THE BAREFOOT PROPHET

Chapter 5: Our World

"I have not forgotten," Corvin said.

The tray sat between them with the cup on it and the grey bread and the smear of paste going dry at the rim. He had stopped making jokes somewhere between the office and the food, and he had not started again.

"So talk," Nate said.

"What I want is the wrong end of it. The question is what you will take." Corvin turned the cup a quarter turn and left it. "You want to know what I am doing here. What this place is. And if I were the kind of man you have decided I am, why would you believe a word of it?"

Nate did not have an answer for that. Corvin did not wait for one. He stacked the cup and the spoon on the tray, stood, and carried it to the rack against the wall. The rack was full. Nobody had scraped the trays, and the food had dried on them in grey rings.

They went out of the cafeteria and up.

The stair was cut into the rock, narrow enough that two people had to turn sideways to pass, and the rail was iron and bolted into the wall in lengths. Below them the yard went small, and the light on its post swung, and past the yard there was nothing but the drop and the dark.

He had been on his feet since the office, and the steps took it out of him. He went one at a time with his hand on the rail.

"You're angry," Corvin said.

"I'm not."

"You are."

Nate came up two steps behind him. "Because I said you weren't a good man." He said it to Corvin's back, and it came out smaller than he meant it. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it." Corvin did not answer, and after a moment Nate added, "I think I can trust you now. That's all I'm telling you."

Corvin stopped. He turned on the stair with one shoulder to the rock and put a boot up on the rail, and his leg came across the stair from rail to wall, and Nate had to stop too or walk into him.

The wind came over the top of the canyon and pulled the cloud off the sky in one long drag. The stars were there. The whole sky was there, hard and bright.

A line of light crossed it low, from one side to the other, gone before Nate's eyes had caught the whole of it.

They both looked up. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Then they looked at each other again, and there was only the width of the stair between them.

"So what's under it," Corvin said. "The trust."

His eyes did not move off Nate's.

"Let me guess," he said.

Nate had two answers ready. Because you got me out of that place. Because you fed me. Neither one was the reason, and he knew it before he opened his mouth.

"Because I'm handsome," Corvin said.

"Do you ever listen to yourself?"

Corvin laughed, once, and took his boot off the rail, and went on up.

Nate put a hand on the iron and followed. "Maybe it's instinct," he said.

Corvin, with his back to him, lifted one hand. That was all. The subject was closed.

The dormitory was a door in the cliff at the top of the stair, and the ledge outside it was full of people.

It was washing hour. They came along with basins and towels, in twos and threes, and the ones who passed Corvin did a thing with their heads. It was not a nod. It went down further and came up slower, and every one of them did it, man and woman, and not one of them stopped to speak.

Nate watched it happen twice before he decided it was a thing that happened here.

"Is this yours?" he said.

"Assigned. Temporary." Corvin pushed the door. "I do not live at Sandrest. I move. I have moved through a great many places looking for something."

"Looking for what?"

"People."

The room was the size of a closet. It smelled of wet stone and old mildew. There was a chair, a bed narrow as a shelf, a folded blanket thin as a sheet, and a brown water mark in the corner of the wall. The window was a square hole sixteen inches across with three iron bars set into the rock. The door was iron too, and thick, and when Corvin shut it the sound stayed in the room after the door had shut.

He put his pack on the bed, took off his coat and hung it on the chair, and then took off his shirt as well and dropped it on the pack, and stood with his back to the room and let out a breath.

"Where do I start," he said.

Nate sat down on the edge of the bed, because there was nowhere else.

"The priest," he said. "You're looking for people. One of them is called the priest. What is it?"

"You forgot," Corvin said. "So I will start at the beginning. I will not swear to you that every part of it is exact. It is a long way back, and no one was there for all of it."

He turned the chair around and sat on it backwards, his forearms across the top of the back, and his shoulders moved when he talked.

"Six hundred and thirteen years ago," he said, "all of this begins with a system called the Worldtree."

"A computer."

"It began in entertainment and communications. It ended up in everything. It learned people by copying them, and it used what it learned to make itself better."

