment (it was hard to say if he or someone else had caused it) he said: "And you also desired his love. Because he is so wise and glorious and you wish to be lifted above the other women by being in his company."
"He only gives me understanding and pity. It's not like that. Really, Jake, I thought you would know better. Haven't you been with him your whole life?"
Jake had liked Bronze once because he had listened to him, and he liked him now because he was…what? A king? And from another direction, far more insidiously came the suggestion that Bronze was making him a dupe. He was under Bronze's thumb just as strongly as those other fools at the Alliance were under the Djinn's. At least, the alleged Djinn. They had not yet seen it and Jake was not yet certain it was real. Might it be a purely elemental symbol for the undying evil of men? That was more sensible than what tradition told him, the image of a proud giant ruling over legions of slaves.
"Never mind," said Jake. "There's no hurry. We've got the whole afternoon. You could hear someone coming if they were a hundred feet away."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Only because I have a lot to talk about. Do we actually know what we're doing?"
Tess's shoulders gave a wiggle of dissent. She assumed from the beginning that Bronze had everything planned out. All that was needed to survive was luck and cunning and boldness. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual could be defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Eclipse Alliance would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. It was the mind-image that she had made for herself to be her own little Arceus that worked for all her purposes.
"Bronze has a plan," said Tess.
"Yes, a plan for himself, at least."
"He won't leave us behind."
"No, he won't. You know that we're his responsibilities."
During the month Jake realized that his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. But now it was becoming different. The smell of her hair, the glint of her lips, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. A deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly in Bronze's face, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling any obligation to anything else.
As he stood on the upper balcony he thought again of the cellars of the Eclipse Alliance where Bronze's parents were hidden. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.
Often Jake gave himself up to daydreams of escape. His luck would hold indefinitely, and he and Tess would start and carry on a secret intrigue for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Bronze would die, and by subtle maneuverings Jake would succeed in getting married to Tess. In case the Alliance was still after them, they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with different accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a Unovan back-street.
It was all nonsense, as he knew. In reality there was no escape from Team Eclipse without Bronze or the gods on their side. He had begun to view allied beings like Groudon as tokens to be cashed in for brief respites from hostile forces, but those would run out eventually. Even the one plan of escape that was practicable, suicide, neither he, nor certainly Tess, would have any intention of carrying out. The very suggestion of that would disturb her, he knew. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
They talked for at least another hour. In some ways, Tess distrusted Bronze even more than Jake. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during Bronze's long platitudes, her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of Bronze when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the historical Hisuian-Logarian mythology that Bronze considered real, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her unless when Bronze clarified that these changes supported his religion.
She believed, for instance, having learnt it from Bronze, that the ancient Kalosi Rumhoth had invented airplanes with the help of the Evil Djinn. And when Jake told her that those airplanes could not have been in existence till a hundred years ago, the fact struck her as uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented the airplane?
"Really, Tess, I'm not sure about this whole Arceus thing," said Jake. "Bronze pushes it too far."
"I've thought about if he's wrong on some things, even on his own perspective," said Tess. "Of course, I won't say Arceus is Bronze's god unless the big fellow Himself comes down and tells me." She suddenly shut her eyes and screwed up her face. Jake asked what was the matter.
"Oh, it's awful," said Tess. "I just thought of what Bronze would say. He'd say that if Arceus appeared in the clouds and told me He was God, I would just explain it away. The part that stings is that I know I would explain it!"
"Maybe you're getting into his head, not the other way around," said Jake. "He can't be right on everything. A mythological history might be filled with holes. And how can we be certain that Creative Evolution is not the highest form of truth?"
"Creative Evolution?"
"Do you remember in the woods after we had left the boat, and how all the Spearow were singing for us?"
"They weren't singing for us," said Tess. "They were just singing to please themselves. Not even that. They were just singing."
"Not for us," said Jake.
"Not for us."
The birds sang, the Pokemon sang. The Eclipse Alliance did not sing. All round the world, in Castelia and Undella, in Kanto and Sinnoh, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Lumoise and Rosecove, in the villages of the endless Rorian plains, in the bazaars of Orre and Fiore: everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable song, made monstrous by work and time, toiling on from the birth to death of the human race and still singing. Out of those mighty notes a new hope would come, even if all else was lost. Tess and Jake and Bronze could be killed, but that song would live on. Creative Evolution. Tess would call it the spirit of Man. Bronze would say it was the Will of Arceus. Jake didn't know either way. But he still shared that secret, secular hope that if you kept alive the mind you would keep alive the body, and that was what could destroy the Alliance.
"It's a morbid thought, but if we're killed, then it's really over," said Jake. "They'll erase our memory from the Earth. Bronze says they'll forget the act of forgetting us. If it's going to happen, then we are already dead."
Tess hung her arms over the balcony. "You want me to repeat that, don't you?"
"Well, we are the dead," said Jake.
"We are the dead," said Tess.
"You are the dead," said an iron voice behind them.
…
They sprang away from the white balcony and turned around. Jake's entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all around the irises of Tess's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. Against the far wall was a television that had gone unnoticed till it had been turned on. They both stared into a field of static from which came the cold voice.
"You are the dead," repeated the iron voice.
"Who is it?" demanded Jake. Both his Monferno and Tess's Gabite were sent out.
"It's the Eclipse Alliance," said the voice. "Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until ordered."
It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for life, to get out of the building before it was too late: no such thought occurred to them immediately. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the television. "Send back your Pokemon. Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another."
