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This is the second part of the Legends of Pokemon trilogy. Please read Pokemon Special: Sword and Shield (the final book) after this. For the first volume, read Pokemon Special: Legends of Arceus. It has these additions but can be read on its own.
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Although not necessary for an enjoyable experience, some basic knowledge of the Pokemon Special/Adventures manga may be helpful. Any questions about the manga can be resolved by a short trip to Bulbapedia.
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Review if you wish. I'd like to hear what you all think about the story.
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The dedication of this book is split in many ways,
But he who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
Therefore, Reader, this book is dedicated to you.
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The Tale Of Brick Bronze
The Great War
And the Return of the King
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Prologue
At The Precipice
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The wise also must take delicate care at the beginning to make sure that the rest of the story is told aright. This is the story of the Emperor Bronze Tercano and therefore this book is forever his place. So how do we approach the beginning with a meeting of Bronze Tercano's father? A man of surpassing warmth and surprising coldness was Robert Tercano of Logaria. Yet, many facts open the way to this man: his abiding love for his lady; the dreams he held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. We see him from the future: a man snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?
-from "Studies of the Emperor" by Emerald of the Southern Priesthood
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Robert Tercano looked down to the left at the broken landscape of the sinkhole tunnel. Illuminated by suspensor globes in the dark were chasms of tortured rock, patches of yellow-brown crossed by black lines of fault shattering. It was as though someone had dropped this cave from space and left it where it smashed. Somewhere below a spout of sulfur-colored fire spurted up from a crack that led to a repository of flammable gasses. That, or the Heatmor were getting riled up again.
Robert's companion, Adam Kynes, stood passively by while his partner inspected the tunnel. He was an ugly, prehistoric lump of a man, large as if he had gone to fat, but his body rolled with muscle. Adam pushed in the filter plugs in his nose as a draft of cave dust came from ahead. Behind them was a tunnel lit by suspensor globes that led back to the surface. Two Excadrill and their handlers waited behind Robert on a small rock flat that was surrounded by many branching tunnels, each plunging into unguessed distances. Adam glanced at them, and smelled the perspiration of their fear and the light musk of the Pokemon. Their neck flaps were loose, allowing dust to get into their mining suits. They would have to be reminded; men got sloppy about such things if rules weren't enforced.
"Is it seismic?" asked Adam. "Or did the water finally eat away at the bedrock?"
Robert studied the tunnel that had suddenly appeared in the mines only two hours ago. He had gotten a call to be at the dig site by six in the morning, which of course meant getting up earlier than God. He hadn't woken up Lily to join him, but was now coming close to regretting it. He needed to review what he was seeing through her wisdom, discuss how to go on.
I would have my wife and son with me.
"Not water," said Robert, pointing at the fissures that were belching out spurts of fire. "Reclaimed rainwater usually circulates into the gas pockets that those flames are coming from. And we don't have earthquakes in southern Roria. There's a reason this site was built where it was."
"There was plenty of reason," said Adam.
Reasons that were still held in fugue. The dig had been tunneled out two months ago. A few Miltank and Mareep herders on the borders of the county grounds had found gold armor in a cave, and that caught the Association's attentive eye. The most controversial business about the whole dig was whether it would run out of profit for such an expense. The purchaser was the government; they wanted a site for the cavern which would worthily house many remarkable discoveries.
The dig was, according to the Association emissary that came to Robert, "the first-fruit, it is said of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world." It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints; "red tape" was the word its supporters used, which have hitherto hampered research in this world. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a government that can spend so many millions a day on war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime. The depth of the cavern proposed for the dig would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of Castelia City, if the equivalent distance was inverted.
The staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Association Chairman had lured the new dig site away from the attention of Samuel Oak, Professor Rowan of Sinnoh, and others. And once it was full-built, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move.
Until the cave-in, at least. It had disrupted their plans to join tunnels North Central and Sombra (the names taken from the manufacturers of two shrewish geology drones that operated in the branches, also called the Goddamn Clankers or the Ex-Wives) and Robert could be damned if he knew a cause for it, and the whole business gave him gooseflesh. Lily had been getting strange dreams.
Robert's eyes glinted in the semidarkness of the hovering lamps, and Adam took in the man again, from the brimmed hat he wore to the dirty trousers that covered his boots. He was olive-skinned and handsome in a brawny, blue-jawed sort of way, though he was coarsened noticeably by now, in the springtime of his fifth decade. The face was only warmed by deep grey eyes that reminded Adam of Robert's son.
(of course he does, they're related)
"I'm going in with a suspensor belt," said Robert, marking the places in the cave where he could climb up or down. "Get the Durant ready with lasers and a few telemetry probes and we'll be good for a first look."
There was a soft scuttling as the two miners released a couple of Durant from their poke balls and began fitting them with laser harnesses and cave flashlights. Robert walked from the mouth of the cave-in and knelt before a dusty old crate. He disengaged the palm lock and fished out a black girdle. Attached to it was a silver circle smeared by the patina of much use. Robert tied the crinkling, oil-slick belt around his waist and fit a breather plug over his mouth, then fixed a neoprene visor. He passed another belt to Adam and fit it for him; though Adam was their best climber and could find his way over a ravine in blind cave-darkness, he somehow remained ignorant about how to work the claps of the heavy belt when they were on his back.
"All secure, sir," one of the miners called.
Robert took a final breath of clean air and looked around him. Adam always felt unsettled when Robert was in this mood; it was as if he saw hidden things that others missed with a mysterious surety.
Waiting for the Durant to crawl down the cave slope to lead the way before him, Robert heard the portable fan in the room rattling busily (though it only served to move the dust around). In the primitive bathroom buried in a wall to the right, a rusty shower head dripped, and there seemed to be no way to stop it. (Adam finally put a towel under it to muffle the clockwork sound.) The glowglobe lamps flickered in a couple of places. The room's one picture—an unsettling composition depicting a sailing ship crewed entirely by grinning and possibly homicidal Rorian men—hung crooked. Every day Robert tried to straighten it, but it just fell slanted again.
"What's down there, can ya guess?" asked another miner.
"Something that will put a jam in this sorry business," said Robert, before jumping into the gloom.
He tapped the silver circle on the belt when he reached the peak of his leap, and felt the soft eeriness of the suspensor field anchoring him into a controlled fall, spreading from his center of mass and leaving his limbs free to work or grasp. He floated down like a falling leaf, the Durant moving around below, clacking their prehensile iron jaws as they embedded glowsticks into piles of loose rocks. Robert landed twenty feet below and deactivated the suspensor field with another tap at the girdle.
He looked twenty feet up to a portal of light where Adam stood silhouetted. A rope was thrown down, and Adam hovered down to the cave floor, his breath coming out as a rhythmic hiss through his mask and visor.
"We never work alone," he intoned. "Unless you want to get stuck down in the plug forever."
"Never so," answered Robert, reminding himself that Adam had the best cavern discipline of them all.
The light of the spotlights mounted on the Durant's back, the yellow luminance of suspensor lamps, and the lights shining from the brows of their neoprene helmets showed a bowl-shaped cave strewed with rubble. The northern end of the cave was obscured with a mound of pea-sized gravel that had settled between larger chunks of limestone. There was a faint popping sound as tongues of fire pulsed from their openings on the walls and floor.
"Clear out the north end," Robert said the Durant, speaking in a tone of command. The Durant turned to the north, and two thin streaks of bluish light strafed through the rocks with precise cuts, melting away stone and gravel as if some painter was brushing the limestone heap away.
