City Without End (10 page)

He could stand the situation no longer. Drying his hands, he went to the foot of the companionway to see if he could overhear the conversation. The big man stood at the head of the stairs.

“In,” the monster said, cocking his head toward the cabin.

Jaq hastened up the companionway, fearing that Ghoris had taken on one of her fits. But she was sitting up, smock pulled modestly up, with good color back in her face after the meal. He hurried over to the basin to bring a damp towel for her mouth and chin, but she waved him away. Nearby the two passengers stood, none the worse for the passage through the binds, and now waiting expectantly as though he should do more for them than he already had.

The navitar gripped his arm so fiercely he winced. “She will wait.”

“Who will wait?” Her hair hung in slimy ropes around her face. She needed her cleaning up and here they were having conversations.

Ghoris only smirked, but the smaller man took pity on Jaq’s confusion. “You’ll leave the ship for a time, under the navitar’s orders. A short absence, desperately needed.”

“Leave?” Incredulous, Jaq turned to the navitar.

The passenger continued, “We would go. But we’re hunted.” At the monster’s side he looked like a mere upstart. But between the two he was clearly in charge. Jaq paid him closer attention now. The passenger needed him to run an errand. But what had Jaq and his pilot to do with a venture of the worldly world? Ghoris needed him,
had
needed him for these five thousand days? That could not change.

“You tire of the river, ship keeper,” the navitar said, crisp as you please.

“No, not . . .”

Still holding on to his arm, Ghoris drew him down to look into her rheumy eyes. “That’s the
story
you’ll tell on your long journey. Everyone likes a good story, even lying ones, so long as it’s true
somewhere
.”

Jaq would have marveled at this long speech from his navitar except that he could not get past the words
long journey
.

“I’m going on a journey?” The ship rocked at anchor, a motion he barely felt, so long had he been on the river. He could not imagine the life of the un-Nigh and had no intention of ever leaving the pilot’s side, especially not for these mere passengers.

“Here is a nice story,” Ghoris said, smirking again. “This man is the one everyone wants. Looking here. Looking there. But Titus Quinn is right here. Husband of Johanna, she at the center of it all. She misses him, except she can’t remember him.” She shrugged. “All stories are true somewhere.”

Jaq gaped. Titus Quinn?

“Was it necessary to tell him so much?” the one designated as Titus Quinn asked.

But the question was too much for Ghoris, and she began picking at her shift, finally deciding to haul it closer to her face to clean her chin.

The monster said, “Give him his task.” He pressed his hand to his side as though he were in pain, and sat heavily on a bench.

Jaq could only stare at Titus Quinn. He didn’t look like a man who could kill a grown Tarig and straddle the brightships. He looked like a passable soldier of Ahnenhoon: fit and lean, but no general. But if his navitar had said so, it was true.

Titus Quinn nodded at him. “You’ll go to Na Jing in the Shulen Wielding, Jaq. From there up the minoral to the reach, where you’ll meet a scholar and give him a message. As I said, we’d go ourselves, but we’re hunted. With luck and good winds, you could be home to the Nigh in a couple of arcs.”

Twenty days to cross the primacy and travel up the minoral and back again? Nay, more like forty days, or one hundred days, what with intransigent bekus and the haphazard migrations of the floating grain-eaters. It made him sick to even think of traveling by Adda, by the huge Celestials. And what would the pilot do without him? He asked that.

“Mo Ti will be her keeper,” the monster said.

Jaq stood, hands at his sides, shaking his head. Titus Quinn. A great journey. He looked to his navitar, but she had already forgotten him, staring out the window at the Sheltering Path primacy, the God-blighted primacy where no one ever went. The pilot had dismissed him, sending him as a messenger.

“The big man is unwell,” he noted, hoping he was too ailing to be ship keeper.

The monster snorted. “The wound needs only rest and
less talk
.”

Jaq stood before them, resigned and stunned. “What is the message?”

“To use the correlates to find the doors to the Heart.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” Titus Quinn said. “But the message is for a scholar. His name is Su Bei. He’ll understand. Tell him: The lords travel to and from the Heart. We need to control those doors. And Su Bei must identify the locations.”

The lords travel back to the Heart from whence they came? Jaq tried to grasp this. He could not, and clearly they weren’t going to explain things to him, explain treason. He beseeched the navitar with a look.

Ghoris stared out the window, insensible. His navitar had commanded him to undertake a journey for Titus Quinn. How was this any business of his navitar and himself? Still, Ghoris refused to look at him. He saw how it would be; he must go. They had told him secrets. He was part of it now.

“Who is Su Bei?”

Titus Quinn, the great fugitive, appeared to relax somewhat. Jaq had not noticed until now how tense he had been. “A friend of mine from the old days. A scholar who taught me the Lucent tongue. I gave the correlates into his keeping. Can you remember the message?”

Reluctantly, Jaq repeated it. And then again, until he got it right.

“Tell him to find me in Rim City in the company of the godwoman Zhiya.”

Now Jaq knew it all: Quinn’s location, his plans, his knowledge of something called the correlates. Jaq could go to the Tarig and tell where the fugitive was. But then the lords would throw his pilot in the great river, and she would sink like a boulder. That he could not bear.

As he left the bridge with Titus Quinn, he reflected on the fact that Ghoris didn’t even know his name, had never known it.
Ship keeper
she had always called him. He looked back at her, hoping to at least hear that fond term.

