Bright of the Sky (39 page)

Quinn caught a glimpse of light outside the galley door. He saw that the companionway was lit, spilling light from above. His mind was crawling.

The door narrowed and then bulged out. Belly churning, Quinn steadied himself against the galley counters and walked toward the light from the companionway. As he came to the first step, it moved farther away, but when he took a step up, he had gone halfway up.

At the top, he faced an oblong room with a dais at one end. The ceiling was of a membranous material like the veil-of-worlds. On the dais sat Ghoris the navitar, her head quite close to the ceiling.

Dressed in a red caftan, her body was of an indeterminate shape and size. Her white hair hung loose, flowing around her chest. She pointed at him, the end of her finger coming closer than he thought possible. Then he saw that she was moving her hands in front of her, without reference to him. She was conducting. She opened and closed her mouth, over and over again “See the twist, there,” she said in a shredded voice. Her wrist turned, and she smiled beatifically. “See, traveler, do you see?”

“The lights went out,” he found himself saying, wondering if it made any sense.

The navitar’s hands were pudgy, as though her muscles had all gone to skin and gristle. She looked down at them, her face doughy and rounded.

“It is not light; it is the fundament. Yesss.” Her eyes closed, but her hands played in front of her. “There are thirty-six, and some are paired. Then eight fields and all the generations. Coming in now. To my hands.” She picked one out of the air, bringing it to one side.

She continued, her voice a gargle: “To make them a family. Combining them, creating a structure, from which we know what we know. Yesss, the symmetry of it. Gone are the anomalies. Coming to my hands, the complete set of symmetries, yes.” She opened her eyes, sweeping her gaze over him, never quite focusing. “You cannot see them. Light is what you see. It is not light. That is the surface of one thing. Being what you are, it is your mistake. You have all agreed on the world, to keep from going mad.”

Madness was more a term he would have applied to
her
. That, or savant.

“Traveler, what holds it all together?” she said, as though teaching a pupil.

“Holds what, Navitar?”

She gestured around her. “All. What keeps it from collapsing? Think of the—ahh, the cosmos. What keeps it from succumbing to its own weight? Because it is flying apart, do you perceive? But the Entire does not move, in your plane of life. Think on this, most carefully. In your ignorance, you answer that the storm walls resist collapse. But what powers the great storm? What is its energy? That is something even you can know.”

In his plodding logic he said, “The Tarig power it.”

Ghoris sighed. “Poor under-sentient.” Her attention moved to a point just over his head. “The lines,” she whispered. Opening her mouth, she stared as though she was trying to smell the lines. Quinn opened his own mouth, letting the air move over his Jacobson’s organ. He thought
he
could smell them.

“What—,” he began.

“No speaking! It frays, frays.”

She was looking directly over his head. “Traveler, you are the knot. Things converge in you. It will make our journey much harder.”

She began to move her hands more quickly, as though dealing with a tangle of invisible yarn. “All the lines converge. You are looking, looking. Yes. Finding things you never looked for, losing all that you sought. I see. I see her, too. She is at your side. A tangle of lines also. Ah yessss.”

“Who?” Quinn whispered. “Who do you see?” He believed her. That she saw things in the lines.

The navitar’s heavy face fell slack for a moment. She shook her head. “Her knot is at the center of things. You are there, but her lines are, yes, strong.”

He fumbled in his pocket for the pictures. Grabbing the picture of Sydney, he thrust it toward the navitar. “Is this who you see? Tell me.”

She glanced at the picture, then stood abruptly. Pulling a fastener at her neck, she stood up, and her caftan fell around her waist. She stood tall, pushing into the membrane, distorting it, and then puncturing it with her head, standing as though decapitated. She brought her hands up through the membrane.

He looked at her fleshy body, her breasts like deflated balloons on her chest.

Poor creature. Fire, oh fire.
He heard her voice inside his head now.
Lost. Her
strings are cut. In all the worlds.
After a moment she sat down as, over her head, the membrane closed up. Her hair hung in ropes, curling and wet. Closing her eyes, she whispered, “Gone to fire.”

Quinn was stricken by her words. “My Sydney,” he murmured.