"Anything now?" said Adam.
Robert brushed his gloved hand over a dry spiderweb of sandstone outlined against the darker rock. He felt tired, filled with the ache of not showing his fatigue. "I'm thinking it's something to do with the gas, but I can't imagine any natural blast making the rock collapse like it has. I've only seen this kind of wreckage with the demolition crews."
Adam grasped what he thought to be the hidden importance in Robert's words. "Was an explosive set off?"
"By who?" said Robert. "Not sabotage, or they would have blown out the whole network. Nor any of ours, for we hadn't dug any tunnels that way, by hell, not even boreholes."
"Perchance an Onix dug through close to the ground and the gas filled the tunnel left behind. It lit, and with a little extra space it made a bigger bang."
"There aren't Onix in these parts," said Robert quietly.
"No, there aren't."
Adam shuddered. The whole damn thing suddenly made him catch the willies.
Robert looked down at the blockage. The Durant had cut away a good chunk of it, exposing a small gap in the rock behind, a little lower than man-high, that led into black. The Durant entered, trailed by a series of hoverlamps.
"If we go in there, can we say that we acted cautiously?" asked Adam. Momentary tension showed itself in a tightening of his jaw.
"Of course," said Robert, "provided that all our equipment is in good working order. And Adam?"
"What?"
Robert laid a hand on Adam's shoulder. He forced himself to the casual gesture as his face twisted into a smile. A whole pattern of conversation welled up in his mind—the kind of thing he might use to dispel the vapors in his Pokemon before a battle. The pattern froze before it could be vocalized, confronted by the single thought that Adam needed to know. Robert then said a terrible thing.
"Guard your mind."
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He jumped over a smoldering fire and ducked to enter the hidden cave. It was a far smaller outcropping of the cave-in than the last one, filled mostly with a heavy clutter of dusty rocks. It was illuminated by their lights almost totally, yet a queer darkness seemed to creep along the corners and in the shadows. And faint but unmistakable, sending an impulse to freeze in place through Robert's nerves, was a muffled jangling that sounded like a madman rapping on an iron door.
Adam glanced at the Durant, hoping that the noise he heard above the noise of their breathing filters was only their legs and mandibles clicking together, but they were huddling together near the chamber's exit, shivering in what he took at first for cold and then for fear. Didn't Pokemon sense things that humans couldn't, know when there was some fundamental wrongness?
The frantic humming seemed to be coming from a large heap of rocks buried in a corner of the box-shaped chamber. As he bent over the pile with flashlight brandished, Robert found himself exerting all the force of his will—which was considerable—just to keep from fleeing. That sickening rapping and the occasional jangling chimes beneath it offended his ears and mind and heart. How slick the thing must be, he thought. A childish, whining though occurred to him. Surely it would look at him, whatever it was, and all the malevolent madness of the universe would be in in that disembodied, leering gaze.
I will not run. I will not. If Pokemon can stay, I can stay. Man must not be replaced.
(the mind of man is supreme)
He and Adam picked away at the rocks, giving each stone a wary glance before setting it aside. Robert paused to wipe a growing fog from his visor and failed. It was his own evaporating sweat. The droning song and the contrapuntal jangle of the chimes both increased. The sounds were like chilly fingers prying around in their heads.
"This isn't natural," gasped Adam, backing off from his work when the chimes seemed to reach a new threshold. "Leave it and we'll come back in the daytime."
"If I can stay, you can," said Robert, looking up at the other man. He must not push Adam too far, but a growing frustration with his own terror was souring his mood. "By the Original One and His Son, I'm as pale as you are. Get back here and dig. Do it till your fingers are nubbins."
"What if it wants to be found?"
"What wants to be found?"
Adam hissed in air and stared out the room's doorlike entrance, unable to answer. After ten seconds he tried to turn back but found himself unable. A curious thought arose: Robert might be crouching behind him. Perhaps he would leap on Adam when he turned. Perhaps he would jump on Adam from behind. Perhaps he should see a figure that looked like Robert standing with its back to him and when he spoke to it, it would turn round and show a face that was not human at all...
He finally turned around and eased back to clearing away the rocks. Robert knelt before the dwindling heap like a worshipper at an altar. Adam felt a suddenly compulsion to stop him, and reached out with an arm suddenly cumbersome and heavy.
It doesn't matter if you do or don't, a voice whispered in his mind. It was sleep-inducing, that voice, and incredibly persuasive. Nonetheless, Adam kept reaching. He grasped Robert's suit collar with fingers from which all feeling seemed to have departed.
"No," he said. "Don't." His voice sounded draggy, dispirited, depressed. When he pulled Robert to one side, the man seemed to go as if in slow motion, or underwater. The room now seemed lit by the glowglobe's sick yellow light that sometimes falls over a landscape before a ruinous storm. As Adam fell onto his own knees before the object Robert had uncovered (he seemed to descend through the air for at least a full minute before touching down), he heard the voice, louder than ever. It was telling him to kill Robert, to open the man's throat and give the object a refreshing drink of his warm life's blood. Then Adam himself would be allowed to end his own life.
All the way down to the House Below you will praise me, the voice assured him in a voice both sane and lucid.
"Do it," a voice inside him said, the voice that wise men call the voluble self. "Oh yes, do it, who gives a damn."
While you die, I'll let you whisper my name, the voice whispered. The Great Djinn.
Robert could never recall how he covered up the object with a burlap bag he used to store samples. Somehow or other, despite the loathing and dismay that pulled him back and a sort of invisible wall of resistance that met him in the face, fighting for each movement, he managed it. He could not even remember what it was. The glowglobes flickered. The thing under the bag raised the volume of its idiot's song, and the tips of his fingers twitched in response. Then they stilled again. That was a small victory, but he knew that it was trying to get him to uncover it.
Hopeless, the voice said. Even the Durant were giving in, their red eyes glazing to a blue-color like liquid oxygen, a total saturation with no white or crimson.
As he had struggled to still his hands, so Robert Tercano of the line of Logaria now struggled to pray.
Arceus, not my will but Thine. Not the potter but the potter's clay. If I can't do anything else, help me to take it in my arms and squeeze and destroy the gods-damned thing once and for all. But if it be Your will to help me make it still, instead—to make it go back to sleep—then send me Your strength.
Drugged by the demonic relic, he might have been, but Adam still hadn't lost his touch. Now he plucked the rest of the prayer out of Robert's mind and spoke it aloud also.
"I stand," said Adam, "I stand with thee. I stand, and I need no other."
"Arceus," said Robert. The word was as heavy as a stone, but once it was out of his mouth, the rest of them came easier. "Arceus, if You're still there, if You still hear me, this is Robert of the line of Logaria. Please still this thing, Lord. Please send it back to sleep. I ask it in the name of the Original One the Father, Arceus the Son, and the Third One. I ask in the name of the White."
"Amen," said Adam in a sluggish, bemused voice.
For a moment the droning idiot's song from under the bag rose another notch, and Robert understood it was hopeless, that not even Arceus Almighty could stand against the ancient evil he had uncovered.
Then it fell silent.
"God be thanked," he whispered, and realized his entire body was drenched with sweat.
"Will it stay asleep?" asked Adam. "Say it's so! That was too close for comfort."
