The CRES code

Chapter Thirty Nine - Emily in Lendaron

     The most likely place to find Randall and the others, Emily thought, was Lendaron, the capital city of Saxony.

     Randall would want to be close to one of the world's centres of power, she thought. There were bigger ones than Lendaron, of course, in Europe, Africa and along the North American east coast, and there were myths and legends of powerful empires further away with names like Cathay, Gupta and Nippon. Few of them spoke this strange, futuristic dialect of English, though, and during their short acquaintance Randall had confided to her that he had no talent with languages. That pretty much limited him to the British Isles, therefore, which meant that, unless he'd crossed the Irish Sea to Uineill, he would be in Saxony and that, she thought, meant Lendaron.

     She had done her homework before setting out. Lendaron, in the ninth century of the Hornish calendar, was a city of a million people entirely surrounded by the largest, strongest wall in Europe. A wall that, in all history, had never been breached unlike virtually every other city in Saxony which had all been broken into and overrun, their entire populations, rich and poor alike, butchered by orcs at least once in previous centuries.

     Emily was ready to be impressed by her first sight of it, therefore, and as she and her escort of soldiers emerged from the woods that lined the great west road, she wasn't disappointed. The wall reared ahead of her like the edge of the world. Blocks of stone as massive as those that had made up the pyramids (and maybe still did as far as she knew) piled up to make a sheer cliff forty feet high with an overhang at the top for dropping things on a besieging army. Wide towers stood every fifty feet with wooden catapults standing on top along with what looked like gigantic crossbows. It looked as though it had been built to outlast eternity, and yet Emily knew that it was just one of four walls, the inner three scarcely less impressive than the outermost. A wide moat stood before the whole thing. An arm of the river Thames, dug by navvies to flood any tunnel that the orcs might try to dig under the wall.

     "It looks so strong," said Emily, almost to herself as her carriage clattered towards it, "but they know that you could destroy it any time you wanted just by dropping a small asteroid on it."

     "They know that won't happen so long as they obey the laws of VIX," said the priest sitting opposite her.

     "Maybe, but the mere knowledge that you could destroy the city any time you wanted, what must that do to them? I know that what you've done is for the good, that you've restored the biosphere and returned mankind to a better way of living, but the certain knowledge that a greater power exists that they have no defence against must do something to them. Give them a crippling sense of insecurity."

     "Mankind has always lived with the belief that Gods exist, with the power to judge and destroy."

     "Maybe, but they were always created in the image of the people who believed in them. Everyone believed that their way of living, their actions and choices, would lead inevitably to their salvation, that it was the people who lived differently who would be punished. Everyone believed themselves, their tribe, their society, to be the chosen people of God, and that gave them a sense of security. You, though, you machines, you don't have a chosen people. Anyone might be blasted to oblivion if they do something to offend you. The self delusion that gave them the sense of security with the old Gods doesn't exist with you. Where's their comfort blanket?"

     "We do not interfere in human society," the priest replied. "Humans can live their lives any way they wish, commit any atrocity they wish, and we will not interfere. Slavery, rape, genocide... If that is how humans wish to live then we let them. The only law is the control of technology. Steam, electricity, explosives. That is the only thing we punish humans for. So long as they do not violate that law, they have their comfort blanket."