An unaccustomed and labored smile drifted across her face. She lifted a hand in farewell.

PART II
THE
CRYSTAL
BRIDGE

CHAPTER FIVE

Rose
. 1. A dimension said to exist outside the All. 2. A
flower
found on a remote planetesimal. 3. (informal) A fleeting state of
being.

—from
Hol Fan’s Glossary of Needful Terms

T
HE PORTHOLE IN LI YUN TAI’S SLEEPING CHAMBER
shimmered with a silvery light. Tai and his lover paid dearly for a burrow with a window unto the depths of the sea. But today the porthole seemed wan and cold. Wei Bo was gone.

The moment Tai entered his burrow, he knew. The bed was unmade, Bo’s pillow gone. Heart in a clench, he threw open the doors of the clothing chest. Bo’s silks, gone. His dance slippers, gone. Tai clicked the doors shut, stunned and lost. Mementos were missing. The painting of Gu Lou the navitar, the one they had bought together. Gone. Bo was gone. Tai sat on the bed next to the sea wall, staring into its phantomy depths. The anti-bright. The light he and his fellow morts preferred to the glaring sky. He sighed. You drive away the thing you love. By wanting too much of it.

Not that it had been love. Neither Tai nor Bo ever said love. That was a hag word; it dragged you down, taught you to cling and skim. Their life in their burrow had been flash and deep. Now it was nothing.

Returning to the wardrobe, Tai stripped off his work clothes from the dumpling kitchen, stuffing them in a corner of the wardrobe and rummaging for his blue chemise. No, too nice. He reached for the short orange tunic, the cling work boots, and the crinkle belt for added spark. He threw them on, regarding himself in the wardrobe mirror. He was tall, trim, young, and pale. He was flash. What more did he need?

He set out, plunging into the main street of the undercity, no aim in mind. Marquis lights gilded the streets; vhat drum rhythms pulsed from wine dens. Here and there, portholes showed the dim eye of the water. It was a better light than above. The undercity was very like the Rose, with something almost like night. The Rose: the place of short lives, deeply felt. By the Navitar’s Mind, that was the only way to live.

Morts, who usually stayed in the underground city, avoided the life-lengthening rays of the lords’ glaring sky. The Reds considered this practice heresy, coming to the undercity solely for worship. Both Reds and morts revered the navitars. But the Reds were the conforming side of things; morts, the flash side.

A few Reds hurried down the street, casting sideways glances at him, disapproving of how he was dressed. They disapproved of most things. The under-city used to be theirs alone, a place to honor the navitars by peering into the foaming waters. Morts weren’t welcome, but the Society couldn’t keep them out. The Entire had no forbidden places, much as Reds might wish it otherwise.

His mood lifted. If he could shock a Red, then he must look blossom.

Pedi cabs swept by, stuffed with revelers, oglers, and wish-I-weres, daring a taste of the undercity but by day keeping to the ways of the All. But why be Entire when you could be Rose? Li Yun Tai had answered that for himself halfway through school, leaving his family seaside domicile and the life of the bright, the only life his parents could imagine. They’d sacrificed everything to come to Rim City to start their textile business and sew silks for the middling merchants and their haggish children. They had swathed Tai in silk from the time he was a baby. He grew up with the iridescence of silk and its eye-shattering colors. It had made him want an iridescent life. When he started to sleep days and wake in the ebb, his mother said, eyes full of tears, “You are tired of us.” But when he left the silk shop it was for love of silk, not despising of it. He hadn’t seen her or his father in five thousand days. They wouldn’t like what he’d become. A mort. Soon to die. Kept out of the bright. Live a modest span, then walk into the sea. Like the river pilots. When you’re done you’re so done.

The Dark Flower was crammed full, but the door keeper let him in, liking the orange with the work boots, nodding to Tai, saying something Tai couldn’t hear in the thrumming drum beat. Through the dancing bodies, some wearing feather masks—so overdone—he caught sight of the drummer hammering the giant vhat pans, attacking the drums with staccato hands, his body muscled, beautiful—so flash in a world already flash. It struck Tai with bitter clarity: here was a world evaporating even as the dancers tried to claim it with reaching arms, jutting pelvises.
Grasp, cling. Lose it all.

That’s what Wei Bo had said. Why he left.

A woman with a red outcrop in her hair asked Tai to dance, and why not? He wasn’t too proud to dance with her, and it shocked his brethren. He held her close, grinding hips, but laughing.

“Like the flower?” She bobbed her head. It was a blossom made of silk.

Very mort. By the end of the second dance she’d given it to him, and Tai wore it behind his ear.

Feeling good now, Tai accepted another cup of wine and drank it like nectar; it didn’t faze him. A woman in a green feather mask stood before him.

“Nigh fizz?”

Feather girl held up a foaming drink served in a spilling-over cup, forcing him to lick the overrun. They danced, but he found tears pushing at his eyes. The Nigh fizz let him feel his heart. Oh, Wei Bo. Not love, of course. But they’d shared a burrow for six hundred days, and they’d been fond of each other. And others. And then just others.

She led him to a stairway. People were doing it on the landing, and on the stairs, every which way, girl to girl, boy to everything that would stay still. But though he was throbbing, he didn’t want to just pluck the flower of the moment. He didn’t want the moment at all. He just wanted to die. The Nigh beckoned him through the wall, portals discharging gargled light. Come down, down to me. You’ve lived your flash. Come down.