"I guess it will," said Robert. He took off his gloves to tie a knot of twine over the bag's opening, then picked it up and peeked through a small hole in the lining, seeing only the glint of glowglobe light reflecting off the surface of a concealed object. Its color was a leperous white. The sack was heavy, and he systematically probed with his fingers around the item within till he guessed it was made of some kind of porcelain, though colder than any porcelain he had felt. There was a jagged dissonance buried in the quiet hum, like bits of broken glass. There was a nasty flickering purple glare in its hot heart, some cold light that did not belong there. A strong chill moved from the outer surface of the artifact and into his fingers, piercing the burlap lining and going straight into his finger's bones. He put on his gloves.
"What'll we do with it?" asked Adam.
"It wants to be found, you guessed true," said Robert. "And it will be found if we don't take it. Better it stays with a praying man. I'll keep it locked somewhere and pray to Arceus that it stays sleeping, though all our walking or climbing might wake it up again." Robert darted a hard stare at Adam. "You tell no one about this, not to your wife or children or Pokemon or potted houseplants. We don't want to start a panic."
"I won't say a word, Robert."
"Swear on it."
"By my watch and warrant and all the holy saints."
Robert nodded and read Adam's person with his usual hyperawareness. He had observed everything about Adam over the months—his tone of voice, set of facial muscles, his culture and psychic weaknesses. In time his son Bronze would learn the art, and Lily was a better teacher at the mental arts than he. Adam's signs were obvious enough to show that he wasn't lying; perhaps he was scared into silence, or could be bought. The secret was safe.
"Then we leave and make our peace."
(look again)
Obeying this prompting that came from a sense beyond even his primitive herd instinct, Robert turned back to the mound of scattered rocks and caught a glimpse of sudden shine. When he bent down to look again, he saw everything that mattered.
"Oh my Lord," Adam sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.
In the glint of the light Robert saw the vast, accretive weight of smallness, from planes which hadn't crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that were not random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness.
He saw a man kneeling before a party of robed figures on a seashore, thanking them for their kindness; he saw the figures giving it back freely. He saw Arceus Himself in the burning folds of the refracted light and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time's great helix. And the quiet, singing voice of the shining talisman. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.
Robert picked the shining object up and held it in the palm of his glove. It was a boxy rectangle the length of his little finger, perfectly plain and featureless, made from bronze or alchemical brass. He put it in one of his pockets and stowed the burlap sack under his arm, knowing that he was chosen, that God was speaking to him, that Arceus was moving in his life. This manifested in a breathless thrill that kept his tongue locked.
"I'll keep this safe," said Robert. "Keep it and then protect it. This relic, this brick, this is what holds everything together. It's what will help us. Do you feel it?"
(keep it secret keep it safe)
"I feel it," said Adam. "Feel it well."
Robert closed his fist on the brick, and the feeling of its sharp edges against his hands was oddly comforting, as if he was touching something precious, very precious.
This is your promise that things may be different, Robert Tercano, chief of the line of Logaria—that there may yet be the return of the king. Even of the old empire.
A pause, and then:
If your son stands. If he stands true.
Robert shook his head to clear it, thought of taking a sip of water from the mouthtube inside his visor, and dismissed the idea. He was not thirsty enough to use up his water ration: cave discipline. He would drink later. As for now, he would return to the others. They would ask him questions, and when they did, he would tell a tale; he would be asked and he would talk. Sometimes we must speak other than we think.
Time to get moving.
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Four months later
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Part I
The Hearth and the Tinder
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"The shadow of that hideous strength,
waxes long and more it is of length"
(Sir David Lyndsay: from Ane Dialog, describing the Tower of Babel)
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The sun rose, having no alternative, onto nothing new. However, the world was currently in the grip of several processes, which afterward came to seem important, and that were all steadily going on. The majority of these processes involved Bronze Tercano.
Bronze had fallen asleep into a dream of a cavern, silent people all around him moving in the dim light of glowglobes. It was solemn there and like a cathedral. Even while he remained in the dream, Bronze knew he would remember it upon awakening. He always remembered the dreams that were genetic prophecies.
He remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after he had awoken in the middle of the night and kept very still. He was an excellent sleeper. Only a few things ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterward.
He had begun by dreaming simply of a face. It was a feminine-looking face, clean-shaven and rather pale, with a sharp nose. The face had very straight and black hair that flowed over its back and shoulders like little dark waterfalls. Its expression was frightening because it was cruel. The mouth sagged open and the eyes stared as he had seen other men's eyes stare for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually Bronze became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting ramrod straight in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls; waiting, Bronze thought, for those under his power, so that he could do something horrible to them. At last the door was opened and a rather good-looking man with a cloak on came in. The first man seemed to recognize him as an old acquaintance and they sat down together, smiling, and began to talk.
In all the dreams which Bronze had recently dreamed, one either understood what the dream-people were saying or else one did not hear it. But in this dream, and that helped to make its extraordinary realism, the conversation was in a kind of coded language, and Bronze understood bits of it, but by no means all, just as he would have done in real life.
The visitor was telling the man something which he apparently intended him to regard as good news. And the cruel man at first looked up with a gleam of hope in his eye and said something unintelligible, but then he wavered and changed his mind. The visitor continued in a low, fluent voice to press his point. He was a good-looking man in his rather cold way, but he wore a strange hood and the upper folds kept on going over his eyebrows so as to make his eyes and parts of his face invisible. This, combined with the almost unnatural perfection of his teeth, somehow gave Bronze a disagreeable impression.
And this was increased by the growing distress, and finally anger, of the first man. Bronze could not make out what it was that the visitor was proposing to him, but he soon figured out that the bid agreed on before the new scheme was the hijacking of some vehicle. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that angered him more than that. At this point the dream abandoned all pretence to realism and became an ordinary nightmare. The visitor, adjusting his hood and still smiling his cold smile, seized the other man's head between his two hands. He gave it a sharp turn; just as Bronze had last summer seen a Rowlet turn its head all the way around. The visitor unscrewed the first man's head and took it away. Then all became confused.
A strange man was still the center of the dream but it was quite a different head now: a handsome face all covered with earth. It belonged to a young man whom some people were digging up in a kind of churchyard. Bronze recognized it as an ancient Hisuian-looking man, with Hisuian clothes and a dagger in a sheath tied to his side. Bronze didn't mind this much at first because he thought it was a corpse. Then suddenly he noticed that this ancient thing was coming to life
"Look out!" he cried in his dream. "He's alive. Stop! Stop! You're waking him."
But they did not stop. The young man sat up and began talking in something that sounded vaguely like Old Hisuian. He locked eyes with Bronze and pointed at him, now shouting louder and louder. "Hide it, you fool, hide the Brick! He wants it but he must not get it. Hide it! Hide the Brick!"
The dream faded.
Bronze awoke to feel himself in the warmth of his bed, thinking, thinking. This world of Mitis Town, without play or many companions his own age, perhaps did not deserve sadness in farewell. His mother had hinted that wild adventures waited in the north of Roria. There were Pokemon, and great perils, and deadly trials to toughen men. But was he not already tough? He had progressed through training over many years, and had reached perhaps the fifth level of the Logarian battle arts.
Bronze sensed his own tensions. Over and over and over within his floating awareness the dream rolled. When dawn touched Bronze's window sill with yellow light, he sensed it through closed eyelids, opened them, hearing then the renewed bustle and hurry in the house, seeing the familiar patterned beams of his bedroom ceiling.
The hall door opened and his mother peered in, hair like shaded bronze falling straight to her shoulders, her face emotionless and green eyes staring solemnly.
