Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [19]
It was the time to make himself garments of skin.
He had to save the girl.
He didn’t know all the details of their plan—was not supposed to. He knew that it included an attack against the castle, but he had to get the girl out of the danger zone first.
“Hi, Genie! Has the Fairy destroyed your Wish?”
She greeted him with a happy mental dance when he reactivated her dream world on his arrival. He was pleasantly surprised. She could remember things. More than he did. He had forgotten the girl’s real name—again.
“I see that you have met her,” Nathi said.
They shared a smile.
“What did you ask her?” she said.
Ask? “She didn’t talk to me.” He simply… knew.
“She never does. The Fairy is mute, remember?”
Nathi couldn’t speak, dumbstruck. So that was no fairy tale.
“And she is also deaf,” the girl said. “But you gotta ask. Because you will get nothing if you don’t.”
True knowledge doesn’t come without doubting first. Nathi understood. The sharpest knowledge also came with screams. “What did you ask?”
The girl did not reply at once. She led his mental eye into the labyrinth of transport tubes. Up, up the dark and empty dragon veins they rose, all the way back to the observation bubble. Nathi recognized the place at once. The needles reaching for the sky. Baby dust devils. And the dry ice of the polar cap, shining faintly through the blanket of the polar night.
But this time he was looking with new eyes. This time, he saw the battle laser installations sprayed over the castle walls like pearls. The patterns of “dalmatian spots” beginning to appear in the polar ice revealed the traces of retractable sheaths of nuclear missile batteries, ready to spring up from their underground bunkers, each launcher primed for bursts of long-range automatic fire. Wizard interdiction amplifiers, to disrupt the enemy communications and to blind their devices and to worm into their ships’ computer brains themselves.
By the neuromorphic principle, each more advanced computing architecture further bridged the gap between process and data. The Singularity breakthrough had been achieved down that path—a kind of evolution in its own right. But high performance and the possibility of electronic consciousness came at a price. It meant some bad news for security, for execution of data had become almost synonymous with its receipt.
Warriors had special physical abilities, while wizards ruled the cyberspace. Wizard support became as critical, if not more so, as air support and space support used to be—for disrupting enemy communications, compromising their navigation data, and infecting their weapons and their decision-making systems.
And deep down, miles below the castle, with the sharpness of a high-enhancement sensor, Nathi felt the deep hum of the generators of a mini-magnetospheric anti-plasma shield. He gaped. How… what… they wanted to storm this?
The girl must get away first. By the plan, they had to reach the Needle. Speaking of which…. Nathi observed how the field of ice around the castle was awash with multiple detector curtains. Suddenly, he saw the girl just as a child, so alone, so small in this cold world, her little body stretched and listless on a bed, now dreaming only thanks to him.
“I asked”—the girl was staring toward the Needle—“how to forget my mom, my family, my home. How to erase it so that it never would come back.” She shut their eyes. “So that they couldn’t make me hurt them.”
That was how Nathi knew. Her Nanny didn’t try to kill her on that day, although she could have—and indeed, was sworn to. Inside the fractions of a second they had left before it would have been too late, her Nanny made a difficult decision. She gave the girl the Fairy, transmitting with a touch of laser light—protection against mind control.
“She left toward the Needle, for support,” the girl said. “And she promised she’ll return. With blueberries.”
I’d rather die.
It wasn’t by the Dragonclaws that she was turned into a human vegetable. It was by