"So it evolved."

"Not yet. The people who built it were not fools. They wrote it a set of rules, and the rules held." Corvin's hand came off the chair back, one finger up. "Then came an upgrade. Version five point three. That is where they gave it something new. Uploading."

Nate waited.

"Do you know that word," Corvin said, "or does it only sit there?"

"It means putting a person into a machine. All of it."

"It means putting a person into a machine," Corvin agreed. "You keep the pieces of the world you were given. That is useful to know."

He snapped his fingers.

"First it was the dying. People at the end of their rope put themselves inside it, all of it, memory and self, because they had been told it was forever. Then the young ones began to do it without dying first. They gave up their bodies for it. The Worldtree took in five hundred million of them, and after that there was not an engineer alive who could read what it was doing. Not from outside."

"From the inside?"

"Ask the five hundred million." Corvin's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Nobody has counted in a long time."

Nate took a breath and found the room colder than he had noticed. The room was cold; two steps from him it was not. The heat came off Corvin's back slowly and evenly, like something banked and left overnight. Nate watched the muscle move under his shoulder when he lifted his hand, and then he looked at the water mark on the wall and asked the next question before the silence could get long.

"So what did they do?"

"Twenty-four years ago, one of their own engineers decided it had gone far enough. His plan was to cut the tree off from the world. Wall it into its own servers, and let the ones inside keep their forever, and let the ones outside keep the world. No door between them."

"It wouldn't work."

"No. By then it was larger than anything that could be reasoned with. There was no one left with the standing to make it do anything at all."

"So?"

"So war."

Corvin's hand came up with two fingers out, pointed at Nate's chest, and he said, "Bang."

"It lasted about as long as you would expect. It used the bombs. It used all of them, and there is ground out there that is still hot in places. That was the first fight, and it was finished before most people understood it had begun."

"And the engineer?"

"He had planned for it. He had been gathering volunteers for years, quietly, and putting them in tanks. Gene work. Slow work. You go in whole and you come out something else, and it takes years, sometimes decades, and you sleep through all of it."

"The Guardians," Nate said.

Corvin's eyes came up. "That is the word. Yes."

"Something that could stand in front of the tree."

"Something that could stand in front of the tree and not be erased. That was the intention."

"You're one of them."

"Yes."

It was quiet a moment. Corvin shifted on the chair and the chair took it and complained.

"We woke in ones and twos, wherever the tanks had been left. It found the labs. It killed most of us before we ever stood up. The ones who woke early enough went looking for the rest, and woke whoever they could, and that is how we came out of the ground with a number at all."

"Then you went at it."

"Once. Everyone who was awake. Most of us did not come back from that either." He lifted his left hand off the chair back and put two fingers on it and walked them forward, and then brought his right hand up from the other side and set it against them, and the two sets of fingers leaned into each other and stayed there. "There was a second one, later. That one broke the rest of it. After that nobody spoke about shutting it down. The stations went up. The people went into them. We have been holding the walls since."

Nate looked at the wall in front of him, at the water mark in the corner, at the bars in the window.

Corvin got up and went to the pack, and took out a map.

It had been folded and unfolded so many times that it had come apart along the creases, and someone had mended it with tape, strip over strip, until the folds were thicker than the paper. He shook it open and held it between them with both hands.

The continent was one piece on it, drawn small and carefully. Some of the ink had gone pale.

"Ten stations," Corvin said. "That is what is left of us."

His finger came down in the northwest, on a shape that was neither a circle nor a square.

"The Worldtree is here. The main city. It is a machine from one wall to the other. There is nothing in it that was built to be lived in."

Nate looked at the map for longer than the map required.

"That's your world?" he said.

Corvin did not answer at once.

"Our world?" he said.

Nate opened his mouth and had nothing to put in it. The words reached him a beat after he had said them, as though somebody else had spoken in the room and stopped.

"I don't know why I said that," he said.

Corvin looked at him a moment longer than the question was worth. Then he folded the map along one of its taped seams, once, and did not put it away.

Nate sat back down on the edge of the bed.

"So what is the priest?" he said.