"You're awake," she said. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes."
He studied the tallness of Lily Tercano, saw the hint of tension in her shoulders as she chose clothing for him from the closet racks. Another might have missed the tenseness, but she and Robert and trained him in the minute of observation. She turned, holding a semiformal jacket for him. It carried a woven red lion above the breast pocket.
Bronze rolled out of bed sharply and stood up. "Here I am, waiting about, starting to waste another morning. I must do some work before I leave."
"So you're troubled?" said Lily.
"Everything is troubled," said Bronze.
"Is Arceus troubled?" his mother asked.
"The sins of this world would trouble anyone."
Lily glanced at the door, then back to Bronze. "What did you dream last night? Was it worth remembering?"
"Yes." Bronze closed his eyes. "I dreamed a cavern...and a man in a room. A very skinny man with black hair. He was talking to another man in a room that was painted all white. It terrified me. The whole thing has a stamp of strangeness on it. Magic, I guess."
"Was there anything else?"
"That's funny," said Bronze. "There was some Hisuian man that I thought I had seen before, in a painting or picture. He was wearing a dagger. This young man was very insistent. He kept pointing at me, saying that I had to hide it, or—" He looked at Lily. "Saying Hide the Brick, you hear."
"Magic indeed!" said Lily involuntarily. "I had a similar dream. The Hisuian man said that I should give a brick to you."
"So what does this mean?"
Lily looked in amazement at Bronze's face. "It's not right for mother and son to go around sharing dreams at this hour. I hate to shoulder this aside, but we are going to run late if we don't go. We can psychoanalyze this later."
That was the dream, no worse, if also no better, than many another nightmare. He believed that if he got out all his notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, he could force himself back into his lost enthusiasm for the dream and unravel it before he had to leave at nine. But then his father walked in and shut the door. As always, Bronze experienced a sense of presence in his father, someone totally here.
...
"Hard at work, son?" said Robert. Bronze looked at at the dark skin that made him think of olive groves and golden sun on blue waters. There was woodsmoke in the gray of his eyes, but the face was rough and predatory: full of hard angles and planes.
"Not hard," said Bronze. "Today's so..." He shrugged.
"Yes. Well, in two days you leave. It'll be good to get on the road, put all this upset behind."
"Father," said Bronze, "will the north be as dangerous as everyone says?"
"It'll be dangerous," Robert admitted. "You've grown up in the temperate south, Bronze. But as you go to the tropics, well...outside the cities and walled towns, Roria is as dangerous as an anarchic state. You know the Pokemon Association's policy for governing our region: spread resources as thinly as possible while maintaining a stable population. You hear an occasional muttering about how badly we're treated compared to other regions, but the balance of our civilization remains the same: the military forces of the Association on one side, the Corporate Alliance and their supporting mercenary levies, and the League's Gym Leaders as the last leg of the tripod."
"I've heard some rumors that the Aredian deserts are as barren as the moon!"
"Undoubtedly. But humans and Pokemon live there, Bronze. If you were going to raise tough, strong, ferocious men, what environmental conditions would you impose on them? The Aredians, the desert-men, the will-o-the-wisps that pay no taxes and would kill any Associaton bureaucrat that ordered them to submit...that is the spirit of Roria! Our people survive on the certain knowledge of our superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It has been done in many regions in many times."
Bronze nodded, holding his attention on his father's face. He felt some revelation impending.
"If the Plan is to work, Bronze, you'll have to win Aredians and common Rorians over to your side. It'll require patience to use them secretly and wealth to equip them properly. But it can be done. That is why I am sending my only son on a deadly quest."
"But it may not be so deadly after all," said Lily. "We've been negotiating with Cypress for a long time. If he stays on our side, we've taken care of the Association's scientific elite."
"A proud and ruthless man, Cypress, but fond of cutting to the truth," said Robert. "I think many could admire him, but I don't. If we're lucky, our enemies may judge us not by him, but by you, Bronze: Bronze, the moral."
"Bronze, the moral," said Bronze, "and Robert and Lily, the valorous."
"You name well," said Lily, smiling.
"Adam tells me you did well in weapons yesterday," said Robert, moving to a lighter topic.
"That isn't what he told me."
Robert laughed aloud. "I figured Kynes to be sparse with his praise. He says you have a nicety of awareness, in his own words, of the difference between a blade's edge and its tip. Or a Pokemon's physical and mental attacks."
"Adam says there's no artistry in killing with the tip, that it should be done with the edge."
"Adam's a romantic," Robert growled. This talk of killing suddenly disturbed him, coming from his son. "I'd sooner you never had to kill...but if the need arises, you do it however you can: blade or Pokemon." He looked up at the window, through which the first morning rays emitted.
"And here we are standing around," he murmured. "There's still time to walk, though you'll have to go without eating breakfast."
"There are eggs downstairs, Robert," said Lily. "It seems to be a female thing, thinking ahead about such needs."
He smiled. "You must teach me someday how you do that," he said, "the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters. Perhaps it is a Hisuian thing."
"Can't I go and get Jake?" said Bronze, putting on his vest. The red lion wrinkled in its fabric as he moved to the door. "He'll want to talk to me about Cypress."
"You'll get that poor boy killed," said Lily. "I indulge you most shamefully in many things, but this is not one of them. You know that the world you are entering is infested with Association intrigues. You can't win the Pokemon League and do what you plan to do without making a few dark choices."
"Bring Jake," said Robert suddenly. "I'll allow that."
"But Robert!"
"Let Bronze fetch him." The words rang flat and final, telling her she could use trickery to persuade, but open argument was useless. "The choice is between Jake's dignity and your instincts. The other boy will feel as though he has missed a great thing. Bronze may frighten Jake all he likes with warnings about the north, but Jake will dare to hope of coming along, or wish he dared. Don't let a woman's fears cloud your mind. No wife wants her loved ones endangered. I'll take your concern about Jake as a sign of your love for Bronze's friend."
The truth could be worse than he imagined, thought Robert, remembering the demonic relic that had been uncovered
(unveiled)
by the cave-in, but even dangerous facts are valuable if you've been trained to deal with them. And there's one place where nothing has been spared for my son: dealing with dangerous facts. This must be leavened, though; he is young.
Unless the creeping danger consumed them first. What dark beast awaited its birth?
"If we stand, you could be the new Emperor someday, son," his father said. "Such a Logarian would be formidable indeed. Can you decide now to go, or do you need more time to weigh the decision of bringing Jake into our next counsels?"
There was no hesitation in his answer. "I'll go on and bring him."
"Formidable indeed," Robert grunted, and Bronze saw the proud smile on his father's face. The smile shocked him: it had a ruthless look on Robert's scarred features. Bronze closed his eyes, feeling the memory of the dream reawaken with him.
Perhaps the dream means something huge, after all.
But even as he focused on this thought, his voluble self denied it.
...
When Bronze left to find Jake, his mind was filled with so many matters that he did not notice at all the morning beauty of the little street that led him from the woody hillside suburb where he lived down into the central and lightly populated part of Mitis Town.
Though my present conditions as I write this far surpass it, and Jubilife City is also splendid, I think Mitis Town where I was reared is the most beautiful place on Earth. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or poke balls or marmalades has yet come to industrialize the country town which is the setting of the Professor's laboratory, and the laboratory is also tiny. It was founded by a fellowship of Rorians sixty years back to research things like the sociology of Pokemon and to pray for the soul of the town. Now it was the official laboratory of Jonathan Rowell Cypress, the Rorian Professor of Pokemon and Sirdar Administrator, and he had perhaps forty attendants, few of which, if any, prayed anymore.
