In the darkness of his bed closet, Nils Hansen ran his fingertips over the surface of the battlesuit that had been Borley's. An amazing piece of workmanship—except for the joins between limbs and body, and even those were the work of a competent smith.
Enough. The cool solidity of the armor was the last physical sensation Hansen felt as he—a man who had become a god, and who was still very much a man—let his being merge with the Matrix that bound the eight planes of Northworld.
It was like diving into a slush of salt and snow, except that the chill was mental as well as physical. He rode the infinite possibilities spawned by every event, expanding into the future and past together—
Dawn breaks.
Dawn breaks in a solar flare that scours the land and seas of all life.
Dawn never comes and the world hangs in twilight.
—all possible, all real; unbounded—
Except that something blocked and channeled Hansen's course across the event waves.
For an instant without time Hansen struggled, spreading his consciousness across the eight worlds and the Matrix. He knew everything that could be and had been and was . . . and the other moved with him, as fast and as far, immersed in perfect interpenetrating cold without end—
without end
without
Hansen let himself be guided and slammed into individual being. He stood in North's hall of frozen light.
Hansen shook and trembled. It was a grim pleasure to him that the tall, one-eyed man on the High Seat also shuddered with the greater-than-cold.
North straightened from an attempt to hug himself into a fetal ball. He shook his head to clear it, then ran the fingers of both hands through his hair to settle it into smooth gray waves.
North smiled at Hansen, then glanced at the clear container on a stand beside his High Seat. "Well, Dowson," he said, "you should have joined us. We had a very interesting game, Commissioner Hansen and I. Didn't we, Kommissar?"
He smiled again. There was no more humor on North's craggy features than there had been the first time.
A brain floated in fluid within the container. Scales of light sublimed from the outside of the tank and expanded across the hall like the shockwaves of supernovae. As the colors swept through Hansen, his mind heard Dowson's voice say, "There are no games, North. Only the Matrix. Only reality."
"For you, perhaps, Dowson," said North. "But not for the rest of us."
"I'm not your plaything, North," Hansen said. His voice trembled, not so much from the freezing Matrix as with Hansen's need to control his own cold rage. "I was never that."
"For all of you, North," whispered a wash of color. "Only reality."
"No . . . ," said North.
His eye bored at Hansen. Hansen stared back as though his heart were hard as an awl.
"Don't interfere with my affairs, Kommissar," North said. "In the West Kingdom."
Planes and solids of pure radiance swept around North to form vaults of unimaginable height. His nose, hooked like a raven's beak, flung a hard shadow over his chin as he glared at Hansen.
"The West Kingdom's my own affair, North," the younger man said flatly. "It's been my affair since I was a warrior there with King Golsingh."
North spat. The floor was black and clear in intricate marquetry. His saliva splashed as speckles of blue light.
"Golsingh is dead," said North.
"The Peace of Golsingh isn't dead," Hansen retorted. Then he grinned, and his expression was as stark as the smiles of the one-eyed man. "But you'd like to change that, wouldn't you, North? What do you have against peace?"
North shrugged. "What do you have for it, Commissioner Hansen?" he asked in a reasonable tone. "If there's anyone in the West Kingdom who knew you before, by now they're old and on the point of death."
Color trembled from Dowson's container. "Men die in peace as surely as in war," the brain said. "We will die, North."
North's face went hard again. He wore the jumpsuit uniform of the Colonial Bureau of the Consensus of Worlds; his collar tabs bore a field-grade officer's shimmering holograms. "Yes," he said. "Queen Unn died in peace, but she died young for all that."
Hansen shrugged. Letting them get to you is letting them win.
"Then just say it's my whim," said Hansen. "I spent my life before I came—here, before I came to Northworld . . . I spent my life keeping the peace."
He could feel his cheek muscles tensing, changing the planes of his face. He must look like a grinning skull. "That's what we called it in the Department of Security, keeping the peace. So I'm going to keep one island of peace here on Northworld, too."
"And if I say you will not . . . Kommissar?" North asked.
Above the men and the tank containing what had been a man, coffers of light shifted down through the spectrum, orange and red and finally a red near to black. A sudden, soundless jolt of ruby lightning raked across the arches.
Hansen laughed. Jets of violet as saturated as the discharges from a Tesla coil ripped from every finial of the vaulted ceiling. Their crackling was scarcely distinguishable from Hansen's laughter.
North laughed as well. The hall brightened to its former purity.
"All right," said the one-eyed man in apparent good humor. "Will you play me a game, Commissioner Nils Hansen? To see whether the Peace of Golsingh will hold . . . or not hold."
"It'll hold," said Hansen.
"I won't interfere," said North. "But if you play, Hansen, you'll play as a man—not a god. If you intervene in the Open Lands as a god, I will crush the West Kingdom so completely that men will whisper when they speak of it. Do you understand?"
Hansen spat. A section of the floor dissolved into blue fire, then reformed. "I hear you talking," Hansen said.
North nodded as if well pleased by the response. "One more thing, Kommissar," he said. "If you play in the Open Lands as a man . . . you can die as a man."
Dowson said, "All men die. . . ." in a veil of light.
Hansen shrugged. "All men die," he said. "I'll play your game."
He raised his arm. In another instant, he would have slipped back into the Matrix, but the one-eyed man called, "Speaking of Queen Unn . . . she died in childbirth, didn't she?"
Hansen looked at North. He felt nothing at all—
"Yes, I believe she did," he said.
—except the urge to kill.
Then he was gone from North's palace.
North chuckled mirthlessly. Dowson's voice washed over him, saying, "Hansen is not a hard man, North."
North stared at the tank with his one eye. "What do you mean?" he said. "He's a killer. You know that."
Colors—blue and mauve and orange—shimmered away from the tank. "Oh, yes," said Dowson. "But Hansen doesn't plot all the time to win his point."
The ripples of speech continued to expand and fade until they merged with the radiant walls.
North got up from his seat. He turned away from the man in a bottle; the god who had no life except in the Matrix, which was all lives.
"You know I'll need warriors at the end, Dowson," North said. "How am I to find them if there isn't war in the Open Lands? Constant war!"
"Hansen isn't a hard man, North," Dowson's words rang. "But you are a hard man."
North raised his arm. "Then he'll lose our game, won't he, Dowson?" he shouted as he dissolved into the Matrix.
"Perhaps some day he will lose . . . ," whispered the brain through the infinite paths that North followed.