The navitar’s eyes blinked open. She growled, “That is not her name.”

From her sitting position the navitar began conducting the lines again. She reached out her hands in his direction, grabbing the air, curling her fingers, and drawing the lines close to her chest, forcibly pulling him in her direction. He staggered to the foot of the dais, where he fell to his knees.

Pointing up with a finger, she said, “Look up!”

He did so. The sky was stitched with needles, stabbing down, retreating up, like an aurora borealis made of knives.

She moaned, “You have many lives. I have many lives; all are up there.” She shook her head, flapping her heavy jowls. “But you cannot see.”

“No,” he admitted, devastated. He was both very emotional and fending off sleep with all his strength.

She rose up again, plunging through the membrane. She swayed, as though buffeted by exotic winds. He heard in the back of his mind:
I see your
lives, your knotted lives. It twists, oh twists. But which world is it?
He could see her blurred image above him as she waved her hands above her, where knives of light slashed down and gathered in her fists, making her look like a goddess of lightning.
I see the world collapsing, the fire descending. I see a burning rose. Oh so
beautiful, so dead. They do not combine; they do not have symmetry. One excludes the
other; both cannot be true. The rose burns, and the All flies apart. Choose, Titus, choose.

He whispered, “What must I choose?”

The navitar suddenly crouched down and squatted over him, her face slimed with mercury. Her thoughts came to him:
Your heart.

She was silent for a long while, hanging her head in exhaustion. Then she picked up eight or nine threads—this time Quinn could see them, spiraling filaments that came from thin air into her fingers—and, tugging on them, she thrust her upper body and hands into the sky. As she did so, the ship’s prow fell into a long well, and Quinn fell forward, onto the soft and puffy wood deck.

Sleep sucked him down.

Quinn opened his eyes a crack, just wide enough to see the Ysli’s pinched face scowling down at him.

Someone was saying, “We’re here, after all. And Dai Shen is the only sick one, when I thought it would be me.” Cho’s voice.

Quinn came fully awake in a room filled with an eye-stinging light.

Anzi hovered anxiously. “You went up, but why Dai Shen?”

The Ysli chittered. “Sleeping. You should all have been.”

Sitting up, Quinn said, “The lights went out. I went looking for light.”

The Ysli’s face crumpled into a deep frown. “No light in the binds.”

Then he brought forward a crumpled photo, thrusting it into Quinn’s hand. Without another word, he left them, retreating to his galley.

“Are you all right?” Anzi asked.

Quinn nodded. His stomach felt grease-laden and his head ached, but he was in one piece. He flattened the photo out. It was a pale wash of film, now so faded that he could hardly see the image. But, unmistakably, it wasn’t Sydney.

Not his daughter. It was his wife. The photo he had inadvertently shown to the navitar was Johanna. Ghoris had been talking about Johanna.
Poor creature.
Her strings are cut in all the worlds.
On the upper deck he had understood what that meant, but now it was not so clear. He must have one more interview with the pilot.

As Cho, struggling with his trunks, left the cabin, Quinn whispered to Anzi, “The navitar—she said that—”

“Said what?”

“Things will burn. Fly apart.”

“Her type is half-mad,” Anzi said. But she looked alarmed.

“She said the lines—the lines she sees as events, that they converge in me. In Johanna.” He jerked to his feet and confronted the Ysli. “I would bid farewell to the pilot.”

“Leave,” the Ysli squawked, standing in front of the companionway.

A noise drew Quinn’s attention. Looking up, he saw that the closed door at the top of the stairs shook in its frame.

“Let me speak to her,” Quinn said. From the upper deck came a whimpering noise.

The Ysli’s face contorted. “The navitar is unwell.”

In proof of these words, the foul smell of excrement came from behind the doorway, hitting Quinn’s sense organs in a wave of revulsion.

The navitar was paying the price for seeing things. No wonder she was mad; if the river played with space-time, perhaps she sometimes observed effects before the cause. He wondered how the madness and suffering could be worth it. But then, he didn’t know what she saw, and thought that, quite possibly, it was everything.