Bronze himself knew Cypress. The new professor was just beginning to find his feet in the town, though he never got out much. He was a forty-year-old fellow who looked half his age. Men whispered of life-extension treatments or sorcery. Bronze did not believe that either was the cause for Cypress's seemingly perpetual youth, though he was beginning to wonder. The man's raven locks and cold face had not changed in over two decades, if pictures were anything to go by. He and Bronze had become acquaintances over the past several months; not friends, certainly. Cypress treated Bronze with all the respect the boy thought he deserved, and so they enjoyed each other's company whenever they talked about whatever was on their minds.
Cypress had caused a minor stir in the scientific world when he was appointed Rorian Professor. He had been a physicist and discovered extrauniversal energies before catching the eye of Samuel Oak, Kantoian Professor. The Rorian Chairman, beloved to the people about as much as a bad bout of cold, favored Cypress as well. They were both part of the "progressive element" in Rorian politics. Yanase Berlitz, the head of an old and wealthy family, and one Professor Rowan of Sinnoh had protested, but Oak had stood by his decision.
"He'll be a hell of an administrator," Oak told the Chairman. "He works all day long, even during dinner. We shall have all the obstructionists wasting time as hard as they can. But luckily that's the worst they can do."
Bronze was going down his favorite walk, or he took it often so he must have favored it. The official start, official for him, was a short and for some reason permanently muddy lane leading down from the back of a sweet-store, passing through a gateway and straggling off to a small stand of oaks and beyond that to the unfettered countryside. The five-barred gate itself, worn by wind and rain to a delicate filigree, the rust seeming of a dusting of roughly ground cinnamon.
It does open, but he preferred to climb it, enjoying the way it wobbled under him in panic, clanging and chattering. The action of throwing his leg over the topmost bar caused him to rotate a smart half-turn. Perched there, he imagined himself a dauntless sailor breezily aloft in the swaying crow's nest of a square-rigged carrack out on the bounding main. A boy will be a boy, you see, even this one.
Immediately beyond the gate was a slanted field traversed by a broad, flat grassy bank, man-made but to no known purpose. On it stood three noble beeches, beeches, set in a line and spaced an equal distance from each other, evidence again of human agency, and not the random plantings of some Phantump forest spirit. Perhaps it was the site of some rustic ritual of yore, recalled from years long ago in the darkness before the Logarians came, featuring bards and music, and maidens and blossoms, and bearded moot-chieftains with their weed hats capering the clumsy steps of an old-time dance and shaking aloft his long wooden stick that bristled with talismans. Or, less fancifully, they may have been planted there by some long-forgotten tribe to establish a boundary or to honor some woodland Pokemon.
He reached Jake's house by nine. There were two means of ingress. The main gate opened onto a short drive that ran between two rows of full-grown lime trees straight up to the house. This he avoided, and instead turned and drove on along the road that follows the curve of an old demesne wall. After a distance of a couple of leagues or so came to a right-hand bend, in the angle of which, to the left, was a leafy nook where stood a narrow grey-stone arch enclosing something like lychgate, hidden from the road in a tangle of brambles and overlapped by a gnarled hawthorn bush. Here he walked up. A breeze drowsily tousled the spiked and shinily dark leaves of the hawthorn. The sunlight here seemed vaguer, hazier. No bird sang.
He found himself meeting Jake just outside the lychgate. Jake's eyes were two pools of alertness in a deeply pale face, a silent figure in patched leather trousers and a green cotton shirt that had been cinched high with his old, wide infantry belt. He walked down to Bronze with quick, tremulous footsteps, as if afraid that a bludgeon would come flying through the air at any moment and bash in his head. In that posture the boy seemed small for the fifteen years Bronze knew him to have. It seemed natural that they should walk together and talk over the daily agenda, and the long-term Plan.
In the view of eternity, all long-terms are short-terms, thought Bronze.
"You still think we'll go through with it?" Jake said as they went further east on the road leading from the main gate. "Or at least, they'll go through with it? But it's the only way, right?"
"Sure it is," said Bronze. "And sure they will. It's always been needed. Once I have the Pokedex, I've got the Professor, the bursar of the laboratory funds, and all the chemical and bio-chemical people on my side for a start. You know that my parents and the archeological workers will support us. Adam's a family friend, and I believe that he sees the point in the Plan and that he's in favor of it; your mother will probably do something pretty devastating but she's bound to side with us if it comes to a point. Besides, I haven't yet told you. We're going to be getting some new Pokemon. Cypress came down to get something at the post office after lunch yesterday, brought some poke balls to the laboratory, and got busy at once."
Months ago Cypress had seen the main chance of giving Bronze a Pokedex. The Rorian Chairman would give him funds and personnel for its manufacture...a subtle gain for the professor. But the Pokedex was Bronze's avenue into the Association leadership, to make them know that he was a presence. The whole ceremony would have no cameras or watchcams, yet the Association elites would mark him. It was an increase for his small voice. The other Pokedex Holders would know. There was more to holding the Pokedex than politics, of course, but tireless negotiating over the last year by Cypress and the Tercanos had ensured that the right people believed in Bronze's quality enough to have him land the privilege.
"I'd not want to go north with you," said Jake.
"That is wise," said Bronze simply.
"It's a whole other world up there," Jake murmured. And then, after a pause, "By the way, I suppose Cypress's own position is secure?"
"What do you mean?" said Bronze.
"Well, there was some talk, if you remember, as to whether someone who was of such disrepute in all the circles he entered formally could go holding the title of Rorian Pokemon Professor very long."
"Nothing will come of that. Cypress is too handy for the higher-ups to get sacked this early. Cypress is my gateway to the Pokedex, but I can't have him discrediting himself. My parents made that calculation long ago. But I confess if I were put up to explain in public exactly why a man who is nearly always away from his laboratory, going on some errand who-knows-where, should go on being a Sirdar Professor of Pokemon, I shouldn't find it altogether easy. The real reasons are the sort that you would call imponderables."
"I don't agree. Why would anyone have an objection to explaining the real reasons in public? Isn't it important for a man like him to have influential connections with the outer world?"
"Yes. Of course, that's the real point. It would be a little difficult to put in that form at an Association meeting, though!"
Then Bronze laughed. "Ah, now, Jake: we see the danger, now. Who knows where it might be shifted next? If Cypress is removed or falls out of our side, it'd only create a great cloud of confusion. We'd lose our link to the Association. I need connections to ensure the elite remains intact when I assume power."
"So if you become League Champion," said Jake, "that gives you a fortune and a position to rally the people around. You want them to see you as their voice."
"I've lived with Rorians my whole life and they'll trust me over some foreign Association," said Bronze. "My people are looking for official leadership. Suppose I can be a native Rorian ruler. In that case, I'll have the resources I need to repair this abused continent: the failing economy, the ruined military, the declining church, and the spread of cynicism could all be repaired or stopped. But if I slip up and get in the way of the government before I become popular enough to resist them...well, the police turn a blind eye to whatever happened to me."
A strong gust of wind brought Bronze's awareness back to the dirt path they were treading. There was no cloud in the sky and the road was overhung by fir trees. To the east the southernmost slopes of the Frostveil Mountains shone redly before branching into foothills. In the west lay the rest of town and unpopulated forest. The smell of hedges and growing green was sweet. It was deep spring in the southern hemisphere, what some orthodox Rorians called New Earth.