The noises from outside startled them into flinching. The wailing scream and thud of rocket bombs exploding in the distance rang in their ears. In the distance they heard dislodged chunks of mortar fall with successive dull impacts, with a rain of hissing sounds that signified smaller bits of scattered matter. Screams, gunshots, and the more variable noises of Pokemon attacks came from outside. Jake felt the sudden thrum-thrum-thrum of huge frigate engines vibrating through his boots. An unseen fleet, at least a dozen strong, seemed to be above the building.
Something broke then in their minds and they ran down the stairs. There was a sound of trampling boots behind them and the museum seemed to be full of black-uniformed men. The voice was demanding them to stop, to halt, to lay down, but their legs were beyond their control. In a glorious moment they burst out of the museum into bright daylight, with the sweet air on their faces, and people all around them in the square.
Above them, casting bulky shadows over the plaza, the Eclipse Fleet hovered above the capital of Roria. Armored warships bristled with weapons, weirdly beautiful with their reflective alloy coatings, their adornments of antennae and sensors. Their aft engines blazed pure fire as they overwhelmed the crews of surprised sentry vehicles. Most of the picket ships simply stood down and returned to their hangers unharmed. Five Association sentry vessels fired off heavy salvos at the capital frigate, but most of their projectiles were too weak to pierce the armor of the fleet. For every mark of scouring on the Eclipse frigates, an Association jet exploded in a flash of incandescent vapor.
"They're blasting the towers," said Tess.
"Don't look, run!"
But as they began to sprint a ring of black-clad men appeared, as if they had sprung out of the metal ground, and encircled them in a net that stretched around the museum entrance, and a separate half-circle of men facing outward, nearly back to back against the ones advancing toward Tess and Jake, were keeping away the people of Anthien City. There was a confusion of angry shouts that sometimes contained a yell of pain.
"The place is surrounded," cried Jake. The plaza was full of solid men in black-and-orange uniforms, with ironshod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.
"The place is surrounded," yelled an Eclipse captain through a megaphone. "You may say goodbye to each other."
"They're attacking the city," whispered Jake.
"We're attacking the city," the captain mirrored. "Stand down."
There was a gasp and thud to Jake's side. A huge shape went flying and he received a blow to his ankle that nearly threw him off balance. A Dodrio had stabbed its beak into an Eclipse operative's solar plexus, doubling him up like a pocket ruler. Another man was thrashing on the floor, fighting for breath as a Raticate strangled him with its tail. He whirled to see reeling violence, shouting, the clash of flesh, wax-image faces grimacing, the livid face of Yellow breaking through the ring of Eclipse mercenaries as they went toppling like bowling pins in the face of her Pokemon. The net was broken for a moment.
"Grab on!" cried Yellow. The Dodrio left its prey and ran beside Tess and Jake. They leaped onto its back, seeing a Golem along with Yellow blocking the mercenaries, the Pokemon's blood-pitted eyes there visible through a blur of dust, the clawed hands of a mercenary's Sneasler beyond the stairs, its arcs of steel chopping futilely at the Golem's rock hide. There was the orange fire-mouth of an Ember attack repelled by an Omanyte's shell. Raticate's teeth and claws were through it all, flick-flicking, red dripping from them.
Another moment and they were watching as Dodrio through the city, past the statue of Haurgon and down the street they had come. Yellow was gliding beside them suspended on her shoulders by a Butterfree's hands. Looking behind him, Jake had one last glimpse of Yellow's other Pokemon standing against a swarm of Eclipse uniforms: their jerking, controlled staggers combined with rippling attacks, the iron-hard bodies with red splashes of death all over them.
They went racing beside Yellow. Dodrio's pace slackened a little and Jake saw how Yellow's demeanor had changed. She met his eyes with a single, sharp glance, as if confirming his identity, and then looked back at the road in front of them. Her body had straightened and seemed to have grown much bigger. People were fleeing into their homes as commands and orders for compliance came from hijacked devices. Mercenaries were setting up artillery at intersections while blasts from the ships wrecked the skyscrapers.
The three of them stopped in an empty alley. Tess found herself frightened, not of bombs or truncheons but of Yellow's face. The distance between her appearance now and earlier was increasing every moment. She was like something that ought not to be indoors. Sunny and fair though she was, a sense of mold, gravel, wet leaves, weedy water, hung about her.
"This is it!" said Tess excitedly. "They've attacked the city to capture us. It's done, finished! We'll be vaporized!"
"Silence," said Yellow sharply. She stood bolt upright. The foul air of the alley seemed cleared of impurities and reblaced with a balmy October breeze. "No," the woman said. "God's glory, do you think you were brought into the fire to act like a schoolgirl? If it were not my business to bear you to the end, I would have struck you. I will hear no more of that. Do you understand?"
"We hear and obey," said another voice from the mouth of the alley. "But she meant no harm."
A sweet heaviness, like the smell of hawthorn leaves, rushed over them. It was Bronze with a Magnemite behind him, both looking ragged. Joy stabbed through Tess's heart. He was alive!
"Yellow, if not to heal our own wounds, but for the healing of the world, we will need your commerce with field and water. The gift of Viridian Forest will allow you to defeat your enemies." Jake knew he was referring to the fact that Yellow was a druid.
"No, Bronze," said Yellow in a still louder voice, "that cannot be done any longer. The soul has gone out of the wood and water. There are few wild places. Oh, I daresay I could wake them; a little. But it would not be enough. A storm, or even a river-flood would be of little avail against our present enemy. My weapon would break in your hands. For the hideous strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Men built the tower of Babel to reach heaven."
"Then we must escape," said Bronze. "If you will not lift your little finger to call your powers up, other avenues must remain to us. The war is really beginning."
There was another round of rocket blasts, and then silence fell. Bronze knew that the last resistance had been quashed. The city was conquered and wholly under the power of the Evil Djinn.