He took a last glance at the companionway and nodded to the Ysli. He’d never let Quinn upstairs now, and quite possibly Ghoris was rendered helpless at the moment. Quinn picked up his satchel and followed Anzi onto the deck.

As he stepped out and looked around him, the world fell away.

With his focus on the navitar, Quinn hadn’t registered the fact that they were
here
.

At the Ascendancy.

It was a view to stagger the mind. The boat was tied to a floating dock amid a mercurial sea, vast in all directions. Pillars of exotic matter extended from the sea to a distant structure overhead, tiny at this distance of some thirty thousand feet. However, it was, Quinn knew, an enormous habitat containing the impregnable mansions of the Tarig.

Of course, the pillars didn’t hold up the city. Rather, they supported the Entire by replenishing the exotic matter of the sea and the great rivers of the primacies. On either side of him and far away, Quinn saw the storm walls of the primacy converging on the great sea. Closer, the great Rim City stretched out, hugging the shore and forming a profoundly long and narrow metropolis connected by the instant transport of the navitars.

Amid a small crowd, he and Anzi were shuffling toward the center of the dock, where a gatekeeper metered the flow of travelers. As they had planned, they would give their names, which had been sent ahead by Yulin from an axis communication node. The Chalin sway was not forbiddingly distant from the heartland, and, for this reason, timely communication to and from the Ascendancy was possible, although limited to the speed of light.

Quinn lifted the end of Cho’s trunk from the man’s back, to help him.

“Many thanks, Excellency!” Cho huffed. “I could have brought all this in redstones, but Min Fe will have his paper.” He lowered the trunk to the dock with Quinn’s help as they waited for a Chalin legate to check them through.

Anzi was staring at the view above her.

“Born in a minoral?” Quinn asked, grinning.

Her cheeks flushed. “I . . . I was,” she said, giving up on pride. “I never saw such a sight.”

Nor had he. The last time he’d come here, it was by the bright. But he knew there was only one other sight to match this one in all the worlds. And that was at the top.

It was time to leave his photos behind. He had agreed that they were too dangerous to take to the bright city, but now that it was time to discard them in the sea, he hesitated. They had been his traveling companions as much as Anzi had. And although the photos were bleached to ghosts, his heart had supplied what was missing. At last he knelt on the dock and let them fall. When they lit on the water’s surface, the images seemed to come back. As they floated a moment, he saw Sydney in acute detail, and for a moment it seemed that she was a young woman grown, with blighted eyes. . . .

Anzi was at his side, gently pulling him away. They stood in line. He wished he’d put the pictures in the water one at a time so he could have seen Johanna, and what the lens of the sea would have shown him, or the lens of his imagination.

The line inched forward. Anzi was giving her name to the legate. Ahead, shimmering in the streaming pillar and meant to ascend in it, was a spacious elevator capsule with its door open. Quinn tried to shake the uneasiness of being in close contact with a material as dangerous as river matter; but others seemed unconcerned. The capsule created a region of safety.

Something was amiss. Anzi was saying, “A mistake, surely. I have been sent by the master of the great sway.”

The Chalin legate was shaking his head. He looked at Quinn, scowling. “You are Dai Shen, to see the high prefect?” Quinn nodded. “Then you have leave,” the legate said, “and no one further, of Master Yulin’s sway.”

The legate tried unsuccessfully to wave Quinn past. Anzi went on, “We have a clarity of great importance, and I will help present it to the high prefect, for the sake of the realm.”

The legate turned a stark gaze on her. “No, you will not. One named Dai Shen has leave to ascend.” He turned to Anzi. “Wait here for him if you wish, and if you don’t mind sleeping on the dock.”

Cho was watching this exchange with consternation. He had already passed through the checkpoint and was ready to board the elevator, but now he came back. “I can vouch for the woman,” he said. “A very high personage, and so forth. Charming, with important connections to the Yulin household, I assure you.”

The legate turned a withering glance on him. “Do I need help from a
steward
?”

Cho backed away, murmuring, “No, no, pardon.”

“I don’t ascend without her,” Quinn said, stepping closer to the legate.

“None of my concern,” the man answered. “Who is next, with approvals in order?”

People pressed in from behind. Quinn stepped out of line, going to Anzi.