"Yes," said Bronze. "I owe Cypress for this opportunity. Some boy named Nefud was actually my chief rival in the selection, my father tells me. Between ourselves, a good many people liked his attributes better than mine. It was Cypress who insisted all through that I was the sort of boy they really wanted. He went around to my parents and ferreted out all about me and you. He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of boy we need, and be damned to paper qualifications. And I must say he turned out to be right." He made a mock little bow.
Jake felt a curious sensation, the feeling that comes upon a man when he realizes his father very nearly married a different woman than his mother. He had thought so long that Bronze would be the right pick for any sort of position, fighting/training/philosophic, that Bronze admitting this almost shocked him.
Bronze marked the lines on the other's face harden, perceiving the conflict of thoughts. He thinks too much of me, he thought. He has no idea what things I lack.
"But you aren't doing this just to be a Rorian nationalist," said Jake presently. "Or to kick out the foreign Association."
"No," said Bronze softly. He ran his hand over a crumbling stone wall that bordered a sharp bend on the path. "I never was."
There was no denying that the things Jake occasionally suggested did go to the root of the matter every so often. Bronze, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Jake had the wrong point of view about many things, he gave hard wisdom, answers from deep earth that Bronze's intellectual bent sometimes skirted around.
I'd see a field and think of the collective energy that went into planting it, thought Bronze. He'd see it and call it a field.
Soon they emerged from the shadow of the line of trees that were around them and stepped into a remembered narrow lane overhung on both sides by jostling hedges of hawthorn, and wild woodbine, trembling fuchsia, and many other bushes and shrubs and so on. Jake felt that he should know the names of them but didn't, all in blossom and bursting to be. One of its routes led to the town outskirts; when he was younger he'd often go down this path at night, or dare himself to do it, despite the fact that he never felt at ease there; something about the disorder of the hedges and walls, or the menacing arch of the trees always made him think that he was dragging himself toward someplace haunted.
"Cypress is one of the villains in this whole piece," said Bronze. "I'll have to take a deeper look at him one day. As radical an atheist I've ever met but the most enjoyable to debate."
"I was thinking that your parents where trying to use Cypress to make the Plan work," said Jake, "but it was Cypress moving the chessboard all along. I wonder what he wants. Doesn't he go around your father's dig site every once in a while? Your dad never tells me anything about archeological business."
"Most good fathers never should," said Bronze. "At least, only about the business of this father." He remembered that in his haste he had eaten no breakfast. "We ought to go faster. Maybe Cypress will have some food."
"Bread and water," said Jake. "That's all I've seen him eat."
"Even Adam eats more than Cypress," said Bronze, thinking of his weapons master's military habits, and the traditional Rorian roughness, of living off what Arceus provided.
"That man's insane," said Jake, swallowing in a throat suddenly dry. "I practiced shooting targets with you once and he hit me for every shot I missed. I was eight, maybe. Then when I started crying he ordered me to cut my shit and leave. If I have to look at your stupid maggot face any longer I'll puke my guts and lose a good dinner." Jake grinned suddenly, his smile looking ragged, furious. "Every time I tried to practice with you, he beat me up. Kill that son of a bitch for me, would you?"
"He was my father's chief cavemaster, Jake," said Bronze, suddenly bursting into his own grin. "I won't kill him and neither will you. He's a hired trainer working for the cause, but I'd think of him as a friend who teaches hard lessons."
"Lots of hard lessons, eh?"
"Don't feel ungrateful for the character he's given you," said Bronze. "In every government, the elite must be rural and have a warrior/aristocratic component. They must not be disconnected from the hard lives of the workers. Shooting practice, Pokemon training, and horseback riding all serve to remind a noble that pain is real."
Those were an extrapolation of Adam's words. Bronze doubted that Kynes had intended for a moral when saying that he needed to be toughed up, for he was not a moralistic man; but Bronze had a habit of making his own meanings.
"Didn't he catch you asleep last week at your lasgun practice?" Jake asked.
"He did. In my defense, it was one in the morning. Lasguns are complicated to maintain and I dozed off while repairing one. My punishment was sufficiently embarrassing that I won't bother recounting it."
Bronze grinned inwardly. Of all his father's friends, he liked Adam Kynes best, knew the man's moods and deviltry, his humor, and had learned that his rough talk was a sign of love. The blows, however burningly furious they made him feel, were also to be appreciated. Though Jake had no commission to be trained in the deadly arts, he had learned some from Bronze safely out of Lily's eye; but he could never bear it when Adam passed him a barb. Sometimes he snuck away from the training times he had gotten mixed up in, then made for home like a man running to his enemy's funeral.
"He hasn't given you a Pokemon?"
"Never that. And I never liked fighting with them, anyway. It's cowardly and makes me feel like I'm hiding behind those I love. Better humans fight humans with bolt or blade."
"Strange talk for someone taking on the new League," said Jake.
"We'll have to do hard things, even if we don't feel like it."
Despite all abuses to his principles, Bronze would endure the training. Adam's depredations in blade and gun practice were part of the enormous responsibility his person bore. It was necessary that his body should be spooled up into prime condition for what he was about to do. He felt some contempt that himself, the heir to Logaria should dare be treated so; the day was coming when Adam and all his father's men would serve him. If Jake had been in his place, it would have been so; perhaps Jake would have buckled under Adam's steady fire. Bronze Tercano, Heir to Logaria, Offspring of Tar-Elrosi, and Lord of the Ancient Lands, would not. He knew it. He was for the open lands and long fields. That this seemed a good fate was something he would marvel over later, in his solitude.
Jake was right. I do this not only for a nation but also for my cell-stamped ancestors. I am the heir to Logaria.
...
They walked south, moving along the bank of the Windy River, past some cottages, then left and eastward at the Arcean church and down the straight road with poplars on one side and the wall of a tangled wood on the other, and so finally down to the gravel drive that led to Cypress's laboratory.
During the whole rest of the walk Bronze talked about the ancient Hisuian and Logarian legends to Jake. "It's really marvellous," he said, "how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like the one we have now. You've noticed how there are two sets of characters in the old myths? There's Rei Berlitz and Adaman the Great and all those people in the center: all very courtly and nothing particularly rough-and-tumble, well, Rorian about them. But then in the background, on the other side of the Hisuians, so to speak, there are all those Logarian people like Berothrim and Targon, who are very Rorian indeed and usually more or less hostile at all times to some creature or person."
"Like the modern Aredians in the deserts?"
"Oh yes. The old Aredians that we meet in the Legends of Arceus are very different from the ones we have today; they were royal. Now? A man's flesh belongs to the tribe and they make poems to their guns. And all of the epic cyle is mixed up with magic. You remember that odd moment, how the Emperor Adunakor set his mind ablaze with visions from the Red and Blue Orbs? It feels all very ancient but mixed."
"What do you mean, mixed?" Jake asked.
"Well, wouldn't there have been one section of ancient Logarian society that was purely Arcean? People wearing old robes and talking something that would sound to us rather like modern Logarian: and fully Arceus-worshipping. Yet there are some pagan elements. Further down country, in the out-of-the-way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old primitive Rorian under-kings, speaking unlike what we have now, and practicing a certain amount of Pokemon-worshipping religion, removed from the beneficial influence of the Logarians."
