The Wellstone Read Online Free

Conrad Mursk? We worked together once, long ago. Before that, I was a companion to your son.”
    When the yams are clean, de Towaji sets them down on the floor, rises again, and moves to a corner of the house, where a pile of small stones rest atop a little shelf. Flint? For starting a cooking fire? Surely
raw
yams would have busted the poor man’s guts out long ago. He then turns toward the house’s only exit and commences that slow, deliberate walk again. When Radmer blocks the way, de Towaji literally runs into him.
    Then blinks and looks him over.
    “Sire,” Radmer says.
    Slowly, the old man nods. “Ah. Ah. I ... know you.”
    “Yes, Sire.”
    “Mursk.”
    “Yes, Sire. Very good.”
    “The architect. You ... crushed the moon. Squoze it.”
    Radmer glances behind him at the half-disc of Lune in the sky. The clouds, the continents, the splatters of ocean.... But this isn’t a map. This is the world itself, seen from a height of fifty thousand kilometers. “We crushed it together, Sire. Long ago.”
    Gruffly: “You’re ... in my way.”
    Radmer can’t bring himself to bar the doorway any longer. Bowing, he steps back and to the side, allowing de Towaji to pass. At once, the old man’s expression eases.
    “Forgive me, Sire. I don’t know if I’m rescuing you, or desecrating ... Excuse me! Sire!”
    Impatience is a rare emotion among the Olders, but seeing de Towaji prepare to ignore him again, Radmer feels it now, and dares to grab his long-ago master by the arm.
    “Bruno! I have little time for this. Rouse yourself and listen to me: a great evil has been loosed upon that squozen moon of ours. Its future is now very much in peril.”
    The old man frowns, and it is no regal frown meant to convey official displeasure, but a private and unconscious one. A gesture of simple unhappiness.
    “Future,” the old man muses, or perhaps recites. He continues looking down the path ahead, deeper into the forest. “I remember that word. Where is the future? When will it get here?”
    “I fear it will not, Sire.”
    De Towaji’s gaze clears a bit, and a look of pained amusement passes briefly over his features. He speaks very slowly. “Lad, I guarantee it will not. All these ... futures we thought we were building. Where are they? In the past.
This
is the past, by the time I finish saying so.” He pauses for a long moment to make the point, then adds, “There is no future, only past.”
    Now Radmer is angry. “I’m not here to debate the semantics of it, Sire. People are dying as we speak, and still others are being enslaved. Millions more are at risk, and
there’s
an ill thing to allow into our past, if it’s within our power to prevent it.”
    Bruno tries to pull away. “I’m in the past as well, lad. Leave me.” Then, more regally:
“Leave me.”
    “I won’t,” Radmer tells him. “Not yet—not until you’ve heard me out.”
    Resistance ceases; a kind of bitter calm settles over de Towaji. He is waking up, yes, and he doesn’t like it. The look is clear in his eyes: a fear of being
needed
again, of bearing up under that burden after being free of it for so very long. Radmer understands, suddenly, that the old man’s isolation and senility did not come upon him by accident.
    His grip tightens, and his voice is almost cruel as he says, “Even if you were
dead
I would make you listen, Sire. Because I fancy you can help us, and I don’t much care if it pleases you. Where else have we got to turn? Nowhere. And when I speak the name of our peril, I think you might even
want
to help.”
    “Unlikely. You have no idea how wearily I washed up on this shore, lad. Not the least beginning of an idea.”
    Tightly: “I fancy I do, Sire. I’ve been depended on a time or two myself. And we live on, don’t we? Never too old to be bothered, to be mined for blood and sweat, to be dusted off and put to use again in one way or another. Not even a grave to rest in, not for the likes of us. But the alternative—to