"And when the Hisuians mixed with the Logarians, the conversion of the rest of the continent would have gone on even faster," said Jake. "Some Hisuians would have been missionaries, living with tribes of three hundred or a thousand people far south from the civilized equator, buried wearing their daggers at their sides."
"Then the proselytization of the region would have been complete, of course," said Bronze, speaking a little quickly. He was ashamed that his heart should have skipped a beat when Jake said "buried wearing daggers at their sides."
"What has happened to the world, then?"
"I don't know," said Bronze. "Maybe the planet is just moving on from one cycle to the next. Or maybe the end times are getting close. But the point isn't to worry about what we've got. It's to see if the decline of our world can be stopped, maybe even turned back. That's the whole business of the Plan."
Only a few more days here, he thought. Soon I'm leaving.
The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the Lily had said about a world being the sum of many things. These things, he presumed, were the ones that were truly eterna: the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns; not the physical bodies that lived and died, but the essence-aspect. It was the unknown sum called Creation, a vague summation without much reference.
"There was a dream I had last night," said Jake absently, as if he was looking not at the road ahead but to some distant planet. Bronze had noticed these moments happening more often. The last weeks he had dismissed them as mental noise, but after his own dreams he had begun to wonder. "And it was about a girl."
"Oh? Well, that's quite common for men our age. You know her?"
"No." Jake stopped and closed his eyes. "We're on a cliff by the seaside, but the sky above us is sheltered. It's almost night, but it's hot and I can feel the sea breeze. We're waiting for something. And she's frightened but trying to hide it from me, and I'm excited. And she says something about southern Roria. I've never heard anyone with an accent like hers."
"Is there more to this dream?" Bronze prompted. "I think it's just deferred energies. Either dreams mean something or they mean nothing."
"Yes, maybe," said Jake. "She asks me something about Cypress. I say that he's a strange man and I take her hand. And I say I'll tell her a poem that you (I said Bronze) taught me. And I tell her the poem, but I have to explain some of the words - like ghazi and Southernesse and City of Caves."
"What poem?" Bronze asked.
Jake opened his eyes. "It was called the Logarian Aurangzeb," he said. "If you know it, you'll say it better than me."
Bronze took an inward breath and began to recite. The language was in Old Logarian but the tune was modern.
...
"You are the light of Southernesse, you are radiant,
O King, oh Tar-Emperor, o generous one, o guardian,
Welcome, welcome Shahanshah and Padishash!
There is no god but ARCS, may his glory be glorified.
I am become a Rorian wanderer for Arceus
Having joined battle with infidels and pagans
I readied myself to become a martyr,
God be thanked I am become a ghazi.
Hail to my soul, for within the country of Logaria,
I speak the valuable tongue of the Southlands.
Again today, my heart yearns for the City of Caves
It cuts off the root of blasphemy and goes towards faith,
The flower of the heart does not bloom in the garden of foreign lands
The King instead flies away, going toward the realm of Logaria."
...
"That's the one," said Jake. He fell silent then and Bronze saw that he wanted him to speak. He had his own thoughts, and by the time he had waited Jake out they were at the laboratory grounds.
Cypress managed his business really very well in the space that was given to him. Most of his assistants did not know when they came into the laboratory that there was any question of Cypress's sacking when they saw his productive output. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that item Fifteen was "Employer/Employee Competency Overview" but as that appeared at almost every Association meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand, they did see that item One was, "Questions about the Professor." These were not concerned with the proposed sacking but rather Cypress's beliefs.
It is good enough evidence that the Arcean clergy uncovered most of Cypress's occult murmurings, putting out a paper that said, closely enough, that the professor should be sacked and the laboratory redone, "for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, may games, dancings, mummings, and thoughts of Pokemon-worship, heretofore used about the man called Jonathan Rowell Cypress, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufry of shamanism, gentilism, lewdness, and paganistic folly."
Not that the Association had renounced its own interest in the place. They hardly heeded the Arcean church, putting down the local protests to destroy "progressive and occultist" thoughts among the "the groves and the high places." Bronze remembered that they even sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people and protect Cypress's stately work from the mobs of religious.
The scheme among the church leaders came to nothing in the end; but there had been a bicker between the Rorians and the Association troops in the very heart of Mitis Town a month ago. Armed forces had escorted away the fabulously learned and saintly Mr. Ashish Crow, and a Skarmory's steel feather had scraped another Jacobson. Bronze knew it would take a brave man who could accuse Cypress either of shamanism or "gentilism" (though he understood the man's fascination with spiritual mysticism); yet the story is that Crow's last words before being shackled and spending a night in a holding cell were "If that pagan Cypress is a true Chairman's man, then what does that make you, who are only sons of bitches?"
Very few people were allowed into the laboratory. The gate was by and large the only entry: a high wall enclosed the place, the property of which was perhaps a quarter of a mile broad and a mile from east to west. If you came in from the street and went through the town to reach it, the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the road which is dry and gravelly; the forest, florid, but beautiful; antique buildings in the Logaria look down on it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage under the trees, nearly dark at midday.
When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the property proper: in the midst of the much larger rectangle of the Association-owned land. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of the tunnel and the white stone of the laboratory's exterior baseboards which rise from the part of it that borders the ground gives the impression of being soft and alive. Bronze noticed his father's hovercar parked by the road and guessed they had already gotten here.
The Arcean church is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead in the south. You went along this path from the gate to the sliding doors, past slabs and urns and busts that Cypress had installed in the front yard to commemorate dead scientists, and then up shallow steps into the full air-conditioned paradise called the laboratory.
There were a few consoles; humble, almost domestic in character. There were plastiglass windows, almost mossy and grey-covered. You were in a scientific and sterile world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of nanotech or bots. There were no windows straight ahead on the far side of the laboratory; only a row of elms and a blue-painted wall: and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of Spearow from some other conservatory entered by a door from the left wall. The streets were so far off that there were no other noises.
No other workers could be found in that solitary place, no fellow scientists working under Cypress; only a squad of cleaning drones, a receptionist bot, and wireflim projectors that sorted Cypress's papers. The sternness and emptiness filled Bronze with a sense of quiet but also unease. It felt as though something at the heart of the place was rejecting common humanity.
As I have said, on the left wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with wide plasteel windows on either side. You crossed a stylized wooden bridges and a dark brown, dimpled, artificial, and wholly indoor river flowed underneath you.
"O, Man!" said Bronze, reciting a line from the Hisuian Coda. The presence of pure religion always made him mystical. "Here is a lovely portion of God's Creation; then, stand before it and learn to love the perfection of Thy Supreme Friend."
Jake paused midway over the bride, looking at the source of the river's flow. A low fountain stood there, large with fluted lips. There was the rhythmic noise of a peeling, spooling arc of water falling thud-a-gallop onto the artificial rock bed. Every available space in the room was crowded with exotic wet-climate plants. Something rustled below in the greenery. He tensed, then glimpsed a simple clock-set with pipe and hose arms. An arm lifted, sent out a fine spray of dampness that misted his cheeks. The arm retracted and he looked at what it had watered: a fern tree.
Water was everywhere in this room, water being so conspicuously flaunted that it always shocked Jake. The unnecessary expenses of maintaining the conservatory must cost, cumulatively, many thousands of units.
Bronze was less environmentally inclined. He was very near his goal of reaching Cypress's office. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought the out into the archival room, and across from them they saw through a few windows the glimpse of green leaves and dark shadows. Cypress sat at his standing desk behind a single door with a camera hidden where the peephole should have been. Bronze opened the door and went through it.
...
The whole office was sparse. It had one oak desk, a leather swivel chair, a lamp and spruce-paneled walls. Whenever Cypress needed to fetch some paper he yelled for the wirefilm projectors to bring it or else got it himself. The Pokemon he kept were small and slight and fluffy and full of squeaks, and Cypress addressed them in tones of half-breezy, half-ferocious, gallantry. The women that Cypress kept for himself, though they were seldom seen on the grounds, were very numerous. Although Lily had attempted to make this a point for blackmail, Cypress kept a clean house.
Robert and Lily were already waiting by a pair of dark oak chairs that say before the desk. Bronze noted how his father stood with caution, talking calmly but eyeing Cypress like a soldier would eye a barbed wire fence which, by a necessary but unfortunate turn of events, must negotiate.
"I see that you came along to talk with me, Tercano," said Cypress, looking up at Bronze. "And Robert, I've told you that you need not worry about all those little nymphs I keep for myself. But I won't go on with you here if you keep complaining."
Cypress's dark hair was smoothly arranged in sullen locks above eyes that seemed incongruously confident. He wore a tight-fitting black suit and snug trousers with suggestions of ritualistic symbols at their bottoms. Tuxedo shoes covered his feet. A belt with three poke balls ringed around his waist. He was aesthetically handsome, except for the neck and eyes; the neck was thick and the eyes were coarse, humorous, and brutal, giving off the idea that the mind which looked from them knew exactly what was really going on. From his experiences, Bronze thought that he had a certain charm of manner, and he possessed the trick of re-settling his glasses on his nose which was curiously disarming–in some indefinable way, curiously civilized.
Jake merely noted the man's poise and thought, Here's a man who won't let himself go to fat.
"That might be very good advice, Jonathan," said Robert, "if I were committed to staying here at all. But I'm not. And from what I've seen I don't like how you run this place, and you know that. I've very nearly made up my mind to go home after the whole ceremony is over. Only I thought I'd just have a talk with Bronze first, to make everything clear."
"Making things clear is the one thing the Association can't stand," replied Cypress. "I work for the Association, and I'd make things transparent, but that's not how they want to run the place. And mind you, the Rorian Chairman knows what he's about. It works. You've no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving, you're not superstitious, are you? I am. I don't think it's lucky to leave your son while he's getting his Pokedex. You needn't bother your head about all the women and the duties I perform here. That's not part of your job. You're being put through it at the moment, yes, but if you hold on you'll come out above them, once I've packed up and left in a year or two. All you've got to do is to sit tight. I won't be left after your family has had their way, and you'll be spared the annoyance."
"That's just the same line you told me when I asked about your tastes," said Bronze. "But it never seems to do me much good when coming to the point."
"Do you know, Tercano," said Cypress, "I've taken a fancy to you. And it's just as well I have. Because if I hadn't, I'd be disposed to resent that last remark. Perhaps you will find some difficulties on your trip if I get any more cross."
"You care too much," said Bronze. "You've dabbled in hedonistic pleasures: rich foods, exotic drugs, deviant sex. Yet you have intelligently anticipated my counterarguments in many subjects. Why don't you expect my sense of rightness to call you out?"
Straight talk! thought Cypress. "You carve wounds in my flesh and write there in salt! Adam Kynes was right in calling you an ungrateful maggot."
Careful, thought Lily. I don't know how much banter Cypress can take.
"Despite that face of yours, you are a very ugly man," said Bronze, hoping to achieve just the right tone where he could sound insulting yet not give anything to be used in return. "Adam's right, but I'm still prettier than you."
"Clever, trying to make me lose my temper and saying something foolish," said Cypress, noticing the way Jake's eyes nervously moved onto him. "But I still won't tell you the politics of this."
"But why not?"
"There you go again, Bronze!" said Cypress. "You've grumbled in the past about being given nothing to do, and as soon as I suggest a bit of real work in this Pokedex Holding assignment you expect to have the whole plan of campaign told to you before you do it. It doesn't make sense. That's not the way to get on here. The great thing is to do what you're told. You won't take orders from me, damn it, so do it from your parents. If you turn out to be any good you'll soon understand what's going on. But you've got to begin by doing the work of catching the damn Pokemon while the Pokedex does its other work for you. You don't seem to realize what we are brought together as. We're a secret army. The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you'll get on. I'm speaking for your own good, boy. You can write. That's one of the things you're wanted for."
"I've no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles or Pokemon studies," Bronze said. "And if I had, I'd want to know a good deal more about the politics of the research branch of the Association before I went in for that sort of thing. I've only focused on the electoral."
"Well, my work is strictly non-political," said Cypress, "and so will yours, obviously. Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Robert knows how we got the grant for the dig site. Any opposition to the Science Program was represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us: to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is."
"I don't believe you can do that," said Jake. "Not with the papers that are read by educated people."
"That shows you're still in the nursery," said Cypress. "Haven't you yet realized that it's the other way round? Why, you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believed the Association papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the horseback archery results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Pokemon farms to be used as fertilizer. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything. Of course, there's a minority of educated like Bronze that actually look a little deeper. You usually don't get them from the public schools. That's what he has going for him."
"As one of the class you mention," said Lily with a smile, "I just don't believe it." Let me test him by saying something he knows is not to my character.
"Good Lord!" said Cypress. "Where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Southern Herald. There's a paper for you. They report on everything the way the wind swings. Remember that for ten years the old Arcean tradition was an anti-progress institution? Now since the Arceus-worshippers got control of the publishing company, they went all conservative in about a fortnight. Did they lose a single reader? Don't you see that the educated reader can't stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."
"Well, all that does is help ruin the region, and the whole human race," said Lily. "And I'm Arcean myself, which is unfortunate when I agree with a bit of what you're saying. But talking about the Association's own propaganda will ruin your career with the elites."
"No, it won't," said Cypress. "I am not talking in much degree about the Association, emphasis on much. I am speaking of other power groups. You could say that I'm even being a proper citizen, an honest citizen, and a public servant, by spreading the word about these dangerous psychological tactics. They are remarkably effective."
He smiled, and Bronze had a good feeling that Cypress did not call them dangerous in other circles. Then the confidential tone in which he had been speaking up till now had disappeared and there was a threatening whisper in his voice.
"There are many convenient accidents that happen to Rorians who don't tread the Association tripwire," whispered Cypress. "Let me caution you: should an unfortunate accident occur to me here, assume that you may also be susceptible."
"I don't like your tone, Cypress," said Robert.
"Anger is one thing, violence another," said Cypress. "I gave Tercano his Pokedex. That is the only interaction you will recall. Nothing else has happened between us."
Cypress reached into a desk cabinet for a chromium box, about the size of a human hand. "Get up, Bronze! We've got to get going. I have lines to say, the tired old guarantees of responsibility and chivalry and cooperation with your Pokemon partner and all that grade-school garbage. Follow me like the Jews following Moses out of Egypt!"
Robert made an attempt to prolong the interview but the professor did not permit this and in a few seconds he was outside the door.
"It's time I deal with him, then?" said Bronze.
"Using the science of dealing with men like him, yes," said Robert.
"What was he saying back there?" asked Jake. "What are Jews? Where is Ayegip?"
"Probably something from an old book he's read," said Lily, giving Robert a chaste kiss. "Take as long as you need, Bronze. You better run along now. Have a nice talk with Cypress. Be careful not to annoy the man. He does so love giving speeches with you and hates your witty interruptions."